Kristine sent me a link to a chocolate-chunk cookie recipe with feves by Valrhona in it–oval shaped bits of dark chocolate, available from Whole Foods.  I wrote back that I was embarrassed to say I actually had some in my cupboard.

And we’re off to the races with another story…

Years ago, I really got into baking cheesecakes, back when the kids were very little; so much so that I bought a copy of “The Joy of Cheesecake.”   And in it, I found, at a stage when I was reading Dr. Seuss to my kids, a recipe for Oobleck Pie.

Avocado lime honey cheesecake.  With wheat germ sprinkled on top.

It was almost impossible to buy a good avocado in New Hampshire, where we were at the time, so my hubby and children were spared; I didn’t try it.

We moved to California, and a few years later I found myself with a lupus diagnosis and doing swim therapy every day at a local indoor pool.  You had to have a doctor’s prescription to use the place.  It made for a close-knit community, where people tended to know each other and look out for each other.

Which is how one guy who loved to cook got told about the Oobleck Pie, and decided that that was just too weird: he had to try it.  I don’t think I told him about the wheat germ when I gave him the recipe.  Some things go far enough as it is.

So.  He actually baked one.  (No wheat germ.)  And then he brought it to the pool and handed it to the staff in the office, intact, unsampled, beautiful, slightly green at the gills, and whole.

I, totally unsuspecting, walked in the door, went to check in, and one of the lifeguards grabbed the thing from the desk, shoved it at me, and said, This is your fault. You have to take the first piece.

What, no wait an hour after swimming?  You guys trying to ground me from doing my laps?  Heh.

The first bite was a shock.  You know what’s coming but you don’t really, and then there it is.  After that, after you get past the “but I wanted cheesecake” mode, it’s actually, kind of, um, good.

Oobleck, for those who don’t remember, is the green sticky stuff that King whateverhisnamewas ended up with after telling his magicians he was tired of the same old stuff, rain, snow; he wanted something new.  They chanted and eye-of-newted till the oobleck filled the skies, superglueing everything and everyone it touched to everything else it touched.  This quickly became a massive, kingdom-wide problem.

And it stayed that way till the king admitted he’d made a mistake and said he was sorry.  At which point the sticky Oobleck gunk all magically melted away.

My sweet husband and I were at Flea Street Cafe for I think our anniversary, several years ago, when Jesse, the owner, came over and chatted a moment.  She had angel food cake with lavendar flowers in it on her menu, and I told her about the Oobleck Pie.

She really wanted that recipe.  I went home and mailed it to her.

Whether she ever used it, I don’t know, but if she did, it was probably from avocados and limes she grew herself and honey from a local beekeeper.  I love California.

Oh, right. The purple shawl.  I promised.  Here goes.  Twinsies.

Here is the Knitpicks Bare merino/silk, reblocked to a smooth edge. This is the smaller version Water Turtles shawl, 24″ long laid flat, about 27″ long on, 880 yards/200 g, with 16 g left over, dyed in Jacquard Acid in less-than-full-strength Navy.

After I finished it, I picked up the long-neglected purple Maple Creek Farm merino/bamboo shawl that I’d started during the weekend of my son’s wedding–it kept getting put aside for projects that needed to be fast-tracked, but it was so close to being done.  I decided, just spend one single day and let it be done.  I’d forgotten which pattern I’d been knitting it in…

Smaller version Water Turtles. Huh. Well, it might make for slightly repetitive knitblogging, but whatchagonnado.  I knitted it down to the very last five grams, and it’s ready to block too.

A side note: I like to answer every comment, but there was a problem with my email that hopefully is fixed now after I noticed that some of the ones on the last post never appeared in my inbox.  If you didn’t hear from me, I apologize.

Okay, another one just for fun.  That one top and center–boy does that bring back memories of exclaiming to a friend way back when when we were all in our early 20’s, “You bought a PINTO?  Your first new car, and you bought a PINTO?!” having many growing-up memories of my neighbor upset at his because the darn thing ran only when it felt like it on alternate fifth Saturdays of the month.

Well, the salesman had talked him into it, and it was cheap…

(I need to go car shopping. I really, really don’t want to.)

Mim posted a map of the US as seen by Californians.  Oregon/Washington are vaguely displayed as “coffee,” anything east of there to the Great Lakes as Canada, etc. Having corrected my kids’ take on history after school a few times, I burst out laughing when I saw her post.

There was one memorable time, taking a walk around the neighborhood, when there were some teenagers hanging out together, and I smiled and wished them a good day.  One of them, for whatever reason, suddenly piped up with, “Are you from around here?”  (I think I need to walk more often!  I’d only lived around the corner longer than he’d been alive!)

I put on my best Southern accent and asked him, “Do I *sound* like I’m from around here?”

“Where are you from?”

“Maryland.”

Clearly that was a head-scratcher for him, so I asked him, “Do you know where New York is?  Washington, DC?”  (Trying to gauge the depth of the education deprivation.)

Yes. Yes.  Uh huh.

“Okay,” I told him.  “When they were building Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia both donated land for it to be built on.  During the Civil War, Virginia took theirs back.”

Throw a little extra at him with his geography lesson: US history did NOT start with the Gold Rush!

I’ve always wondered if that kid paid more attention to his country after that.  Given how funny I thought the conversation was, and the fact that kids learn more when they’re cared about, I like to think I helped provide some positive motivation.

Let’s have a do-over on the blocking here.  I picked this shawl up this morning (deliberately) before it was bone dry: I’m going to rinse it again and smooth out the bottom edge rather than trying to have the pattern end in points.  Knitpicks’ merino/silk heavyish fingering weight was a bit too bulky for that.   The points just weren’t crisp enough for me, and as I ran the wires through last night I was pretty sure I was going to bag them later.  But I wanted to see first.  A rounded edge is easier to maintain anyway, and it’s not something any recipient should be having to worry about.

I was so sure this one wasn’t going to stretch past maybe 24″, but sometimes yarns surprise you. Blocked, held up, it’s 27″, and I had enough yarn out of my two skeins that I could have gotten it to 30″.  Size 9 (5.5mm) needles.

A side note: the fireworks last night probably worked out well for parents of small children needing to go to bed.  They started an hour early this year, given the extra darkness.

This is the link to the webcam at Nepenthe: the beautiful resort in Big Sur (scroll down a bit to see a collage on the left of days’ worth of views) founded by Kaffe Fassett‘s father.  Discovering Kaffe’s “Glorious Knits” book is what helped bring me back to knitting nonstop eighteen years ago.  I feel I owe the man, and I have met him several times at Uncommon Threads booksignings: he is warm and gregarious as well as infinitely creative.

The SJ Merc today says that Kirk Gafill, grandson of the founder, his brother, and four others are refusing to evacuate to try to save Nepenthe.  They have their fire-retardent gel at the ready.  All those affected are in my prayers.

(Update Sunday 10:56 am: their webcam’s image is frozen at 6:22:45 am today. I’m hoping they simply lost power.)

Happy Fourth of July!

Something I learned in spinning surprised me: you could fill up a bobbin, fill up a second bobbin, and then when plying the two together, get most of the yarn of both of those onto a third bobbin before you ran out of space.  Shouldn’t it be just half, twice?  Shouldn’t one full bobbin plus one full bobbin make two full plied bobbins? But no, over and over I would get most of the way through the singles as I plied: the plied yarn was denser, but it didn’t take up that much more space. I got really good at spinning just enough of the singles–a little more than 2/3–to fill the plied bobbin just to the tippy top.

When I’m joining yarns from different skeins together these days, I apply some of what I learned from that.  If it’s a multi-plied yarn, I break off a few inches of half the plies (one if it’s a three-ply), knot the two strands just at the points where I’ve thinned them down, and then wind each thinned-down yarn end tightly around the full thickness of the strand I’m attaching it to, both directions.  The tip of my needle is pointing towards where the doubled-up length is after I’ve done this.  You can see in this picture at the bottom of the smooth loop to the right the slight bulge where the knot is–not the knot itself, but the joining strands arcing slightly away from it right at the knot.  But that disappears into the knitting.  I do dampen that doubled area and rub it vigorously between my hands to help it felt together if it’s not a superwash yarn.

I know. Knots are Not Done.  But I’ve heard too many stories over the years of people’s knitting coming apart at the skein seams in the wash, and I refuse to go there.  How tightly you tie the knot affects how it feels in the finished garment or whether its presence is even discernible, and I am careful not to overdo it.

I like this shawl. I’m not quite entirely sure yet it’s the one.  Purlescence is closed this week for the LYSOs’ vacation, and when they open Monday, I’m going to go put this one next to the Casbah one of mine I loaned them for display.  If the Casbah feels more right when I see it, that will be the one going off in the mail to Marc’s wife.   (Nathania, Sandy, Chloe–I’ll knit you another one.  Bring on the Handmaiden.)  But I’m finishing this one up quickly so as to have a good choice.

Eleven years ago, our friend Conway told me that one of his sons and his family had been visiting and were just going out the door for the airport to leave when his son, a doctor, looked at him and asked him what was wrong.

Conway told me he’d answered that he was fine, saying, you don’t want to miss your plane, but that his son went, No, you’re not. And over his father’s objections he’d called an ambulance and thus had saved his father’s life from that heart attack.  Conway was bursting with love, pride, and gratitude as he told me this.

A month ago.  We arrived at the Loews Hotel on Coronado Island for our son’s wedding, started to unpack, and it was time to go meet up with Kim’s family somewhere around the lobby and then head over to the rehearsal dinner.  At the foot of the grand spiral staircase, I saw a few people I didn’t know and Kim a bit away, talking to someone.  I approached a 40-something man and asked, “You must be Kim’s uncle.”  I figured he would either think I was crazy, or, I was right.

The man smiled broadly and said indeed he was.  He was Kim’s Uncle Marc, Conway’s son who is a doctor.  I liked him immediately.

His brain tumor surgery Tuesday has had complications.  We wait to hear.  I had his age and kids’  mixed with his younger brother’s, though, yesterday.

I may not know him well, but what he didn’t know when we met in May was that I have been grateful to him for eleven years for dropping everything on the spot and giving his dad a little more time on this earth for those who loved him.

And the knitting for Marc’s wife continues.  It’s what I can do.

Suddenly there’s so much to process in a hurricane all at once.

A new relative we just added into the extended family just found out he has a malignant brain tumor. Metastasized.  He has young children.

A young man my son met through their internships in DC turns out today to be Marc, the son of a friend whose husband was killed in an accident just after they moved away from here back when Marc was in I think kindergarten.  I lost touch with his widowed mom when she moved the second or third time and have wanted for years to get a chance to reach out again and talk to her.

My son called in great excitement to tell me, not waiting for me to get to my email for him to share the news.  Marc emailed just now that his mom was just as excited as I am at our all finding each other again.  Synchronicity is wonderful stuff.  And he mentioned something to me about his wife–while I’m struggling to picture the little boy as the grown man.  Wow.

The day his family moved away, a number of us at the young-child stage got together at their apartment on Stanford campus, where Bryant, his dad, had just finished his PhD, to box and scrub and watch kids and help out.  Anything to lessen the pain of their moving.  Bryant bought us all pizza at the end of the day, a rare luxury for us all, and we sat or stood under the scrawny pine trees just outside their door they were about to close for the last time, reveling in the friendship with the poignancy of loss that they were leaving.  How much Bryant was going to, just a few months later, we could never have known.

When Bryant died–he was a pedestrian, struck by a passing car–there was a tremendous need here to do something.  We their friends here got together with one person setting up a video camera, and shared our stories of their father’s kindnesses from people the boys would likely not even remember when they grew up.  So that they had something to remember Bryant by, so they would know the kind of man he was, so they would have his good image to live up to.

So their father would be real to them.  Compassionate and human.

Marc marveled that I remembered his brother’s broken leg. I marveled that he remembered any of us at all. But he did.  But then…  Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised.

Get out the video camera, take out the tape recorders.  Write up questions to ask.  Get the older folks talking about back in the day.  Their children and great great grandchildren will cherish every word.

Meantime, I’ve definitely got some knitting to do.

I have an ancient curling iron that long ago lost its on button.  I am not a fan of the old gray plastic department-store-type knitting needles, so it gave me a way to put an unloved dpn to good use–in ten years of poking it into the on switch, I’ve never bothered to replace the iron.

The TSA inspectors must have dropped it out of the suitcase and the flying public is now safe from my deadly weapon.  I had to go looking for one of its mates in the Unloved Needles case.  And found–my old casein needles!

I’ve always thought these were pretty. I wonder, though, who ever thought that milk protein, of all things, would be good for knitting with.  There are urban legends of them melting horribly into one’s knitting in hot cars, but I don’t know.

I picked them up just now, curious.  The 9″ set I bought way back when turned out to be too long for comfortably knitting socks, so they’ve never really been used.  I pressed into them and then raised my thumbs and they came up partway before detaching from my skin and falling back down.  Hmm. Might be good for when you need the needles to hold onto a silky, slippery yarn.  Dunno.

I wonder what the strangest needles and uses for needles others have encountered are.

I don’t wonder what the strangest knitting material I’ve ever heard of is: that would be the salmon skins knitted into a jacket that won a prize at a World’s Fair in the early 1900’s.  Hmm, thought I read about that in “No Idle Hands,” but it’s not in the index.  Googling for a reference led me to these.  (No, those are not leather.  Not in the traditional sense, anyway.)

Should I ever buy one, I’ll keep my casein needles out of it.  Just in case.

Jessie, our niece, dancing joyfully with her nieces, Hannah and Jane.

Jane in her daddy’s arms afterwards.

One very small boy got into the spirit of the occasion by taking his mommy flowers: and since living ones are always better, he scooped the whole thing out of the ground, rootball and all, ever so carefully, when nobody was quite looking at the right moment–little ones move fast–and brought them to her, two footsteps away. This picture was taken right after they replanted it together while I laughed and snapped his picture.

The funny part was when other guests introduced themselves and asked if we were there on the Hyde side or the Williams. Uh, yes, um, wait, let me explain… The groom’s last name was the same as the bride’s mother’s maiden name (no relation, though). And his mother’s first name and her late mother’s first name were nearly the same. (Think Kara and Karen, Laura and Laurie, Janet and Janice–that sort of thing). So it took some clarifying.

Jessie and her new husband at the end of the reception, ready now for Happily Ever After.

They are moving to our area when they get back from their honeymoon, so we’ll get to see them often, and I can’t wait!

Jetblue does that flight once a day. Yesterday’s was cancelled. We’d heard there were delays due to smoke, and yesterday’s had been delayed so far into the night that Jetblue bagged it.

I was really afraid, with my asthma, of coming home to what we would find with all those new fires. So just picture my excitement, after all that worry, as we drove down the freeway: look! You can see the lights on the hills! Look! You can see the Oracle tower clearly! LOOK! It’s CLEAR!!!

Richard, pleased, said the seabreeze was blowing a good one tonight. And all was right with my world.

As we got further south, the sky started to muck up again, but that’s okay; I can handle it now. I saw that air further north. Maybe tomorrow I go hang out at Creative Hands yarn store (are they open Mondays?) in Belmont. How often will I ever get to claim this about a LYS: it’s for my health.

Jessie’s wedding was wonderful. The skies back home in northern California, at 1100 fires now, not so much. There’s a huge temptation not to get on the return flight in a few hours.

And then yesterday, driving across the foothills of Salt Lake City, one could see the smoke plume and the fire from clear across the valley: exploding propane tanks inside a burning building way out in the industrial area. Alright, alright, I’ll get on the plane–can’t run away from it, can I?

It sits there, looking so innocent. Like a kid going who, me?

Awhile back, my phone rang in the middle of the night. Not, with my ears out and on the headboard, that I noticed. And my husband can snooze through anything. We were pretty horrified at the message we discovered on our answering machine in the morning: “Is there something really wrong over there, or can you shut that thing off? My son’s family and I are leaving for Thailand at 3:30 am, and we really want to get some sleep first if possible.”

Which was far nicer than what I would have wanted to say had I been them. Sometimes we don’t deserve our good neighbors.

Our ’00 Chrysler minivan, or, for those teens-learning-to-drive years, the dentmobile, has a psychotic alarm system that maybe four times in its life now has randomly gone off of its own accord, honking and braying and kicking up its lights. How To Win Friends And Influence People. Not. Overcast, drizzly days have seemed more likely to set it off, but with the rarity of the event that might be just random attribution, akin to what Californians call “earthquake weather” (ie unseasonable warmth at a cool time of year, based on which past earthquake I have yet to figure out, but the Oct ’89 7.1 Loma Prieta got lots of comments of, well, it WAS earthquake weather…) Ie, it could be that drizzly overcast was simply what the weather was, the days that that van did its Heavy Metal act.

That story wasn’t finished, though; our neighbor kept not coming home from that trip, and we around her started calling each other: have you heard? No, you? It was a month after that call that I happened to step outside to see if the mail had come yet, just at the moment S stepped out of a car dropping her off at home. She saw me, I walked over to ask how the visit with the grandkids had gone, and she threw her arms around me and bawled.

They had been going to take the grandkids to the beach that one day. In Phuket. Somehow things fell apart and they just didn’t get there–which meant, when the tsunami hit, they were safe. They spent the next month visiting survivors they knew in the hospital, one of whom had seen her sweetheart pulled away from her, running relief supplies, driving the trucks, being keenly needed every single moment.

And now she was coming home to a quiet house in a quiet neighborhood where nobody knew. And I happened to step into sight at exactly the moment she most needed, offering her a transition to home and a shoulder to cry on.

Last night, I was making some of what is basically strawberry pie filling, for spooning onto all kinds of things to make them taste good. Strawberries pureed with a little sugar and a little cornstarch. Amount of cornstarch depends on number and runniness of the berries, and sometimes I get the equation right for it to set, but if I don’t, well, hey. Nuke for long enough to boil one minute or maybe more, but not less. Add juice of one Meyer lemon if you happen to have a tree handy.

Someone was asking me about new Crohn’s meds. That’s mine. It does seem to help.

I needed a lemon. I walked outside, thinking, man is it dark out here! All the ash in the sky from all the fires–842 in California at last count I heard–and all our usual city-lights-nightsky was smudged out. It looked very overcast. It was a bit strange out there.

The puree took all of two minutes to prepare, and into the microwave you go. As it cooked, it hit me:

Go disable the alarm on that car tonight.

I hadn’t thought of that thing in months. How do you even do that, given that it sets automatically? None of us remembered. I was going to have to look it up in the owner’s manual. A bit of a pain.

Compared to what it did that one time?! Go disable that alarm. Remember how S’s whole trip started off.

I’m going! And I did.

Hopefully, my neighbors will never know what didn’t hit them. But it stopped me and made me realize, you know? It’s been awhile since I made a contribution to Doctors Without Borders. I need to fix that.

We could use a little of the drizzly to go with our smoke about now. Nothing I can do about that. But there is something major I CAN do some small thing about. And I lay in bed last night, marveling at how the connections came to be for me. A nudge to go make sure my beeping car stays quiet.

A nudge to make the world a more gentle place.

(With thanks to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee for her Knitters Without Borders work for Doctors Without Borders.)

For Jessie and Jeremy. The picture refused to shrink and felt in the Adobe wash, so I had to cut it with the Picasa scissors. The front edges of the shawl are folded back on themselves.

Thank you to those who emailed: my Crohn’s is settling back down like we told it to, and in time for their wedding, too. Isn’t it nice to have an obedient disease like that?

Specs: Monterey pattern using Blue Sky Alpacas Alpaca Silk, a heavier yarn than used in the original, so I swapped out the pattern and used the Constance pattern from “Wrapped in Comfort” as a template to get a smaller stitch count. Size 10 US (6mm) needles, four skeins, using 14 g of the fourth 50g skein.