Picture #11 really sells the place. That train wreck was a long time coming. Although I bet the heating and cooling bills were low after that glacier of grass swept halfway over the house. Wow.

We could have a little fun making up AirBnB-type ads for the place. The che-Shire cat: come see the disappearing home! It’s got the Ring halfway on!

Meantime, yesterday I was trying to make an appointment about that rib but the Medicare bounced. I spent two hours on the phone, with Medicare insisting it wasn’t a problem at their end.

Without that cleared the clinic would not book me an appointment, because not only would I not be reimbursed, if I ever–once–paid out of pocket I would be kicked off Medicare for life.

Whoa.

Which is why I’m mentioning any of this at all, because who wants to learn that one the hard way.

At long long last the doctor’s office realized that why yes in fact we did spell your name wrong and that’s the problem. But by that point all the appointments were gone and I had to settle for waiting till today and someone I’d never met.

Which is how I met a great guy I’d be happy to be sent to anytime.

The x-ray came back: no breaks. Yay!

There was maybe even going to be a matching hat and cowl.

We went to a ward picnic last night at a park that always has a cold breeze coming off the Bay in the evening. Quite a few of us wore warm vests even though we didn’t quite need them when we arrived but we knew we would soon.

The start of the cowl was my carry-around project; on impulse I tucked the hat in too on the way out the door. You never know.

About an hour and a half in, there was a young dad in short sleeves rubbing his arms against the cold. His wife had their baby in a front pack and that was keeping them both a little warmer.

The baby wasn’t complaining in the slightest; he had way too many interesting new things to look at: people with unfamiliar faces but far enough way to safely just be interesting, a pick-up game of softball on the field with kids and grownups alike, Chinese elm trees waving long boas of green on the breeze, neighbors walking their dogs around the perimeter, and the smells. Mown grass. (That is no longer common around here.) Hot dogs on the grill. Salad. Fruit. Brownies. You name it. (I wonder how those come across if the only solid food you’ve ever tasted so far is something like rice goop.)

I did a mental check. Yeah the colors would do, and I said to the dad, “You look cold” as I pulled the hat out of my purse.

Yeah, it is, he said gratefully as he instantly turned with it to put it on his small son, folding it over and over to make it work into quite the headsweater. The baby had a big head but not that big but he made it work.

The thought of putting it on his own head hadn’t remotely occurred to him and his wife got to see her husband putting their child first, though I’m sure it was absolutely no surprise to her.

But I don’t really know them yet. Or rather, didn’t. It made me smile all day today, too.

Finished the baby afghan.

Reached over the back of the chair behind me for a different skein of yarn with the usual level of klutziness and I was taken aback that kind of falling on that wooden edge hurt at all, much less like… But eh.

But not eh, as the day went on. Do not twist, do not lift that stoneware, do not laugh. I did anyway, being the boss of me and all that.

So it appears to be round three of, looks like I’ll call the doctor in the morning in order to be told that yes I did break that rib. But we’ll see.

They’re noticeably different even from yesterday as those dark feathers grow in. This year’s four baby peregrines at San Jose City Hall are all females this year. The fluff is turning into dandelion puffs on the wind and they are getting ready to ride its updrafts.

I have forever remembered with great fondness a graduation party I went to: high school was over and it was one last chance to see old friends before we might not ever again. So much emotion and appreciation and, frankly, grief.

The woman hosting it was someone I had always very much looked up to. I never did get to see Susan again, not so far, at least. But she found my blog and I ended up with a beautiful lap quilt that her four year old granddaughter had helped her with and I treasure it.

So when the neighbor next door let us know well in advance that she was throwing a graduation party for her kid, when it would be and what to expect, I was so happy. It’s going on right now.

An Amazon driver was walking to then from our door with a look of take-this-job-and-! so I opened it and waved and yelled Thank you! as she got to the sidewalk.

She looked in the direction of the neighbors and back at me to see what I thought of all of this and all these cars that had made it so she’d had to walk in Amazon only knows how far to get to our house. There was no way her truck would have been able to turn around at the end of our street.

Thank you! I cheerfully yelled again–and this time I watched her whole demeanor change: her face totally lit up.

I could just imagine her thinking along with me that these are the kids who spent so much of their teen socialization years in quarantine, in isolation, in loneliness; there is no substitute for being with friends in person.

And then they could. Right this very minute they could again. All this lost time to make up for. They weren’t being obnoxious or even overly loud but they were clearly having the time of their lives and squeezing out every moment of being together.

Still.

For one last day. They will treasure the memory. They will always hold those friends dear, wherever they may end up.

To life!

(Foil at bottom to thwart slugs.)

The ordinary weekly chore of dragging the hose around the yard, pointing it towards a tree, setting a timer, BRAAAAAP then the next then the next then the next, repeat, while taking the time to closely see the changes: some week by week, some from even just this morning when my tomato was an inch shorter and the netting tent was tall enough.

This is why I haven’t put in an automatic system. There’s calibrating to varied sizes while knowing the sizes will change but also I seem to want it to make me have to go out and spend one-on-one time with the outdoors in the evening, when I finally can in the day.

Everything’s growing. Everything’s reaching up and out to what each plant or tree was meant to be. The best of the sun to them all.

These are the moments when I think having something living to watch and nurture and see responding to care, even a seedling in a paper cup, is as necessary to the soul as the air that we breathe.

It’s not just twelve. It’s not even just 34. It’s 408 individual decisions, after hearing and observing and considering all the evidence and asking for a repeat on salient points and then coming to a unanimous decision of unanimously guilty.

Even from the guy who at the outset said he got his news from the former guy’s website: thirty-four of those decisions were made by him.

As Doonesbury cartooned re Nixon years ago, GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY!

Knowing all that the little mobster’s minions were capable of, those jurors chose to vote what they knew to be true for our children’s children’s children’s sakes as well as ours. They are heroes.

An hour later, my phone rang.

A driver had zoomed through a right-on-red and suddenly found my kid on the hood of their car, waved hi as the pedestrian slid off, and kept on going.

The car coming up behind him was an ambulance. A picture got taken of the guy’s license plate and they called another ambulance and the cops.

The ER said no breaks found, and that is a very very good thing, but it’s going to hurt for awhile.

Meantime, the jury in New York City decided that there would be no breaks in the rule of law no matter what the defendant’s former title was–not on their watch!

Jamie Raskin, former Constitutional law professor, later impeachment manager in the House, wrote a piece for the New York Times.

Most of us have heard of the insurrectionist flag Samual Alito flew at his beach house and the upside down US flag (also a symbol co-opted by the January Six-ers) at his home. He claims the latter started after his wife had had a tiff with a neighbor and that she did it; but his story keeps changing. (Edit: new details here.)

Meantime, the Supreme Court majority has refused for months to rule on Trump’s absurd claim of absolute immunity, including, it was spelled out, the right to assassinate his opponents.

Which, a year from now, could include the Supreme Court itself.

Senator Durbin wrote to John Roberts asking that Alito recuse on the immunity case.

Alito himself wrote back defying him.

For those who don’t get the Times, Raskin said that there is another option: the Justice Department can request that the other members of the Court require Alito to recuse.

And here’s why that’s possible: there was an elected Chief Justice in West Virginia fourteen years ago who had a case before him of a coal executive who had donated millions to the campaign that got that judge that judgeship. Not cool.

So Congress passed a law stating that in cases where there is a reasonably perceived lack of impartiality, judges and justices–specifically including those on the Supreme Court–can be required by law to recuse themselves and it spelled out how that is to be done.

The Supreme Court Justices can do it themselves, whether Merrick Garland moves on this or not, but if he does, then, by law, they must order that recusal.

And it wouldn’t just be Alito. Clarence Thomas’s wife allegedly funded transportation for busloads of insurrectionists and Thomas was the sole vote backing Trump’s effort to keep his Presidential records out of the hands of the Congressional January 6 investigative committee.

So now we’ll see whether the other members of the Supreme Court will choose to uphold the Constitution and the law. Now that the rest of us know what that one says.

Or not.

VOTE. Our democracy depends on every single vote.

It’s been a long time since someone yelled at me like that. I was not supposed to be out there. I was not supposed to be in their space. I most definitely was not supposed to be picking the strawberries and blueberries that they hadn’t been able to get at underneath that bird netting.

I looked up. The mourning dove on the telephone wire tucked its head under its wing: Not me!

That mockingbird was somewhere but I wasn’t quite sure just which tree. Loud, insistent, and incessant! I was surprised that a bird could make a person who has such a terrible time hearing on the phone know just how big a piece of its mind it was giving me. Nonstop. I almost wanted to apologize to the neighbors, while at the same time, it was totally making my day. Look at this! I’m hearing a bird!

Here, I offered, looking at one strawberry and then tossing it to the ground, that one you can definitely have. And that one. That’s probably the bug that chomped them–that’s definitely for you, too.

I finished picking the ripe ones and headed on inside so it would know I was no longer–what, a threat to its babies somewhere above my head? Did I accidentally chase off its one chance at a late mate this summer? Beats me.

Meantime, my plastic container of sourdough starter had fallen out of the freezer and shattered and my good friend Sue fed hers last night and brought over a half a jar, ready to go.

And so for the first time in too long there is a loaf of cranberry pumpkin vanilla orange sourdough bread that will be ready by lunchtime tomorrow and we are so looking forward to it.

With berries at breakfast to tide us over till it’s ready.

So so so much faster than intarsia.

Teasing about being twelve aside, I’m really liking how this is coming out. Four more rows and then I get to start the next set of pine trees.

The camera keeps making the house on up darker even though it’s all the same dye lot, and in the daylight it all matches. Curious.

Bright, cheerful, blinking, and suggesting a tree underneath: the new neighbors put up a set of Christmas lights from the get-go. It’s actually kinda cool. And they leave them on all night about every other night.

I figure if nothing else, sheer curiosity will get me to walk around the block when the sun is safely low enough in order to introduce myself to the folks behind our house.

But there is the unwanted temptation to ask, what on earth?–nicely, while trying not to be all in their business.

I do think though that I should ask if *my* lights are bothering *them*. There’s no curtain on our transoms. No light pointed out the window, either, but you never know how it looks from the other side.

My goal was to finish the roof today, but it looks like I won’t quite make it. Still, pretty good progress.

There is not a bobble on that door, just some light that got caught on a stitch and it decided to go Ta daah! for the camera.

Barbara Walker’s version has a chimney. Only a few minutes ago did I suddenly realize that, oops, mine does not. Well then but it’s new construction, right? And California has outlawed building chimneys in new housing: something about live embers going up them that the state just somehow thinks is less than desirable a possibility these days.

That house…

Okay, when I was twelve we visited a childhood friend of my mom’s, and the friend’s kid my age had a pixie cut. All the rage. Her mom had done it and I thought she looked adorable and I wanted that haircut.

The friend wasn’t about to touch someone else’s kid and Mom said that that was not something she’d ever done.

I insisted she could. (She was Mom, she could do everything!)

She resisted.

She gave in because I was so sure I wanted this, she did the best she could–and I hated it. HATED it. All she did was make everything really short! (Well, duh, kid, she did not say, what do you think a pixie cut is. It probably helped that I was her fourth kid and she’d had serious teenager-mothering practice by then.)

Mom had been cutting my hair and my bangs all my life and I never let her touch it again and grew it out from there to two years of high school, scruffy bangs at the half-point and all. The back even reached my waist if you brushed the curls straight while it was wet–just don’t let go.

That house is twelve-year-old me staring back at me.

Well, hey, the baby is due October 31st. So a haunted house is just the thing. Right?

Leftover strawberry pie filling (I know, you’re going what even IS that? Left over? How?) but there was: blendered strawberries, just enough sugar, cornstarch, boiled and now well cooled.

I quietly threw some blueberries in for my beloved who, inexplicably to me, likes to eat small fruits that are frozen, spooned it into mini molds (Bakedeco.com has lots) and threw them in the freezer for, I dunno, whenever.

It was worth it just for the look on his surprised delighted face after I pulled them out today and he asked, What IS this?

There were some quirks to the Barbara Walker “Enchanted Cottage” pattern that were why I’d never knitted it: two bobbles on a baby item? You know exactly what’s going to happen to those, right? And the roof. Why are there two styles of roof on the roof.

Well, I can just skip those bobbles.

Oh. That’s why she did that. Well, I’ll have to do some make-ones to account for that kluge. Huh. Came out looking like–a bobble! But it’s not, and it won’t say Chew me! above the door and window, followed by, Pull me! as the baby gets bigger, and I can ease that ease right out of there. I was trying too hard not to let the make-ones shrink up the fabric.

Like that Daisy Stitch did. We’re going to need more photos.

Oh. That’s why on the roof. I still won’t knit it that way, I’ll draw two sets of diagonal lines meeting in the center…

Oh. That’s why you can’t.

I put it down for the night.

I picked it up this morning and a classic metal roof is going in on that gingerbread of a house, with all the lines slanting one way together. Helps roll those hailstorms right down it. I started on it after this picture.

Wherein the sunflower in its preblocked state kind of looks like a Narnia lamp, but actually I like that. (I told me it should have had leaves, though.) 

I was on the fourth floor of the satellite clinic, approaching the elevators. Beyond them the wall is a window, and a woman was over there standing staring out at the scene across the valley.

So I stepped forward a bit to catch a glimpse of whatever might be so interesting. And found myself staring, too.

She saw me and decided to turn away from it, enough. We got on an elevator together.

I hope you’re not having to go home that way, I told her, breaking the silence and acknowledging what we had just seen.

No, no, she said, sounding relieved, I’m going the other way.

I’m heading south, I told her. Should be okay.

But I was mentally charting reroutes, just in case. It should be far enough away. Hopefully.

The huge plumes of black smoke billowed over the freeway and the wind was carrying it southward, so once I got past it it seemed to follow all the way. The hills on the other side of the Bay became a faded-out gray/brown, almost hidden–but gradually, the smoke got lesser and lighter in color and I knew then that the firemen were on the job.

I had a pretty good guess as to just which business was on fire over by the Bay, and it was, and memory is that they got hit with a massive fine last time and I imagine they will be again. Our lungs deserve better.

I think maybe tomorrow I will just keep the car in the driveway and avoid all further excitement.