Thank you, everybody. I especially loved the image of the angels blowing on their fingertips.  If you feel so inclined, if you could say a prayer to help speed Kyle along his way on his recovery, and for his mom, I’d be most appreciative; thanks.

Here’s what happened:

Newbie.

Friend’s new skateboard (how do you stop this thing again?)

Mountain.

The doctors couldn’t believe he’d survived.

It makes me wonder once again at my own very existence and that of my siblings and cousins: my dad and his brothers used to have summer jobs as caddies at a golf course atop Lake Tahoe and ride their bikes straight down the mountain home to Carson City, Nevada.  Dad told me this while we were driving that exact spot, and looking down that mountain, I was speechless and he was chuckling and allowing as how yeah, it wasn’t the brightest move.  He described the speeds they would hit by the time they got to the bottom and how very fortunate they were that a car never appeared at the wrong place or wrong time or that a rock never got in the roadway, because they were going far too fast to safely turn to the side.

But I have to add: in my own experiences, the people I’ve encountered who went through major traumas or illnesses in their youth generally grew up to be deeply compassionate individuals who are a great blessing to society.  A heck of a way to get there, and I have no doubt Kyle would have done just fine in that regard without this; he’s a good soul.

Two weeks ago, I called the doctor’s to ask about getting a flu shot, with the gut feeling I needed it *now*, knowing I’d never pass the screening questions at the drug store–they won’t take the liability.  The nurse who answered the phone didn’t know me from Adam and couldn’t be moved, permanent chemo or not; one week’s wait for an appointment, no cutting in line.  I stewed a little and debated simply showing up and telling them I would leave only when I got that shot; had I known what was coming, I would have.  I should have.  I did get my shot, but by then I’d been exposed to the flu three days before.

The doctor yesterday prescribed me some Happy No-Cough Sleeping Juice and offered a chest X-ray, and I told him let’s wait till we’re sure I need it; no pneumonia yet, but he made me promise to run back if it got any worse at all.

I was feeling a little sorry for myself.

Till we got a phone call this morning, and I have nothing! to complain about whatsofreakingever.

Imagine a fight between a car and a kid’s unprotected body that totals the car.  Miraculously, no brain damage.  He will heal. It’s simply going to take time.

I’m sending a card to the kid’s mom. She’s already got one of my shawls from when her husband slipped into a coma this past summer.  And once again I passionately wish I could knit cures.

Joansie’s comment sparked this memory:

I was at a gas station, filling up, in a really good mood on a beautiful day.  One of those wonderful moments when your heart feels open to the whole wide world.

A young man roared up to the opposite tank: sports car, windows tinted dark and nearly pulsing outwards from the rap coming from his speakers–you get the picture.  A decibel level designed to say, Pay attention to me!, with the added subtext for anyone who’s ever parented a teenager of, Pretty please? Or, (defiantly), I’ll make you!

As he got out of his car, I caught his eye, and chuckling, yanked my hearing aids out of my ears and held them out in front of me. Thinking of some of the loudspeakers I’d sat in front of in my youth that had contributed a small bit to my hearing loss, I told him, “Just don’t make it too loud or you end up with these.”  Then I put the aids back in, which is something that never looks like a particularly graceful motion–push the hair out of the way, twist just so into the ear canal, hit the button in your ear to turn the thing back on, push a little further in to tighten up the fit in the ear canal, look like a total dweeb, know it, and laugh.

I was not the cliche of the white lady grabbing her purse close to her in the presence of a young black man; I just had something funny to share with him in the moment and a sense of delight that his music had provided a way of coming together, of being glad to have gotten a chance to meet.

He actually reached back in his car and turned the sound way down with a smile back. I couldn’t believe it.  And we continued on our day and on our way.

Thank you everybody for the input and help; I think the biggest reason I didn’t knit yesterday was I just wasn’t up to it. Today’s a good deal better.

Now.  It’s much easier to learn something or remember something if it’s set to music.  And it’s much easier to maintain a rhythm at something if there’s music going; many a store has installed muzak to get people to slow down and look around more at the merchandise.  Or, in the case of some stores I know of that cater to teenagers, loud, edgy music to drive their parents away so the kids can look more cool, ie be seen hanging out there while definitely not with Mommy nor Daddy.

I like to knit to music, and the tempo often matches without my even noticing.  When I’ve got a heavy deadline looming, I have a tendency to pick out albums with more verve and energy to them.

My apologies in advance for the earworms I’m about to inflict on you.  Someone somewhere, who must have been a teenager in the ’70’s too, was teaching a CPR class and came up with a way to demonstrate how to aim for the right number of compressions per minute a rescuer should be doing.  Which is 103, ideally.  You ready?

“I. I. I. I’m staying alive, staying alive.”

Okay.  Well, it’s the right idea for your heart attack victim anyway. This, though, not so much: (using *!* to represent sharp drum beats)

“*!* *!* *!* Another one bites the dust!  *!* *!* *!*”

(With thanks to John, RN, for the information.)

I was going to take and post pictures of the blocked red baby alpaca shawl today to show off before I mail it.  But. I did warn Mel and Kris that I’d woken up with a cold yesterday, and they decided it was worth the risk and came anyway. I hope nobody catches this from me.  My fever and I aren’t touching the knitting today, although that teal project’s got a deadline breathing down my neck.

Anyone know how long bacteria and viruses can live on a dry surface?

Wow. What an afternoon!

Before Stitches East last year, I started looking for a website for my old high school; it was our 30th anniversary, and I was curious to see if there might be a reunion, since I was going to be flying East anyway.   Which is part of how, months later, my old classmate and friend Elizabeth and I happened to stumble across each other.

Who would have thought… She’s now an alpaca farmer in Colorado.  And when I told her how much I have a thing for baby alpaca yarn, she gifted me with these two hanks from one of her babies, complete with a picture of it. Oro’s Cocoa Puff. Cool!

And then!  I got to show the yarn off to Kris and Mel, who fondled it and oohed and aahed: they were in the area for a show at Half Moon Bay, and had phoned and asked if they could drop by.  COULD they??!  Ohmygoodnessyes!

And then they surprised me with this beautiful serving tray they’d made me.  I was already in I-don’t-deserve-this mode.  At least I was able to do something back this time; Kris had forgotten her cane, and I had a spare that worked.  I showed her how the crooked shape of the top of it was good for leaning your chin on from a sitting position to embarrass your teenagers into hurrying up when they’re taking too long shopping.  They guffawed.

My husband came home early from work to get to see them; I served chocolate and mangoes and we all swapped stories and told tales and laughed for several hours till they really had to go. Time to set up their booth over by the ocean.  If you’re going, tell them hi again from me.  And thank you.

Concert scarf pattern, shawl-ified.  Yarn by Tina.  Swirl effect by Nathania.  Smiles by little Ellie to everybody she can see to wave hi at (unless you lean in too close, in which case she wants her mommy only, which is totally normal at nine months).

Nathania’s outfit and the print in Ellie’s are the same shade of lavendar, and it always cracks me up: they always match. Just like I used to dress my babies in clothes the same colors as the ones I had on that day, every day, without noticing for the longest time that I was doing that.  Even after I did notice, still, most often I’d be halfway through the morning before I would realize that I’d done it again.  It was as normal and natural to do as singing.  Or cracking bad puns.

(Edited to add the answer to Joyce’s question up here: the Concert Scarf is a 12+6 lace pattern +6 edge stitches. I started the (where are my notes I was sure I wrote which one down) one of the shawls in “Wrapped in Comfort” that had a 6+1 lace pattern in the yoke, and then since 12+6+6=24, fudged it by I think I added one stitch to each edge.  I did the edges of the Concert Scarf pattern at the beginning and ending of each row, with the repeating part over and over between.  Nathania and her husband met in a singing group, so I wanted that pattern in her shawl.)

This picture just doesn’t quite capture it.

The best homemade jam ever is ripe white peaches done half and half with mangoes, preferably the Champagne variety, which is to mangoes what Scharffenberger is to chocolate. Champagnes have a very short season and are long gone now, and so when I went looking for mangoes, I came home with these instead.

I haven’t made jam in several years.  These might make me.  There were six in the box.  I ate the first mango, a little early, but quite good–took the whole day, and still, I had to call for reinforcements at dinnertime, and still, there were leftovers for awhile yet after that.  It was the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival of mangoes at 2 2/3 pounds. That’s a proudly-large apple doing the cheerleader tower with it, not some shy little thing.

The kicker is that you know all five mangoes still in that box are going to go dead ripe all at once.  Not a peach in sight. I think they’re going to be on their own, because, with the kids gone, so are we.

The designers’ version of the swatch, swatch, gauge, gauge mantra is, don’t swatch a new lace pattern mid-shawl; if you want to run off with a new idea on a tangent from what you’ve figured out and written out beforehand, do it across a few stitches somewhere else first.  (insert whiny voice)  P l e a s e ?  Four hundred stitches across just doesn’t quite qualify as a swatch.  Ah well, live and learn.  (The former is more likely.)  There’s nothing terribly wrong with it as it was, I just didn’t happen to like it, and I’m the one I most have to make happy with it or it would never get finished.  Now that it’s back on the needles, it’s ready to hum along happily and is feeling all the better for having been held to a standard of perfection.  Not to mention, better four rows ripped than forty.

The good part is, taking those needles out, I went and found a UFO and checked the size of their circs, just to see; I thought I’d been doing that project on 10s.  Nines! Holz and Steins!  Not my sentimental pair, but hey!  I switched them out, as long as the slick ones were unencumbered for the moment.  Yay!

I got an errand run in the afternoon, noting how few miles I’ve put on my car in the last month; it felt good to get out.  I pulled off to the side of the road and tried to capture the snowy egrets in that center shrubbery, knowing my camera could only do so much, but hey. I share what I can.  I’ll get a better camera someday soon, since this one is held together by scotch tape; something to look forward to.

A bicyclist came down the bike path between me and the brownery there, saw me perching against my car door with my Pentax in my hands, and shot me a big grin on his way past, clearly glad to see someone else appreciating the day out there.

I can’t wait to see how this shawl is going to turn out!

(It wasn’t till I posted this that I realized how much the clump of stitches looks like an inverted version of the egrets’ perch.  Cool!)

This yarn is a lot greener of a teal in real life.  I finally just grabbed the Knitpicks 9’s on hand and used them.  They’re too slippery-slick for my taste: my hands have gripping problems so they tire more quickly holding onto these tightly so I don’t drop anything, and I was avoiding them.  But I finally sat myself down and realized, they’re not perfect. But I have them. And time is a finite gift, and while I have the time to knit this for the person it needs to go to, for goodness sake, knit it, fer cryin’ out loud!

Holz and Steins they may not be, but it was a relief to see this project finally starting to grow. I hope to get this shawl done before the weekend.

Hmm. My usual take on shawl lengths is that the heavier the yarn, the longer it ought to be knitted to come off feeling like the proportions are right.  This is a fingering weight baby alpaca (what else?)  It seems to be about 20″, maybe 21″ long; I’ll know after it’s blocked.  Each repeat is 3 1/2″, and I’m thinking one more repeat.  If I left it as is, it would come out like how the pink Julia shawl looks on the model in “Wrapped in Comfort.”

I’m thinking yes, one more repeat. I would put it onto two circular needles to hold the stitches over a greater length, dampen it down and let it dry to get a more precise measurement before stopping, but I have lost my other pair of size 9 Holz and Steins.  Let me repeat that.  I lost my Holz and Steins.  The rosewood 32″ circs I knit every size-9-needle shawl in my book on.  The not-sold-in-the-US-anymore, best-tipped, best needles on the (not on the) market, made from leftover wood from making musical instruments, irreplaceable Holz and Steins. The last time I definitely remember seeing them, I packed them in my knitting bag along with an extra ball of yarn to go hear Stephanie, just in case I should run out of my Sea Silk project.  (Fat chance, especially with my then-sore hand, but knitters understand.  That extra ball of yarn happened to weigh a pound.  Of baby alpaca.  Of course.)

I am writing about my acute sense of loss in the hopes that Murphy will smack me upside the head and instantly taunt me by finding them.

Meantime, I thank you all for the respectful discourse on my Why Vote post.  I photo’d our holly bush and captioned it “prickly subject,” and I’m pleased and relieved at the reception the post has gotten, even from those who quite disagree with me.  I think I’m going to keep it to that one entry and just let the comments continue, should anyone feel so inclined.

Got to love a man who, late of a beautiful Saturday evening in the crisp fall air–(okay. Jennie. Don’t laugh. I know it’s California. I know calling 60 degrees crisp and putting on a sweater and a fleece vest over it is a total wimpout.  Crisp?  Yeah, yeah, I know, my birkenstocks won’t know what hit them when I see you in Vermont)–takes his wife out on a dark-chocolate-hunting date.  And those almonds are beyond dark.  Perfect.

Two childhood memories:

President Johnson threw a party on the White House lawn for all the children of all the US Senators.  We were the grandchildren of one, and we lived close by in Bethesda; we got to go.   The crowd of kids walked in a careful line through a small part of the White House first, and just before we exited into the Rose Garden area, we were handed an extremely cool official plastic white pen with blue and red retractible colors and the words “The White House” printed on the side.  You better believe I took that one to my elementary school to show off.

There was a small Ferris wheel set up on the expanse of lawn, which looked a lot bigger as a kid than it does to me now, and rides on the small ponies being walked in circles.  No way no how was I getting on that Ferris wheel, but I was in heaven with those horses.  I’m sure there was cotton candy and the like, but I remember nothing about the food–just the fact that I could ride all afternoon, and did, and only briefly once did anybody tell me I had to get off to let some other kid have a turn. They had enough ponies to make every child who wanted one happy for just about as long as they wanted.

I came home and told my mom how cool I thought President Johnson was, and that I hoped he would run and win again.

I saw the look on my mother’s face in speechless response, and had no idea what to make of it, other than that, clearly, this was not the great desire of her heart.  But I wanted more pony rides!

Memory number two:

It was the Fourth of July, the late 60’s, and our baby boomer family with six young kids was going with my aunt and uncle and their little ones to watch the fireworks together on the Mall in downtown Washington, DC, the grassy stretch that runs between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.  The crowd was already huge in the late afternoon as we arrived, the best spots taken hours earlier and more people pouring in by the minute.  Soon there was hardly room to move.  There was a sit-in of war protesters going on a little further down, with families on their picnic blankets edging right up against ours and a kind of a temporary no-man’s land in between us and the protesters that was rapidly filling up. There were a lot of people there. There was a strong smoke smell going on over thataway that I didn’t recognize at that age; it wasn’t cigarettes.

A number of Park Police on horseback started an ambling pace towards the protesters.  I noticed–I liked the horses.

And the protesters started running.  En masse.  But there was simply no room.

My aunt’s youngest was an infant, and in the sudden terrifying confusion of the stampede, there was a moment of instant clarity: she had pulled a young man down to the ground in front of her and was screaming into his face at the top of her mother-bear lungs as the surge of feet continued around and over and straight through us, “YOU STEPPED ON MY *BABY*!!!!”

He was suddenly more scared of her than the cops or horse hooves and wrestled himself away from her and took off amongst the others still running through our picnic blanket.

That was it. All the adults announced we were out of there, and while the older kids were half-protesting, what, no fireworks, it was a relief to leave. I’m sure we had seen enough fireworks already in my aunt’s face. The baby was okay.

Watching McCain stepping back out of reach and deliberately away from Obama’s outstretched hand and smile, it hit me that here is a man who does not know how to be friends with his friends. How on earth then can he wage peace in an unfriendly world using the skills of diplomacy he does not have?  “Bomb bomb bomb Iran.  Who cares? The Iranians?”  (I’ve seen the video, sir, it was not the one-on-one joke you claimed in the debates, it was before a crowd.)

Imagine the good we could do if Iranian parents (and others), their leadership aside, felt that the mighty US wanted to make the world a better place for their children, too, rather than they worry that our leader wants to trample them personally out of mob-like fear.  Imagine the American President telling them that he, too, had gone if only briefly to a public school in a Muslim country; that he knew personally that there were dedicated teachers there and here’s how he’d like to help them improve their educational resources.

Amy Goodman, the syndicated columnist, wrote this article after being violently assaulted by the police for trying to interview protesters at the Republican National Convention.  Along with her fellow reporters, her press credentials were ripped off her neck for telling the cops who she was and who her fellows were, and then *she* was charged for it and hauled off, along with her fellows, who were bleeding. They were told after they were beaten that they had the right to cover the police’s work only if they were embedded with them, ie only if they went where they were allowed to go and saw what they were allowed to see.

Alright. Voters?  We have been through this before.  We thought Simon and Garfunkel’s protests, “I said be careful, his bowtie is really a camera” were quaint old songs now.  Back to the future?

Or do we choose a better one?

My ballot says mark it with blue or black ink only, don’t use the red.

Done.

(Scroll past this paragraph as desired…  Again, remember that “Wrapped in Comfort” is on sale at Knitpicks.com and cheaper there right now than the used copies on Amazon; I might have a vested interest in saying so, but hey. Signed and inscribed copies are available as always through Purlescence.  Thank you to so many of you for buying copies these past few days, as well as everybody else who has, and thank you, Stephanie!  I’ve been harlotted!)

These are Nathania’s felted wool pumpkins; I photo’d them, with Kay’s permission, at Purlescence’s knit night tonight.

What a difference a year makes.

Our last winter in New Hampshire, our older children were two and four and terrified of the weird-to-worse-looking people that knocked on the door come Halloween night.  It was unusual enough there for people to knock on the door at all; people in upper New England very seldom dropped by unannounced.  It was a cultural thing, as far as I could tell as a newcomer–but then, it’s true that there was an awful lot of snow in the winter getting in the way.

All my prepping the children beforehand as to what to expect, even the bribes of candy as part of the trick-or-treating deal just didn’t do it for them.  They shrieked and screamed and stayed far from the door and didn’t want me to open it–and they weren’t going out there either, no way.  Mom! Don’t you know what’s OUT there?!

The next year, we were here in California, and even though I again talked to my little ones about Halloween and about playing dress up for it, and remember, don’t forget about that candy part, candy being a highly unusual treat in our household, I worried how they might react this time around.

There was a tall narrow window to peak out of alongside the front door, and back then, people had to come up the walkway past the kitchen windows, so you knew when they were approaching.

My little girl said in great glee to her younger brother, as they craned their heads to try to see down the walkway, “Here come trick-or-treaters! Let’s be scared!”  Pretending to be afraid had magically, at age five, become part of the thrill of pretending for the night to be a witch.

Turn on Cuisinart. Drop in frozen strawberries one at a time, watch them pulverize (does not work well if you start with a full bowl all at once). Add a few tablespoons of sugar.  Taste, add strawberries, add a spot more sugar, repeat.  Add a few glugs of milk, preferably with some fat content to it; process for several minutes.  Remember to turn hearing aids off first.  (You did read through the recipe first before starting, right?)

Ah yes. The good Mormon man comes home from work, and his wife hands him a cold one.

(Notice there wasn’t any left to include in the picture.)