I got more than an inch done on the new afghan while my daughter was working from home, but the picture is stalled in the ether somewhere. Which just means that when I do show you any progress there will be a little more of it.

Man, it feels good to see something new coming to be.

Didn’t go Monday. Didn’t end up going Tuesday, but c’mon, when you’ve got your daughter in town, in August no less, ya gotta have some of Andy’s divine peaches for her and we’d finished off the last previous one together, so off I finally went.

Maybe going on a long drive would get me out of my head a little better.

Some acquaintance-friends who are grieving and under pressure were not thinking straight and did something stupid because they did not think it mattered, did not think we would find out, and did not realize just how many problems they were causing. It was likely physically beyond either of us to fix it if it turned out it went as far as I was afraid it might (later: turns out it didn’t.)

Grief is not a get-out-of-rude-free card.

Forgive as you would want to be forgiven, I told myself again and again. Make it better the best you can, not worse. A year from now, this will be nothing.

Miles and miles and at last suburbia gave way to golden hills and quiet.

Andy’s Orchard. There was the woman I’d given the hat to last month. It was so good to see her.

And then–I think it’s been two years since I’ve seen him, and probably only once since the whole Covid thing–Andy himself stepped in from the back room to talk to her.

He saw me and his whole face lit up in the warmest smile, and I tell you, he had no way to know how much I needed that. Such a lovely man. The two of them turned my day around completely just by being there and by who they are.

I brought home some perfect Kit Donnells and a variety of deeply golden nectarine that Andy himself had brought home two seeds of from the then-Soviet Union. Silk Roads.

And thought wistfully of these friends who, having no idea what they were missing, were last week the only ones who have ever turned down my offer of an Andy peach.

Today’s announcement. Harris. And now Walz. Integrity, honor, calling out to the best in all of us–and the joy! The officer turned teacher and coach turned Representative turned Governor saying, ‘Yeah I’m a monster, I fed the kids so they could learn.’ You knew he knew what he was talking about in those classrooms, he’d seen it.

And if you feed all the kids, nobody feels singled out and embarrassed for being visibly poor at that lunch room counter, no lunchboxes get accidentally left on the bus, no parent has to scramble to make sandwiches in the morning while trying to get a distracted kid out the door–and the mass production of food means it actually costs less anyway.

An avid hunter who got gun regulations passed in his state, a politician who is willing to say that kids shouldn’t have to worry about being shot in school–and he has done and will do everything he can about it.

He got criticized on Fox for looking older than he is and Walz just laughed, Yeah, you’d lose your hair too if you ran the high school lunchroom for twenty years!

We’ve got this. But don’t take my word for it and never take it for granted. Vote!

Seed stitch is so  s l o w. Finally got past it. And we’re off!

So very good to have our daughter home for a visit. So good.

We even shared our anniversary-celebration Dandelion hot chocolate mix with her. She surprised us back with chocolate from–Dandelion. Well there you go. Raised that one right.

A friend’s milestone birthday celebration and an arriving plane that was four hours late and so was the hour and nothing got written last night.

Fire-sky rainbow at sunset. (And no, we’re nowhere near the fires.)

Kind of looks like the arc of a firefighter’s hose, reaching as high and as far as it can go.

The air is so seeded that, with the fog rolling in for the night, it’s supposed to rain any second now. Not even a hundredth of an inch, just enough to draw a few Dalmation spots on the ground below.

(Walks outside, holds a hand upward, a single drop lands on it.)

Nope. Added a few more–259 stitches, because a couple extra inches in width is always a good thing, right? It was a tired day but at least I got three rows into the thing.

Went to Cottage Yarns yesterday. Wound some stash yarn today. Considered patterns again. Looked at some old projects to give myself a pep talk. Counted stitches on the ocean afghan that was my big pandemic project, since it’ll be the same yarn. Considered the sketch I’d sketched and what else it should have had in it.

The hardest part is getting the needles started when you know that by the time it’s all done you’ll have learned what you needed to know before you started it to make it what it could be. But I don’t yet.

So all I can do is take the yarn and let it run wherever it wants to go.

Haven’t found the one I was looking for yet, where Division 1 (that would include Stanford) men tried to mimic Simone Biles–but this is better. Fred Richards, a fellow Olympian: the two of them trying to mimic each other’s moves and clearly having the time of their lives.

James Beard wrote, in a cookbook that was given to us as a wedding present so that gives you some idea of how long ago, that the only way to eat a mango was in private in the bathtub.

I’m not sure I’d ever seen a fresh mango at that point so that description stayed with me.

Fast forward. I didn’t have a box the right size to put four of Andy’s peaches into nice and upright and you can’t stack those, so I took a small paper bag, put them in in a line and  held the thing shut with one hand and supported the weight with the other after texting my neighbor.

Her teenage son met me halfway and carried those balls of fruity juiciness just as carefully. He knew.

I knew they didn’t have enough bathtubs but they could make do. Most definitely.

Our resident desert lizard must have found another, because I got to see a tiny one flitting across the patio. And here I had worried about the first one getting eaten. Given that it took over thirty years to see one at our house down in the flatlands at all, that was not an unreasonable assumption.

We will continue to get to see them, then. It quite made my day.

While I knit… (I think the yarn is Malabrigo Washted, not Mecha, in which case the London Sky tag in the bag was indeed the wrong one.)

We have a shed divided in two parts that was added onto the house maybe before we were even born. The near side had built-in shelving on both sides, the other side nearer the street was open space for a trash can, lawn mower, that sort of thing, with a concrete floor.

Which got jackhammered out when we had to remove the redwood root up to the house five years ago.

That involved my hauling out a good hundred pounds’ worth of wet rainy redwood needle droppings that, over time, had broken through the very aged plastic roof out there. Everything else got moved to the other side of the shed wall.

The near shed had accumulated construction stuff over the years, now-rusty paint can remainders, tangled hoses etc etc and made worse by that sudden extra, and with that broken roof, very little of it was in good shape.

We didn’t replace the roof because we wanted to replace the whole structure and you can’t anymore because of updated fire codes and we wanted to have that shed so it all just sat there.

I got quoted $1500 for clearing everything out. Then a grand. Money that was easy not to spend since you couldn’t see any of this unless you went past two gates on that side of the yard. It was hard to let go of the thought of getting it done ourselves, to acknowledge our bodies had aged out of the task (although those wet needles had definitely made the point.)

The fence guy of two weeks ago offered at $400. Not including the broken roofing, but we can do that, we just needed the heavy and tangled stuff dealt with and those crazy long pipes one contractor inexplicably stuffed up at the top out of there.

They came today. They transformed the place. The condition the shelving was in was threatening to pull the whole structure down, but the shelves are gone now as well as everything that was on them and the structure looks the most sound it has in many years. It just might last after all.

Time for metal freestanding ones to go in there.

On their way out, the two men asked if I wanted to keep the spade with the handle that would rip your skin off. No.

The blue –? I’m not sure they knew what that thing was; it sure didn’t look useful for anything they could think of.

I laughed and explained that the day our moving van came, the neighbor across the street had come over and said, I saw them take a snow shovel off the truck. What do you think you need THAT for?!

I told him we’d rent it out for $75/hr if it ever snowed here.

Good old Mr. Seedlock, long gone. I thought of him and how it would make him laugh and told the men, It stays.

You wanted to see the colorway. The tag in the bag says London Sky, but it could be the wrong one? It’s mainly on the brown side of purple, but that could be my cataracts talking.

Knitting intentions aside, it turned out to be a day for running around getting things done. Including a two-hour  trip to Andy’s.

Searching for Lorings, the great peaches of my childhood, is how I discovered Andy Mariani and his orchard I don’t know how many years ago now and it was a treat to bring some home. My family used to drive out to an orchard in West Virginia well after the peaches had been harvested: all the tiniest hardest rocks of fruit left behind would, by the time the farmer called Dad, have had the entire resources of the trees to themselves and by the time we six kids climbed the trees to get to them they were huge. How often do you get to eat a 24 oz peach that streams juices through your hands as you do? And that taste that good?

I did not believe there could be a better peach. Andy gently let me know in those initial emails way back when that, in fact, there is. And proved it when I tasted his Kit Connells and Baby Crawfords.

They’re not on yet and Lorings and happy memories would definitely do for today.

On a side note, I don’t know if you can buy a tree of it yet, but if you ever want the perfect nectarine, the Raspberry Red variety that Andy developed is the best I have ever tasted.

A new-to-me colorway. A doctor appointment a dozen miles up the freeway at rush hour, so best leave quite early because every five minutes later is ten more minutes spent on the road, right?

And that is how I fell in love with knitting all over again today.