For the first time since the 1800s we have had confirmed beaver sightings in the local creeks. It was long thought they maybe weren’t even native to the area, but they were; they’d simply been hunted to extinction by the early settlers.

That was my first thought. The beavers. The fish. The creeks and all the work that’s gone into cleaning them up, as I looked at that photo of vivid fluorescent green running down the street towards the storm drain.

Someone passing by stopped and took video and called 311 to file a report. Someone running for city council saw it too. The fire department came for hazmat control just as workers were coming outside with spill pads to try to contain the mess.

Which would turn out to be ~550 gallons’ worth so far. The council candidate called the valley water authority, which is responsible for the waterways; turns out nobody had thought to inform them of the dumping.

The company?

Tesla.

I picked up my friend Karen and we headed down the freeway towards Andy’s Orchard. As we were talking, I said, well, my potassium’s always low–to the point they actually treated it for awhile, awhile ago–and one of the best sources of potassium in food is dried apricots. By far, compared to, say, bananas. (Side chatter about stocking up for the winter on this trip.) So it’s not just food, it’s medicine, right? Hey, when life gives you an excuse to do what you want to do anyway…

She laughed.

I was hoping for Comice pears, too, but they were out today.

So, she asked me, standing in front of the recently-dried varieties: regular, premium, slab. How do you know what’s what?

The slabs are the ones that were so perfectly ripe they went smush when they cut them open. Those regulars? Nice and round and pretty. The slabs? Sweet and melting in texture with no added sugar but the shape is ‘gone splat.’ They are perfect.

Turns out it was her son Andy’s birthday. I was his Sunday School teacher back when he was ten, and now he’s ‘the answer to life, the universe, and everything‘ (MIT link with happy mathematicians) per Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (It appears the answer really IS 42!)

Got her back home. I opened my car door, went around to the back and of course I pulled out a pound from me. Go celebrate with Andy for me, willya? Tell him I said happy birthday. He was always one of my favorites.

I was musing, as the first skein ended at the second row of trees and I connected the next: this is the color of their car.

I figure when it’s the color they picked to present themselves to the world beyond their windshield, it’s a pretty safe bet they’ll like it.

And then I remember with bemusement the gold minivan of long ago that was the last one on the lot of that model on the last day of the year so the dealer was willing to cut the price to keep from having to pay inventory tax into the next year on it. It was okay enough; we took it. Remember when Chrysler minivans were infamous for bad transmissions? Maybe it wasn’t such a deal.

But a red electric car? That’s not a last-minute Iococaccamobile, that’s a point of pride in taking care of our children’s futures.

Let me speed this thing up a bit, shall I?

A comment at church yesterday by an avid reader that will stay with me, quoting a friend who loved books as much as she did. The friend was, at the time, a young Mormon missionary, and was trying hard to stay close to the Spirit. To go where she could do good. To do what someone out there needed.

The friend’s favorite conversation opener was to ask, What’s your favorite book?

One time, having been taught all her life that G_d knows and cares about us personally, while trying to focus her thoughts in prayer she found herself impulsively asking G_d Himself, What’s Your favorite book?

She felt immediately silly–but also, to her astonishment, an answer.

“Anne of Green Gables.”

Wait. What? Her favorite from her childhood, but. Why would G_d care about that of all things? What? So that was the second question; she really wanted to know.

And the answer and the experience, passed on to her friend Sarah and now to the rest of us, came just as quickly and just as close to her heart:

“Because that is the first book you read that made you want to be a better person.”

We have neighbors moving in next door in November. They have a baby.

The way to make proud parents of an eight month old feel welcome in the neighborhood where they know nobody, where they plan to raise their child–I checked. Yes I had enough of that Rios. Put aside the coral/fish for now, this is more important.

More trees, this time in Ravelry Red Rios. After all, you want to encourage the kid to join the knitting community when they get older, right?

And you want the parents to be able to throw that wool in the wash without worrying about what the neighbors will think.

425? Isn’t that a little high? he asked, coming out of the kitchen last night.

You start out that high and then turn it down halfway through so the crust won’t burn. Thank you for reminding me–I’d better go do that.

I walked in there just as the end timer went off.

The goofy expression I’d given it on a whim because why not: it suddenly fit. An emoji cherry pie trying to smile.

We polished off half of it for breakfast. Minus the burns.

I didn’t want my cardiologist to later dismiss it as a two-week buildup of unwashed sweat under the monitor that I was complaining about so I put it in writing the morning after I got it: I was fiercely reacting. There are other adhesives out there, and I said I was mentioning this in case he might put a word out with the manufacturer.

The phone rang this morning.

Why, yes, they had a hypoallergenic one–but it’s fiddly. You have to take it off and recharge it every three days and alternate it between putting it back on vertically vs horizontally and you’ll have to put it back on yourself and change the strips and clean the area off with this but not that but did I want to do that?

Are. You. Kidding. Me.

I went in and the nurse went, Wow. THAT’s red!

Yeah… I told her about the adhesives-allergy test they did at Stanford that flamed on for a month afterwards.

Okay, so: I would also have to recharge the phone every three days.

What phone. Wait–you’re sending me home with a cell phone?!

Preprogrammed, yes, here, let’s walk you through what to do. Power on: a list pops up. Shortness of breath? Fainting? Palpitations? Accidentally pressed button?

Now push ‘Accidentally pressed button,’ she said, since we were just training here.

Richard’s take on it later was that that was a great use for old cells–they don’t have to wonder what phone the patient does or doesn’t have, they don’t have to add an app to yours nor know how to program anything, they just hand you this one ready to go and the company got it cheap.

Which you then mail back to the company along with the monitor when you’re done.

So I have gone from I seriously do not know how I am going to make it through these next two weeks and sleepless nights, to, hey. This is so much better. My skin is still close to raw but the thing it was so angry at is gone.

I cannot begin to tell you what a relief that is.

I’ve been determined to get back to Fillory Yarn to try to run into the woman who helped pick out Rios in a color that seemed moose-y two months ago, especially now that I really had something to show her.

She’d particularly liked the golden brown, and I did, too–and even better after I’d paired it with this darker one. I probably would not have bought the lighter without her definitive opinion that it was The One and my moose would have been much less without it.

So. That group meets on Thursday afternoons and today seemed like a good day to try. (The adhesive in the heart monitor is super itchy. A week from now it is definitely not going to be less itchy and distracting, just go!)

So blame it on the heart monitor, but it got me there.

I saw a long-ago familiar face, exclaimed, Oh, HI! and she welcomed me to sit down next to her.

It wasn’t till she said something about once babysitting my youngest and what was his name? that drew a complete blank from me that I finally asked her to remind me her name again?

LILLY!!! Ohmygosh yes!! She’s one of the people I’ve most missed with the ending of Stitches conferences. It’s been years. And–it’s John.

YES! That was his name! He’d come one year to push me around in a chair.

Then there was the time we were both having our scooters repaired beforehand, at the same place, turns out, going in at different times but with both of us saying what we needed it for and it apparently stuck with the guy: a conference. Of knitters. In the thousands. Who knew.

The thing is that when I came in to pick up mine he was dumbfounded. Was I alright? I had lost so much weight. So quickly. Surely there was something I wasn’t saying, but he wanted to know, and said it again, trying hard to be supportive, was I okay.

(what on earth is he on about)

He said something else and I went, Ohhh. You’re thinking of my friend Lilly not me. Huh. Well she does kind of look like my big sister. (And I am definitely not one to complain about people getting faces mixed up.)

Speaking of which, one woman across the table asked if I could pull the mask down for a moment. I did. She studied my face, and asked, Did you ever go to a little yarn store on such-and-such street in Santa Clara years ago called…

I did!

She’d been sure of it. Yes!

That had to have been a good twenty-five, thirty years earlier. Wow, you’re good. (Somehow I remember that LYSO as being younger… When did we age.)

A great time was had by all, the moose-yarn-finder was thanked, showing off happened all around, a ball of Rios was bought “to pay for my afternoon’s entertainment” and wound up for me, and at last I headed out to try to beat at least some of the rush hour traffic home.

Lilly had reached for her cane first–and spent a quick second staring wondering what on earth–as I laughed that wait, she’d grabbed mine. Our canes even matched. Wood, hand carved.

As she had said several times by then, Great minds!

You’re going to need another skein, I told myself.

What? I’ve got an hour’s worth of work before that hat is finished! I argued back.

You’re going to wish you had.

Well hey if I do run out then I can sit there and stare at my phone like everybody else does.

The cardiologist’s office had asked me to come fifteen minutes early.

There was only one doctor running behind.

Patients came. Patients were seen. Patients left. And then the next round. The nurse I’ve known forever said hi on her way by to, I think, lunch.

I started dreading a little the thought of being called back there mid-row once the decreases got down to the last few dozen stitches: not when you want to have a needle slide out as you jam the thing in your purse.

And then I was opening up my wallet and unzipping the coin part for the thing it’s really there for: the yarn needle, attached to the end from the previous hat. Ends: run in.

I pulled out my phone and read the news.

They finally called me back an hour and a half after I’d arrived. The doctor apologized; I laughed it off, no worries. I finished my hat!

He took his time, as he does with all his patients. Palpitations? Not since being on that med? Good.

So for the next two weeks I’m on a heart monitor for last week’s fall and light headed episode. But, he said: we’ve followed each other a long time. (All of his career at the clinic, and he’s my age. He read my first ECG when I was 32.) You’ve been remarkably stable (he didn’t say, for a lupus patient.) If you went to the hospital with last week’s ECG they would panic and throw all kinds of tests at you you don’t need, and this this this and this are why, so this is just to get it in your record that things are the same as they’ve ever been.

He also said something admiring about the hat but also something about the color that I didn’t quite catch. I didn’t want to fish for compliments by asking him to repeat and I didn’t want him to think I was giving it to him because he’d made it sound like he was asking for it and I didn’t want him to take a color he didn’t like in order to be nice. So it simply came home. A chance missed to deafness–and my trying not to hold him up for whoever was next on his schedule.

Next time I’ll think ahead and be a little more ready. And I will definitely take a second skein.

A few years ago I started a second fish-based afghan. It got put aside as baby blankets were knitted for nieces and nephews and then big ones for siblings with more definite deadlines, etc.

I picked it up one time in there but put it back away without adding a stitch.

I picked it up again today just to study the thing a bit and decide what to do. I untangled all those strands, trying to get started.

I had lost my sketches long since and told Richard, I don’t even know what this red blob was supposed to be turning into and I have no idea what to do with it.

(I had had a photo of a coral reef and I was trying a little too hard to replicate it rather than use it as a jumping-off point.)

But, I told him, it does have a big seed stitch border and I love how it looks and hate knitting it and am glad that that much of it is already done!

He went straight to the point: Rip it out. Rip it right down to that bottom border and start over with something you know you like.

I was a little bit stunned. All that work.

He was right.

But…he was also partly wrong. I like this side. I just don’t like the third of it on the right. And that’s the real reason why it’s just sat there.

I told him, Let me think about it for a day.

Sounded reasonable to him.

And then, while doing laundry, it suddenly hit me what the red blob was and where it had been going and how to take it from there. Finally, I could picture it! But if I do? I was trying to squeeze too much detail visually into too few stitches and it will never please me.

I know that if Gracie Larsen were still here she would be telling me how to carefully cut out the intarsia section I don’t want and to knit back up again from there, connecting back in at the sides as I go, even keeping the side seed stitch panels. I could do that.

But do I want to bother with all that. With all those strands on the left, plus whatever I add on the right, when I don’t even know yet what I would replace it with.

Let me think about it for the night.

(Edited to add, after counting: it’s only 26 rows of stockinette so far. He’s probably right.)

Here you go.

It’s not yet blocked; the lace will relax and the trees open up the moment the water touches it and it will extend lengthwise somewhat. Right now I’m getting 59″ W x 64″ L.

The whole thing was a doodle of our childhoods for my brother. The pick-your-own farms we went to as kids. (I seriously considered how to knit strawberries into those furrowed rows but knew I didn’t have enough of that years-old lighter green to constantly be carrying it behind the berries, so I decided they weren’t ripe yet. Because I’m the knitter and I said so.)

There’s also a nod to Moose Mountain Provincial Park in Canada, where we were stuck for two weeks as we waited for a part for our camping trailer to be shipped in so it could be repaired so we could continue on our cross-countries trip the summer I was ten. I will never forget the sound our volleyball made when it landed in the grill. Hissssssss as it pancaked flat…. But what a glorious place to be marooned.

And the radio that was running a contest: winner would get a week’s vacation in Regina, Saskatchewan. Second place would get two weeks’ vacation in Regina, and my folks howled: just what were they trying to tell us about Regina?

That was the trip where my mom taught me how to knit to keep me too busy to fight with my little sister in the far back of the car. It didn’t entirely take immediately but I think we came out okay on that one.

Last week on my knitting group Zoom I asked opinions on chain-stitching a line of duplicate stitch to fill in the missing barn wall sides. Up or down?

A couple of heads turned aside just a moment to inwardly picture how they do theirs.

Down, said Kathy.

Up, said Kim definitively.

So after tonight’s Zoom I decided I wanted to be able to say the best thank you, which would mean to have actually done it and I hadn’t yet.

So.

Down was a definite no-go for me.

Up did it nicely.

Barn wall sides, done.

I kept going. Duplicate-stitch leaves on the middle flower that hadn’t quite come out right, ripped out and redone.

Yarn ends woven in, done.

“Created with pride by” tag added, done.

Wait. There was just one other thing. It hit me: that’s what it had been missing all along. I had to go find that color yarn again, all put away because I was supposedly done with it.

My husband would like you to know that since it came from the coat of a sheep my moose is now officially giving you the hairy eyeball.

(IT’S DONE!!! Pictures when I have decent daytime lighting for them.)

I used up at least half that new skein getting the seed stitch edge done: it took a lot of yarn and a whole lot of time.

But at long long last a few minutes ago (while I was telling myself I knew better and to plan better next time so I don’t end up having to cast off an afghan while purling. Again.) I was down to the last, I counted a moment later, 62 stitches.

After exclaiming out loud, It’s a five?!!?

The writing way down the side of the circular needle that had been so jammed with stitches for so long was finally showing: 3.75 mm. That’s a US 5, not the US 6/4mm I’d thought I’d been using all this time.

And I can tell you exactly where it happened: when I split the row into two needles just above the moose so I could lay the whole thing out flat to see. I switched then from the ebony I’d started with to the long-treasured old Holz and Stein rosewood, because its longer cable could handle those 268 stitches more easily. All this time I’d thought the two had been the same size.

I’d actually tried to check a few times to see if any writing was still extant but you just couldn’t see it for the smushing. I thought from its age. In retrospect, my subconscious knew those tips seemed narrow.

So the moose hangs loose and the beginning edge is more relaxed than the finished one. At a quarter millimeter difference, not by so much that you’d see if it you weren’t told.

Well, I *had* wanted it as dense and cat-proofed as possible.

I am sitting here still gobsmacked.

Okay, so: now that I finally finally don’t have to worry about dropping a ton of compressed stitches off the edges I can finish fixing that barn door (doing it right this time.)

Tomorrow. I’ve run out of today.

I thought last month that I’d bought enough, even though something nagged at me that it wouldn’t be.

It wasn’t quite.

But I didn’t want to infect them, either.

Today was so much better. I washed my hands and put on a mask to be on the safe side for them and went back to Uncommon Threads. Thirteen rows of seed stitch for the upper edge: I’d run out at four.

They were in the middle of a well-attended class with the owner and I got someone else to help me find my yarn; the previous time, Rios in Solis had been tucked away in a storage bin behind where one of the attendees was sitting and I would never have felt I had permission to just go open it/oh ‘scuse me/shove/just, no.

The employee went right to where it was hanging on the wall this time. Oh okay.

While it was being wound up I waited for what seemed a good moment and then asked the owner if I could show off?

Everybody loves a good project.

One woman asked if it was to be a wall hanging or an afghan?

I said, That depends on my brother and his cat.

Ohhh. Cats, she nodded. Yes.

I came away thinking, you know, I’d been wondering for awhile if I should ask him if I should add a doubled-over loop across the upper edge for him to slip a narrow rod through.

I’d also wondered how much the weight of all that wool might stretch the piece out if it were left hanging like that.

But what actually had stopped me was, as the children of an art dealer who’d helped keep the 600-year-old Aubusson tapestry weaving guild alive, we grew up with hand-dyed hand-spun hand-woven tapestries on the walls and my sweet little bit of knitting, I mean, come on….

But somehow that moment clarified it for me: sure I expect he wants his afghan to be an afghan, but why don’t I just ask him what he actually thinks? (Duh….)

I think I have enough yarn…. Actually, probably not. I think I’d have to loop back there.

Why we need to support local, locally-owned journalism: how many people these days get to have a newspaper that does a graph like this?

Across: the names of the candidates.

Down: the questions being asked them.

Their answers: No in red, Yes in green, with a little chat emoji to link to ‘see more of my answer on this’ if the candidate so desires.

Which also means that at a glance you can see which ones didn’t think it worth their time to explain their point of view nor to try to persuade.

It’s certainly not all you need to know about any of them but it is definitely a great starting point.