It’s one of my very earliest memories. I was in the far back of the station wagon (there were no seatbelts there in those days) and I was being thrown around the inside of the car–the roof and I were not supposed to come at each other like that–along with the other kids and I didn’t LIKE it and my daddy was in control of the whole world and I didn’t understand why was he doing this and I was mad. Stop it right now!

A brake cable had snapped and wrapped around an axle (did I get that right, Mom?) and suddenly we were doing a 360 at full speed on the freeway and going over an embankment. Mom remembers the gasoline tanker we missed by inches. My oldest sister remembers the petting zoo we fell into at the bottom where we kids were entertained by the animals as we waited for help. The trucker went on to the nearest phone he could find to call the police to tell them a family had just died back there.

But we hadn’t; somehow we went on with our cross-country trip after that. I wonder what the car looked like. I have no idea.

I wondered tonight why those very old images had come to mind and had to stop a moment to puzzle it out.

I had just read Jeff Bezos’ new editorial: the one wherein he claims himself as a fellow journalist to the Post and proceeds to gaslight both his readers and quite possibly himself, but with obvious discrepancies between his story and Lewis’s. Lies from the both of them, but Bezos might even half-believe them. Right after Trump held an actual Nazi-wannabe rally.

It’s like Bezos had just cut that brake cord himself while we the voters and the honorable reporters are trying to control that wheel and guide where our car lands as it careens out of control.

We can still steer this to safety, though. They can’t take that away from us–yet.

Not now, not ever. We can do this. VOTE.

The Washington Post reinstated my paid-for weeks on my subscription, which means I got to read Dana Milbank’s essay today arguing passionately for the paper he loves. He didn’t say out loud, Boycott Amazon instead, but he’s right, I do still want to support the 18 signatories on their protest to their employer. And I will always want to read them.

Meantime, that reaction flattened me for a second day, which has never happened before. Glad I got the shot, glad I don’t have to do it again, and the case of Marie Callender’s chicken pot pie soup I bought for earthquake emergency supplies? (You know, veggies, protein, a bit of liquid, zero prep necessary.) The rest can go right back into that storage closet because it would take a lot more than that for me to say I’m that sick.

An updated pneumonia vaccine and the RSV vaccine yesterday and today lots of sleep happened.

Recovering.

I checked: of the 18 columnists at the Washington Post who have now signed onto the public protest page against Bezos’ and Williams’ decision to kowtow to Trump the day after Trump met with Bezos–

–note that then-President Trump retaliated against the Post’s coverage by yanking a government contract with Amazon, which Biden later restored–

–only two of those writers had columns today.

One was news on the Middle East escalations.

The other, bless her, was satirist Alexandra Petri speaking up. To quote her:

“But if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement. I will spare you the suspense: I am endorsing Kamala Harris for president, because I like elections and want to keep having them.”

What is happening to all the others?

(I went to make sure that link was right and I got told I’ve been unsubscribed. I’ve been charged for two more weeks and was told yesterday specifically what date my subscription ran to. So not cool, WaPo, not cool.)

Wow, Philadelphia Inquirer. Well done.

This was such an antidote after being stunned at the weaselly dishonest complicity of William Lewis’s piece insulting the Washington Post’s readers re why the Post will not make an endorsement between two Presidential candidates that Lewis claims are equally worthy. The Philadelphia Inquirer showed just exactly how one stands up for democracy and the rule of law against the rapist commando-in-thief.

The Post’s Board wrote an endorsement of Harris–but Lewis refused to allow them to publish it.

Rupert Murdoch’s old henchman–remember the case of the dead girl being searched for whose phone was hacked and messages sent from it to her frantic parents as if she were still alive, in order to sell tabloids in Britain? Yeah that guy–has absolutely no business running the newspaper of Katherine Graham and Woodward and Bernstein, of Deep Throat, of the Pentagon Papers.

I read the Washington Post daily growing up and the moment years ago that reading it online became a possibility, I subscribed.

I now expect to read, but it won’t likely be reported there, just how large a percentage of their readers canceled today like I did in protest. There seem to be an awful lot of us.

Tonight, thirteen of their columnists put their careers on the line to speak against the decision at the once-great paper they have loved. (Update a few minutes later: now sixteen.)

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.