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?

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.