He was a beanpole: young-looking, long, thin-boned, with a tail like a two-sided mohawk.  The most unusual thing was the few speckles of gray fur mixed in with its white underbelly–freckles!  The squirrel eyed me from my kitchen window, scrambled up the Chinese elm and came back down on another limb to get a closer look at me.  It played peek-a-boo there for the longest time, and I couldn’t make a break for it to get the camera or the game would have ended on the spot.  It really did need a pirate-motif sweater, you know?  It debated leaping onto the recycling container where I could reach it to take its measurements, but thought better of it.

Meantime, I got asked at church today if I were still knitting.  Uh, yes. I do tend to do that.

I have often thought that my experiences at Stanford were a time that changed everything for me; I’d never want to go through them again, but for the sake of some others as well as myself, I’m glad I did.

Out of the blue, and it’s always in the middle of the night,  the inflammation process decided to switch on.  I was telling it firmly around 3:00 this morning that my writing about Noel and his co-worker was NOT an invitation to come back and NOT to think so highly of itself.

There is a level of pain where all you can do is determinedly live through it.  I did.  Pain as an intellectual exercise in curiosity about what it means to be alive.  And, go figure, I’m doing okay now–nothing to see, nothing to see, move along, move along, and I wonder if I should I even be mentioning this.  I’ve been sitting on this draft.  And then I just got a note from someone worried over a relative with lupus: yes, I told them–life does go on and it does get better and it is worth the wait to get there.

I don’t like these wake-up calls, but they always make me focus on what’s most best to do next with my time. And I honestly hadn’t thought of this when I set up the first picture, but I just had myself a fine glass of fresh-squeezed cliche.   Pure evaporated cane juice added as necessary.

Teri and I used to chat occasionally via the Knitlist, and I found out her dad was the partner (retired now) of our family’s ENT doctor.  Cool!  So she grew up here.  I snapped this photo of our backyard lemon tree to share a bit of California with her.  She lives in Hawaii these days, and one time, while visiting her folks, she showed up at our house with a box of chocolate-covered Hawaiian macadamias: one of those too-rare times where you get to actually meet a person you’ve known online.  She’s as warm and wonderful in person as she is across the electrons.

I wrote a few days ago about knitting for the staff at Stanford Hospital, and here’s a post from two years ago that is important to me as well.  You’ve got to go see what Teri just did!  Wow!

(Edited to add: Teri got the ball rolling re the plans for yarn and needles in the waiting areas; I hope they follow through.

I have another friend who was hospitalized with a serious illness and baby twins at home she wanted to be taking care of, and she was telling me afterwards about a nursing assistant at Stanford Hospital who was supremely understanding and kind and who took the time to be there for her and her husband: to listen and to make them laugh.  He was such a gifted healer at a time they needed it.  I asked her the guy’s name, sure I already knew…  Was it Noel C.?  Yes!)

I love my skylights.  I love walking down the hall and being startled by a bird in flight over my head.  I love that I can see the neighbor’s tall redwood tree, the sense of being connected to outside.  I love having clouds and sky from the inner parts of the house.

When we were remodeling, we had a house (“Eichler” in California-speak) where all the plumbing lines had been run underground.  This is perhaps not the swiftest move in earthquake country, and ours failed.  This is what kick-started the project.  We were going to have to replace the lines by putting them on the roof, meaning there would be lots of work to be done up there.

One of the first things one contractor did, blueprints in hand, was to cut the ceiling in the bathroom and put in a skylight.  Which, though perhaps entertaining for him, was maybe not the best move for us.  The other bathroom, having been jackhammered where the pipes had broken, had been ripped out to be turned into a hallway.

The plumber saw me taping newspaper over my head, and asked me what I thought I was doing?  Dude. What do you THINK.  “I can’t see anything! Those skylights are frosted!” he protested.

A few days later, the main contractor’s kids had a day off school and he brought them to the job with him.  The nine-year-old above my head made a game of it: where is she going next?  And he chased me from skylight to skylight, waving “Hi!” in delight every time he caught me.  Where are the comics pages when you need them?

The plumbing contractor who came a few years later to fix the problems left behind by plumber #1 wrapped his New Improved Bigger pipes with the wrong kind of materials–which, it turns out, the birds absolutely loved.

Have you ever seen a bird in the spring perched looking into the outside mirror of a parked car?  I did once: it kept smearing the mirror, trying to either feed or court the bird it saw there.  Take that effect, add pecking, multiply by umpteen birds, and you get the idea: we could always hear them up there, but we weren’t quite sure what was going on.  There are trees reaching over the house, after all.

The roof leaked.  There hasn’t been much rain to worry about it anyway, but we finally got around to calling the roofer back. He looked at it and pointed out the woodpecker holes in the pipe wrapping.  Uh, oops.

Oh, and while he’s at it, his company now sells the most advanced of the solar power systems on the market.  Hey.  The idea of getting a loan hurts, but the idea that the loan payment will be less than the current electric bill and then will END… Hey.  The idea that we could buy an electric car at some point and plug it into the house…double HEY!

We haven’t started installing the solar yet, but it’s going to happen. Meantime, there’s a college-age kid up there, wrapping those pipes in white, non-reflective, boring, non-bird-enticing insulation: sorry, guys, the mirrors are gone.

I asked Randy, the boss, as he helped drop off materials for the next day, what time to expect his guys to show up and why.  He said with a totally straight face that he wouldn’t want to have to sue me for traumatizing his workers.

I have half of one bathroom (that didn’t used to exist), the important half, that has no skylight. No sky nor tree nor birds to be seen.  I have never been quite so grateful for a well-placed door.

Technical stuff today.

Joansie asked how long it takes to make one of my shawls.  Depends on how often you do what I did last night.

But if you’re talking about one of the designs already tried, tested, proofed, printed, and out there?  Between, I’d say, about 12 and 25 hours, depending on length and stitch count; the faster-version Julia, 241 stitches,  with a short length, like I did with one skein of Casbah from Mary’s ball, totally feels like instant gratification.  (Use a bigger yarn and needles or a bigger pattern and a wider neckline by casting on at row 2 for a larger person.)  The larger Water Turtles pattern, which reaches 481 stitches, would take the longest of my patterns out there so far.  That would be a good one for doing with Jaggerspun Zephyr laceweight and size 6 needles (at my loose gauge) but again, if you use that fine a yarn, for big person or small, I’d start at row 2.

Purlescence got a new shipment of Camelspin in from Handmaiden.  Mine!  And away we go.

I love the way the frog-faced gladiolus is waving its hands as it talks.

I’ve never been quite sure what to do with this one.  It’s a fair bit brighter yellow, pink and green with a little blue in real life, with the yellow fairly dominant.  (If you embiggen it the colors come out truer.)  The yarn is Fleece Artist’s Merino 2/6 in Sorbetto, machine washable, totally practical for, say, a mom with small children to try to keep up with, and at the time I got it, I didn’t think I could do anything shawl-ish with one 350m skein of sock yarn.  Now I know I can, but this was already knitted by then.  I used the lace pattern in the main body of the Michelle shawl, six repeats across with one extra stitch at each side, and got a nice length out of it.  (Cast on 39 on size 6mm needles, American size 10…)  The eye is more pleased with patterns in odd numbers, but this was visually busy enough that one would never casually notice that it was done in an even number of repeats.  It’s a good use of the yarn; it made a nice scarf for wrapping multiple times around the neck to keep out the cold.

Of which, however, there is not a whole lot in northern California.  A short wrap to tie in front against the chilly fog would be much more the thing for around here, and I’ve long debated frogging this and reknitting it.

Except it’s a perfectly nice scarf and there’s no good-enough reason to waste the effort.  Yarn can always be replaced with more.  Time cannot ever.

It’ll find its rightful home in its rightful time.

Every now and then a post comes out that is just so close to home.  That last was one of them for me. Thank you all for your kind comments; they are very much appreciated.

Meantime, back on the knitting front, I’m afraid I can’t show this pattern yet, but I can answer the request for a closeup on the colors.  The large tote was a gift from my older daughter for Mother’s Day four years ago that she knew would be absolutely perfect, and it was.

That daughter and her husband just bought their first house yesterday.   Life IS good!  Celebration time!  We got a funny note about their two cats exploring their new place, discovering hiding spots that the humans in the household hadn’t known were there.

I’m remembering how our small boy stuffed our silverware down the heating grates in our first house in New Hampshire, some of it never to be found again, and the day he flipped off the furnace in zero-degree weather.  It had to have been him.  His big sister would never have thought of it.  I can only guess it must have been in a moment I was carrying him to or from the laundry room–toddlers have an instinctive love for switches and an unerring sense of when Mom is just distracted enough that they can get away with it.

And I’m glad cats are small and don’t have thumbs.  Because they would sure have fun if they did.

Someone just introduced herself over at KnitTalk, mentioning her career in a neonatal ICU, and I wrote her a note hoping that the parents of some of her patients had brought their kids back for her to get to see.

Which reminded me of Beth, one of my favorite nurses during my 10-day stay at Stanford, who, when I was about to be discharged after having been in critical condition, I promised I would come back to visit.  The intensity in her reaction surprised me: she exclaimed, “The patients always say that. But they never do!”

Well, hey.  I could do something about at least one patient.  It took me a few months and several trips to find everybody, but I knitted for sixteen people–doctors, interns, nurses, nursing assistants.  Beth got a Rabbit Tracks scarf in a soft merino.  Brian got socks as a thank you for walking in his patients’ shoes. Franklin and Noel got hats.  Robin got a lace cashmere/cotton scarf to match her scrubs.  And on and on.

One nursing assistant had been terrible to me, had hated being assigned to a GI patient and had let me know it.  I was there long enough to go from, why on earth do I have to be stuck with her, to coming to realize, how much pain must she be in, greater than any physical pain of mine, to be treating people like that?  There is more to her story, but this is not the place for it.  But I decided the only way I could handle her and hold onto who I am was to pray for her: to recognize her need to be cared about by somebody, anybody.

When I did go back to Stanford to visit, I came bearing those knitted gifts to convey the depth of my appreciation for everybody’s work and for their caring.  But in their faces, I got to see the great joy for them in simply getting to see me walking back in there, on my own two feet, no IV pole, no longer so gaunt and definitely strong again.  I was coming to thank them in person. That was all they needed.  The knitting was just the icing on the celebratory cake.

And on the visit that I found that one nursing assistant, who knew nothing of the knitting, she saw me first and RAN to me and threw her arms around me and wept.  I held her, too, and then pulled out the bag that was for her…  Knitting is time and love made tangible and undeniable, and of all the people there, she’d most needed that.  And that I could do.

When we care and are cared about, all things that matter can be healed.

Last fall, I was surprised at Stitches East by my friends Deb and her daughter Kate presenting me with this pair of lace socks that they had knit together, one doing the feet, the other the tops, so that the differing gauges wouldn’t matter.  They’re glorious socks in my favorite shade of maroon, and the three of us spent I don’t know how long together, laughing till we ached.  After years of exchanging emails with Deb, and then with Kate, it was such a treat to come together like that and to really hit it off like we’d been so sure we would. We did. And how.

Shortly thereafter they got hit with the first of the out-of-the-blue news.  The followup now is that Deb’s son and Kate’s brother Robbie is in need of a bone marrow donor for his leukemia, and he needs it like, now, and there is no good match in the registry yet.  Here is Robbie’s dad’s blog, a mix of work and their current situation.

I checked, and I’m not eligible to even try to sign up.  Given that I’m waiting for the trials at Stanford to progress so I can sign up of lupus patients’ receiving blood stem cell transplants from their adult siblings, this is hardly a surprise.

Here is a list of FAQs on the bone marrow donations.  It can be a lot more gentle a process than it used to be: it is often done now like a simple blood donation.  Speaking of which, and speaking as a parent with a child also in need at times of platelet transfusions–Robbie needs them far more often, though–the supply in the blood banks is real low right now; if you donate platelets, the process takes longer, but you can do it more often than whole blood because they return the non-platelet parts back to you.

Picture yourself, ten years from now, twenty years from now, knowing that you’d saved a life.  Maybe even getting to see a little of what that person did with that life to thank you for the one gift higher than any other that one human being can give to another.

How many hours of your days can you spend that well?

Laura, you got it.  The Julia.  It’s in the book all ready to go for you, and you can do your choice of yarn types/sizes in two gauges/sizes.  The whole thing is six stitches long, repeated forever. (I know–you said counting to four was your limit.  Heh. I don’t think you have to count with this one, though, so it’s all good.)  Purl straight across the back every time.  If you want to, when the boys are in bed, you can do the zig zaggy optional bottom edge.  Or not.  Me, I finally bought a Weight Watchers scale so I could measure grams so that I could figure out how much yarn I was using per row and thus when to start into the bottom edging and have enough if I knew I was running short.  (Note the lack of bottom edging on this one.  I like the seashell effect of leaving it plain, too.)

The larger-stitch-count Julia, by the way, is the pattern I used for the Knitpicks merino yarn you dyed and totally surprised me with at TKGA a year ago.  It’s a little thicker than most fingering weights I use, and this is how it looks knitted up on my size 9 (5.5mm) needles.  Funny that you should ask for plain and simple, and, hey, looky what I knitted last fall!

No whizzing through this one quite yet; I spent yesterday’s time on it constantly counting stitches and editing the text to be exactly right (and being distracted while I concocted another design on the side; I seem to be on a roll.) One more row and I’ll be home free to where I’m just repeating what’s been done.  Count count count. I know what the math says–trust but verify anyway. If perfectionism takes extra time, it’s an absolute necessity and worth it.

My friend Jasmin went to Maine a few weeks ago and got to do something I can only dream of–she went to visit Melinda of Tess’ Designer Yarns!  When Melinda found out Jasmin was in my local knitting group, she told her of how I’d snagged some of her yarn at Stitches West two years ago with my motorized wheelchair, breaking a skein; when I’d apologized and tried to pay for it, Melinda had just waved me away.

So I had gone home, pulled some Tess silk yarn out of my stash, knitted it up into a lace scarf as far as the yardage would take me, and mailed it off to Maine.

Referencing that, Melinda sent Jasmin home with some yarn for me. I got an email from Jasmin in the showroom, asking for color preferences.  I thought I was buying it, and told Jasmin I’d love to have more of that Merino Lace.

At Stitches East last fall, I had traded Melinda some of her hand dyed Merino Lace for a copy of my book and we had both come away happy.  Since then, I had taken it out and admired it longingly many a time but it just hadn’t found what it wanted to be yet.

Till Jasmin came home and happily gifted me, from Melinda, with more.  Four skeins, two colorways I like, one that played really well with what I’d bought in Baltimore.  I swatched.  I swooned.  Yes!  Somehow, the brightness and cheerfulness of the fuschia, purple, and coral with a touch of yellow were the perfect antidote to the still-somewhat-smoky skies overhead, and I am totally loving working with these.  Thank you, Melinda!  Jasmin, too!

(P.S. Knitpicks.com still has knitting books at 40% off right now. I’m just sayin’.)

Oops, I need to snip that end in back.

One time when we had an earthquake about the size of yesterday’s, I was at the funeral of a 95-year-old friend and the bench I was sitting on suddenly jolted upwards hard while the chandeliers were swinging wildly overhead. I figured it was Al waving goodbye–I could just picture him laughing.  (And I was grateful for California earthquake codes.)

Thank you to those who’ve been checking up on us, but no, we’re an eight-hour drive north of where yesterday’s quake was.  You know why the US Geological Survey folks put earthquake predictions in 30-year increments?  Because 30 years is the length of the average mortgage.  They want people to realize that it will happen in their time–and we’ve definitely had a few, but nothing worse than superficial cracks in the chimney grout so far at our house.  The kid across the street can you tell you, though, about being swooshed out of his swimming pool during the 7.1 Loma Prieta.  Well, no, wait–after that one, our kitchen cabinet doors in a modern-circa-1950’s sliding style fell down at our heads rather than slid across every time we tried to open them: a good incentive to remodel.  Which we did.

Meantime.  This is the Constance shawl from Wrapped in Comfort, with a slight modification in the yoke pattern: I changed one pattern row from k1 *yo k1 sl1-k2tog-psso k1 yo k1, to a pattern row of, *k1, yo, sl1-k2tog-psso, yo, k2.  In other words, I switched places on the yarnovers and single stitches next to the double decreases–not a big difference, and simply for my own amusement.  I was using one strand of a fine laceweight cashmere and one of a fine laceweight silk from Claudia’s Handpaints (but not painted) that I bought at Purlescence.  (Where, by the way, you can order a copy of the book and I will go in and inscribe it for you if you’d like.)

Using a silk yarn with a cashmere yarn made for a far different effect than if I’d bought a blend: the silk sparkles and twinkles prominently around the visually quieter cashmere, a very pretty effect. The separate silk strand was a little slipperier to knit than a blend, and the doubled strands in such thin yarns looked a bit messy on the needles–but blocked! This is part of why I launched into the project I reknit yesterday–I like how  two laceweights play together, how they look finer, blocked, then a fingering weight of the same overall weight, and I wanted to play with the idea more, adding differing colorways to the idea.

Oh, and, since I was using finer yarns than the original Constance called for, and since the Constance is one of the least full patterns in the book, I widened the width by using the template for Tara’s Redwood Burl shawl (minus the two extra stitches at the end of the row on the Tara) and swapping in the other lace patterns.  361 stitches.

The recipient for this one is quite petite, someone who actually makes me feel tall (and that’s saying something); I think I got it a good length for her.  I’m going to show it off at Purlescence tomorrow night, and then it goes to the grandmother of my new daughter-in-law.

And in a moment you won’t.  I think.  I could just keep going as it is and knit a perfectly nice shawl. Only problem is, I want this exact yarn to go into that exact new idea and it doesn’t in its current state. I was swatching and swatching and swatching with a different yarn to the side last night, feeling restless with how I’d planned the thing even though it was a perfectly good idea, and at bedtime, having finally figured out my way through to just exactly what I wanted, I was skipping down the hall like a little kid: I DID it! I GOT it!  This is SO cool!

Only, I didn’t entirely yet–I have to frog this down to row four and have a do-over.  Part of me says oh just go knit that idea in something else and let this one be, there’s nothing wrong with it.

Except, I don’t want to.  I want THIS yarn to be the new idea. So there.  Because I’m the mommy. I said so.  Frog it.

…Tomorrow.  Lemme think about it first.  (Casting on to test the new idea in yet another yarn, and then…)

Moral of the story: and *this*, children, is why we have stashes.  Basic playground equipment is essential.

(Edited to add: I did it.  I took it all the way back to zero and got it past the frogging point again.  It was so worth it.)

I make a chocolate torte, a takeoff from what was originally in a Hershey’s cookbook but made even more decadent, that has become my signature dessert and part of my children’s childhood memories.

And I have a daughter who now is terribly allergic to anything dairy.  Not lactose intolerant but truly allergic.  She’s adjusted pretty well, but she misses that torte.

So every now and then we experiment, although we have a long way to go yet.  Hazelnut oil with chocolate is wonderful.  Her sibling’s using soy milk for the cream and substituting the butter in the cake with extra virgin olive oil, not so much.  (I shouldn’t type that. I really shouldn’t type that.  Not out loud.)

Saturday, Michelle came home from Whole Foods with a can of high-fat coconut milk–she figured the low fat version wasn’t going to cut it.  (True!)  I use super-heavy manufacturing cream in my ganache that I cover my cakes with; could one make a ganache with this?

So she gave it a go and melted the chocolate into it.  It tasted like a Mounds bar gone to heaven.  Then she added vanilla, which covered up the coconut somewhat.  I can just hear my dad, who emphatically does not care for coconut, exclaiming, Well, thank GOODNESS.  Heh.

I got a note last night from our friend Paul.  His daughters had doorbell-ditched nectarines from their tree at our door last week; I’d returned the favor a few days later by knocking on their door and handing his wife one of my tortes (my version).  Paul was emailing to ask about it and about the chocolate, and wondered whether we kept some bars of that Trader Joe’s chocolate on hand as a staple, then?  And just which of their bars did I use?

I had to think about it, and the answer was yes.  I do always have at least one of their Pound Plus Bittersweets on hand so I can easily pull together a pair of tortes (I always make two) as the need arises.

As for Michelle, though, I’d have to say, hum a few bars and she’ll fake it.

Somehow today we had six different sets of friends from way back when show up at church, people who’d moved away that we hadn’t expected to get to see again–and they all picked today to be back. Synchronicity is great fun.

The trio of little boys looked at me in semi-disbelief when I told them I’d known their daddy when he was a teenager. Their daddy? A teenager? Nonpsychodegradeable. Lady, are you SURE?

One old friend, after we threw our arms around each other, asked after the old neighborhood and specifically about her favorite old neighbor across the street. I told her I’d run into Jane at Stitches, that she was a knitter now and that we’d done a doubletake at running into each other at a knitting convention of all places. Jane had had no idea that I knit, much less anything about my writing a knitting book. She simply knew me from my taking walks around the neighborhood and our having children the same ages.

And then Jane’s old neighbor asked, in seriousness, about my health. I took a deep breath, and then: I basically told her how bad it had been. Not many details, just enough to be honest. Lupus with autonomic neuropathy is a bear–but the chemo has it mostly in remission, along with the Crohn’s.

I could only open up because it’s okay now, I really am doing so well now, and have been for some time; she was very gratified to hear that.

And then there was K there, visiting too. K… Several years ago, I surprised her with a knitted lace scarf, a nice one–and her reaction had stunned me. She’d held it, burst into tears, and rushed away from me and disappeared, while I was standing there going, What on earth…what just happened here? I don’t get this at all.

From what I was able to surmise, she took it as something bequeathed, while I wanted to quote Monty Python: “I’m not dead yet!”

Today, she was totally cheerful and very glad to see me and no more was said. She lives in a cold climate now: and I happen to know she has a nice wide, warm scarf for it. I will go look her up in ten years and ask her if it needs any moth holes repaired. I am not admitting to any inner snarkiness at that thought.

Vera, who has children around my age, didn’t recognize me at all as I went up to her, exclaiming in delight. I reminded her of the time there’d been a ward Christmas party just before she and her husband had moved away, and someone had ratted me out and everybody had sung Happy Birthday. Vera had poked an elbow in my side, demanding, “And how old are you now? Thirty-nine and holding?!”

I’d looked at her with a wry smile and answered, “Yeah: for about six hours now.”

We shared a good laugh all over again at the memory. That had been ten years ago, and she allowed as how she had a few gray hairs now herself. Hey. Happens to the best of us, if we’re lucky. C’est la Vera-t’e.

Re the photo: the newest knitting, after two Casbah shawls in dark Periwinkle, needed to be not-blue. Knit long and prosper.

(And if you’re counting, no, that’s not all six sets of old friends, but this post is long enough.)