I got a pro tip I never would have thought of: pop your hood every now and then. Let the sunshine in.

When we had the shed cleaned out, the men pointed out where mice had nested after seeing them leaping away.

All that area is open and empty now and I wondered where they’d gone off to.

Some Japanese cars use soy in the covering on their wiring. Richard told me, Oh, yeah, we had one guy who had to replace all the wiring on his new car three times–and it happened while it was parked at work.

Sounds to me like the coyote often seen trotting around that building (sighted often, even I saw it) wasn’t doing its job.

So. My car didn’t immediately respond to the accerator three times in a row between here and the pharmacy but was fine after that. The garage said intermittent problems are the hardest to track down but come on over and we’ll see what codes come up.

The codes were fine.

The mouse nest in the engine compartment that they cleaned out, judging by the look on the guy’s face as he returned my keys, not so much.

We’ve had that car 17 years and we’ve never had that happen before. I can just picture them skittering out across his garage floor, and close to closing time at that when their doors were about to come down and seal them inside their shop. Unless they tracked down every one and succeeded at getting them out. Not that they said that out loud.

I am SO sorry! I said, horrified.

Oh, said the woman at the counter, trying to be nice, we see a lot of that.

Yes, but…!!

Seventeen-year-old Gus Walz, tears streaming down his face, leaping to his feet and pointing to his father on the stage and proclaiming proudly, That’s my dad! as he put his hand to his heart and later ran to throw his arms around him, showed America how every child should feel about every parent and every parent should feel about their child. Nothing, and certainly not politics, should ever be allowed in the way of that.

The Walzes say Gus’s learning and social impediments are his superpower. After reading stories of men saying they needed to go reconcile with their adult children after watching that moment, Tim and Gwen are clearly right. Gus showed all of us how to be.

And how we want our leaders to feel about their families.

Got halfway across a row and knitted the rest on a different circular needle so I could lay it out flat to have a good look. Sometimes staring for awhile is the only way to really see it. It is 12″ or 15″ long, depending on which measurement you believe (I could definitely stretch it to be more.)

Oh hey I could… I wasn’t planning on… But yeah. I like that idea. Blame the puzzle we’ve been working on for that one, but yes, I think I’m going to do that after the next planned thing.

It’s a bit too wide again. 60″. Nice and snuggly, though.

Y’know, it’s still at the point where I could top the afghan off with seed stitch, call it a scarf, and walk away from the whole thing.

Nahhh. I want to see what it wants to be when it grows up.

Glad I wore a mask yesterday. Woke up this morning hoping I hadn’t infected anyone. There was a luncheon after the service but I didn’t stay for it; I’d been exposed to someone with what was hopefully just a mild cold–but you never know, and the utilities sampling says current incidence is very high here. I couldn’t risk the elderly folks by taking it off.

Awfully glad today I’d kept it on.

Got out the covid testing kit and found it had expired two years ago, so we’ll just see what tomorrow brings.

It was a good day to knit.

We were the parents of three, soon to be four. We had just moved across the country where we knew nobody and had more than doubled our mortgage payments. Things were quite tight.

Monajo simply randomly decided that it would be a great day to go visit the new young couple, and with a call and a would-it-be-alright, she stopped by. The surprise was that it was with beautiful homegrown veggies from her garden.

And what a garden. I had no idea. In this city of postage-stamp lots, she had at least an acre with a creek at the back looping in a half circle near the very old bay tree that had grown multiple trunks into what she loved to call her fairy circle, with a very large hammock suspended at the center.

She was a master gardener and loved making arrangements. One day she donated a large number of her flowers in order to teach a flower arranging class on a Saturday at church.

However you place them, visually, you want things to be in sets of three, she told us. Upper, middle, lower, is the traditional Japanese way, or…

I got there late–kids’ schedules and stuff–and there were very few left to choose from, and this was not my field of expertise whatsoever but I tried, I really tried.

She came over to see how mine had come out and helpfully said, Let’s get you started.

I looked at her.

Well, actually, I thought mine was done… (Thinking, and I will never be as good as you at it but that’s okay because we have you and you are a treasure.)

She was the original instigator of our December Birthday Club. She would have turned ninety at this year’s.

When I saw her infant great grandchildren I understood why the delay; those babies had needed to arrive before their mothers got on planes.

The flowers at her memorial service today were glorious, as you knew they had to be and where they had come from. Her children have their mother’s master’s touch.

And there were these tiny seed packets with a note for every person who came: explaining that sweet peas had been Monajo’s favorite flower. She had passed while they were in full, glorious bloom. These were the seeds from those flowers, and she was inviting us into her garden one last time and forevermore.

Conversation with a couple after church who remind me of us when we moved here with young kids. They’ve lived here about three years. Nice folks, quite fond of them.

A quick mention in passing and the guy did a double take: “I had no idea you were deaf!”

Me: “Thank you!”

I explained that that’s why I always hold my phone in church–for the captions.

Ohhh, his face said. He got it now.

And then the skein from Imagiknit arrived, Coco in Rios, and it too was perfect, depending on whether I wanted a dark morph moose or lighter.

So I googled moose pictures. They come in all black, dark brown, dark legs, lighter lower legs, dark antlers, medium antlers. That’s what I thought.

So basically I could take my two skeins and give it a lighter belly and lower legs and antlers. Works for me. We’ll see when I get there, though; after laying the work down on two long circular needles to see what I’ve got so far as a non-scrunched-up whole, I’m doing another round of pines first.

Knitting charts are emphatically not my strong point, but I’d found a moose (Ravelry link) that actually looked like a moose and I went to start adding it in today.

And stopped halfway across the row, feeling silly.

It was backwards. I knew that.

This is where being married to a computer scientist comes in handy so I thought I’d pass this on.

Go to your pdf. Go to pdfux.com and scroll down to find what you want your pdf to do. There it is: flip. Click that, drag your pdf where they say, and there you go.

We had eaten the last peach, and I needed a skein of brown that was not the ones that I had.

It would be a fast dash into the LYS; you don’t leave Andy’s ripe fruit in a hot car any longer than you have to.

Which is how I stopped by Fillory Yarn on the way home.

I’d been told months ago that there was now a Thursday afternoon knitting group there; I hadn’t been thinking about it at all but yes there was. I had wondered from time to time if any of my old group had started coming again post-covid, but I didn’t recognize a single face.

One woman at the table said, Oh sorry, and leaned over to move her purse so I could stoop down to check out the Rios in browns near floor level.

I picked up two slightly different colorways from two different bins and, looking up at her, asked, Which one would you pick for a moose? I need a moose in my landscape.

She wasn’t expecting that and laughed a little.

I told her about the moose in Alaska that had stood at the hood of our car and looked in at us inquisitively like, What ARE you?!

She told me about a moose she’d seen and how cool it was. She was quite definite: That one.

I’d actually been leaning towards the other–but as I mentally pictured it with Cian I knew she was right and was glad I had asked.

Wait, though. I found a third skein in its bin that had less variation to it. Yes! And I wouldn’t have found it if she hadn’t been so sure, helping me see what I needed to see. I owe her one, whoever she is.

A little bit of conversation and then I had to run rescue my peaches and nectarines and Green Gage plums from the heat. But I came away feeling like, it’s been four and a half years since I had an in-person knitting group. I think I’ve finally found it.

So now I just have to knit that moose before next Thursday so she can see what she helped make happen.

Got in to the ENT rather early this morning to get my ear canals unclogged. Badly needed.

I was a bit early, he was actually surprisingly late, but I figured I had about four hours left on that skein. No rush. I do need more cowls in my FO pile, hats don’t do it for everyone.

Lovely man, got it done so carefully. I turned to thank him for my extra hearing.

And found myself looking him in the eyes and asking gently, Are you okay?

His whole body exhaled as he said, I just put my son on a plane to New York.

I debated asking which university but simply said, Monday I put my Boston daughter on a plane, too.

Parent to parent in that moment, we knew.

He walked out of that exam room with a warm smile on his tired face.

A chance encounter at the curb before they leave in the next day or two and all of us grateful for it. Messages sent are a help but eye to eye is so much better.

We’re not using our second recyclables bin this week, I said; do you guys need the extra space?

Oh thank you yes we really do.

What they put in my bins last week could have gotten them rejected: that would be considered trash, that one could have been too heavy, but now they knew what the stricter rules are with the city’s new contractor.

It was not going to be a problem, and I knew they were good for it.

The issues of last week were irrelevant anyway, as long as you sort right: tomorrow’s the big Clean Up day where you can even set furniture out and they’ll take it. Slap a Reuse label on good stuff and it’ll get donated to charity instead of being landfilled.

I apologized for any stress I might in any way have added to all that they’ve been going through and thanked them for their realtor who introduced me to her contractor who cleaned out our shed for us for a good price.

At the last, the sister wondered what on earth to do with the big Rubbermaid bins her mom had labeled Block Party: where should all that go? Paper plates, bowls, cups, it was all still perfectly good.

I’ve been trying to get the annual block party going again, I told her; I’d be glad to take it.

I didn’t say, I got zero feedback from the neighbors on my initial query on the subject–but if I were to say that in her parents’ loved names and with their party stuff let’s do this and celebrate our late neighbors who brought us all together in the first place and kept us going for years and years, making so many connections and memories, and now we have six new sets of neighbors to welcome in in this square block since the pandemic–

–I think for that, yes absolutely a good number of them would come. With her parents’ help we were halfway there already.

Watsonville farmland, 247 acres of broccoli, beets, and lettuce by the ocean that flooded out last year and this.

With lots of private, state, and Federal funding, 65 acres of Beach Ranch is being turned back into the tidal wetlands it once was, offering a buffer and protection for the other coastal areas and leaving room to retreat further if need be into the other acres that will be rented out for farming as long as possible. Migratory birds will still have their estuary as the slough downstream gives way. Other farms will have greater protection as the area calms the sea and absorbs winter storm runoffs.

Sometimes money can buy common sense.

It was Stake Conference, which means a Saturday evening adults-only meeting and a Sunday one for the combined wards in the area. It’s a glorious zoo of old friends running into each other. Carpooling is highly encouraged; we did.

We got there early and I pulled out the ball of yarn and needles I had tucked into my purse on the way out the door to start the next carry-around project.

Someone I didn’t know at all cried in delight, Another knitter! and came over and sat next to me with her own new project. I got to see on her phone some of her greatest hits, and she is good! She got to see a few of mine.

Six months from now we’ll have another such meeting and I’ll get to ask her how that one came out.

Then the meeting was about to start and we both tucked it all away.

It’s become a tradition: before Michelle flies off we go to Dandelion Chocolate in San Francisco, and with their new early-morning hours we had the place to ourselves at 8:30 a.m.

They currently have a crisp almond pastry with a filling made from the juicy part of the cacao fruit, which as I understand it typically dries out during the fermenting process with the beans. They describe it as tasting somewhat like lychee–which I love but would never dare try again after having a near-anaphylactic reaction to its cousin, rambutan. From cacao? That I could do.

And now I want to find a source of that (if there is one for people who aren’t chocolate manufacturers) because it was very very good.

With a shout-out to everyone’s inner Mikey. I’m… I’m….

Okay, picture the scene.

It’s the early 1800’s, you’re a fur trapper, you get a whiff, go oooh, and a quick trip to Madagascar to grab a bottle of vanilla to put in your brownie mix is just not happening that day.

Since you’re going to be skinning that pelt anyway once you find that thing the animal’s not going to need the rest of him so it’s all yours.

The ultra-anti-skunk: glands in the same place, different effect. Beaver butt vanilla flavoring. Castoreum.

Don’t forget the ice cream.

So, y’know, just update those dairy farms, we can squeeze a few beavers between the cows and hook them up too, right? You could make that ice cream on site. If a cow leg comes too close the little guys will chew them out, they can stand up for themselves. The cows can argue back but they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.

This has been an actual thing for 2000 years and nobody ever told us this in high school science class?