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.

So some of the Republicans have been saying loudly that Biden should quit, be 25thed if need be, because clearly his decision not to seek reelection means he’s too old and feeble to continue in office. They’re claiming the Democrats are covering up his decrepitude.

The lies get tiresome, don’t they. But hear me out on why they’re pushing that.

It’s because if Biden did leave now, Harris would be President and would need to pick a vice president. Which both the House and the Senate would then have to approve by simple majority vote, per section 2 of the 25th Amendment.

Mike Johnson would be a single heartbeat away from the Presidency, and Mike Johnson would be the one whose job it would be to call a vote in the House to vote on that VP pick.

Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t think he would McConnell that vote?

A refusal to vote on a nominee should be legally considered a de facto confirmation. Make the members of Congress do their jobs and put their names to their votes. That should be one of the first reforms come January; democracy demands it.

Got so caught up in doing the Two Sides of the Sea puzzle again that the time caught us by surprise. G’night.

Scene: pharmacy. Picking up for the both of us.

Waiting in line, the guy who had pulled in next to my car got out of his black mustang with the vivid yellow duct tape pretending to be painted racing stripes–applied in very careful lines, but the ends looked like they were flapping just ever so much in the wind now–and very cheerfully made a scene asking for the keys to the bathroom. The clerk seemed to recognize him. She smiled. Bless her.

Tall, a little high or a little drunk (hey you stagger too lady writing this what are you talking about) or maybe this was just the way he was, with a vivid yellow wildly printed shirt I took to be of the shiny nylon that was all the rage for about a month when I was fifteen that I’d worked so hard to talk my mom into letting me have. Mine was silver. (And then we Maryland kids were dying in the heat and swore off that particular fashion and blamed it on California, where we decided they didn’t know a thing about humidity and clothes needing to breathe. That shirt and that guilt over not wearing it so as to thank Mom but but but it was so hot! were exactly what got me sworn to natural fabrics. But I digress.)

Eventually he reappeared and ambled around and then got in line behind me.

Meantime, the clerk had found my meds and my husband’s and put them on her side of the counter and said something behind her mask that I told her I couldn’t hear–then, after rummaging around the shelf some more, she disappeared.

I stood there. Our meds sat there. No clerk.

Eventually I heard the guy talking again, but that seemed to be what he liked to do best and I ignored him till he got loud enough to be clear he meant me.

Excuse me, ma’am? Excuse me? Are you picking up your meds?

I told him I was, but I explained I hadn’t been rung up yet so I couldn’t walk off with them, and, *shrug*.

He said something else I didn’t quite get, but he was cheerful and friendly and happily boisterous and entertaining, so, okay, whatever.

I was wearing a vyshyvanka with embroidered flowers on the puffy sleeves and a beaded gerdan with dandelions, so clearly I was a fellow hippy traveler and he was happy to meet me. He was happy to meet anyone. Life was fabulous.

Two clerks came out and went searching together. Turns out an extra med had been declared pick-up-able today  and neither could find it, but the pharmacist said no it’s out there, and the whole thing took so long that there were now a whole bunch of people waiting.

At last they got done and as I turned to leave, Mr. 1970 screaming-yell0w-zonkers shirt told me, Peace out! Have a blessed day! and I wished him one, too.

Getting back in my car, I glanced over at the license plate on his. It seemed to be an area code and then HE double hockey sticks and since when does the DMV let that through–they used to be really strict on such things. But I guess a younger generation is running the show there now. Okay, cool.

Got home, and out of sheer curiosity looked up where that area code referred to.

Richard heard me guffaw hard from the next room and I had to explain.

It was the specific area code assigned to a college campus. Utah State.

You always meet the interesting people, he told me.

I do think he would have won. But passing the torch and letting the next generation shine to the world was absolutely the right thing to do. The Presidency ages one as it is and the telomeres were growing short.

Never since George Washington have we had a President who felt he could win the next election but chose not to run in it for the sake of the country’s well-being. My late Republican Senator Uncle Bob was right: Joseph Biden is a very good man.

I was glad when Kamala Harris ran for California Attorney General, ie finally a statewide office so I could  vote for her, and I have every chance since.

I’m really, really curious who the new VP candidate will be!