Ultrasound last fall, biopsies last month, ultrasound again today. So much fun.

As I waited for the exam a quite elderly couple came in, she with a cane far too tall for her and pushing him in a wheelchair.

I had my glasses off for close-up work but he got my attention and I put them back on. He was miming knitting, a good circle around his imaginary needle, doing a great job of it–and then when he caught my eye he pointed his thumb at his wife talking to the receptionist.

Ah. Cool! I smiled, and he beamed.

They called me just as she was sitting down but at least he got to tell her he’d spotted another knitter. He was so happy about it!

Looking at the black and white screen, I asked the tech (because why not), Is it a boy or a girl? She laughed.

When I came back out of there, it was nearly 5:00. There was a mom with two boys who looked like they were identical twins, about four or five. They had an energy that had me remembering the days, though they stayed in their seats and behaved but they did not want to look at screens, they wanted to tell her and each other all about their day with every limb making happy exclamation marks to the words.

I looked down, saw a lion in my purse that I’d restocked just yesterday and instantly had the thought that no that’s not it. Huh. Okay, try again: and out came a black and white panda and a black and white puppy. Similar, but individual and you can tell them apart so they’d know which was whose. Perfect.

Happy Birthday! I said to the mom as I offered them to her.

The look on that tired mom’s face and its transformation in that moment. This is why I do this.

What she couldn’t know is that she made it worth my going through that exam. It was clearly the right day to be there.

Yet again, it rained more than double the forecast that the day started with.

On a cold rainy day, pulling the needles of an almost-finished blanket up to your hands is just the thing.

Those rows where I was wrapping the second color across the back of the first color or the other way around, every single stitch across the entire row, are finally over. It took nearly two weeks to do seven inches. Now all I have to do from here is finish on upwards and add a raptor as I go and add the navy edges for a picture frame.

Unless… Unless I do this morning’s sunrise, where a third layer of darker storm clouds put a top bun on my sky sandwich of bright white clouds and bright blue: so. Five stitches of the current blue to each one of the new, stagger in the first few stitches to recenter and then do three, then alternate 1×1 during the transition between colors before you get into the shapes of the clouds… Ask me how I know…

It was so pretty and it so called out to me.

Then I turned away from the window and half-deliberately did not take a photo of it to tempt myself with.

The deadline is done. The ballots they could cure that needed curing, done. There were eleven names on the Super Tuesday ballot and one came out well ahead of the pack at 21.9% and the other two relatively well known names came in second.

At exactly, it has now been certified, the same number of votes.

Throw in all the voters for those eight other candidates who are now out of the race and there is no easily predictable winner in November at all.

If either Simitian or Low calls for a recount they pay the expenses, and it ain’t cheap–but get reimbursed. IF they win.

California law says the top two vote getters go on to the general, regardless of party. We have never had a threesome before.

Tell this to anyone who thinks their vote doesn’t count, because man does it ever.

p.s. On a random note: gerbils in an art museum. Just for fun.

Considerably bigger than two months ago; it’s not a baby anymore. Such a beautiful animal. (Typed while fully aware we went from one wild rabbit that we knew of to seven for awhile a few years ago.)

It does eat the worst of the weeds, which is great–but it also chews on young fruit tree trunks. The most vulnerable are enclosed in heavy-duty Erva bunny -proofing cages, highly recommended even though they’re pricey, so  that’s not an issue there.

The mango doesn’t have one. It probably should.

I want to put the rest of my sunflower seedlings out there but you know they’d be gone in a night. I do need to buy more Ervas.

Pro tip: do not follow the instructions to stake the cages to the ground: you want them to rattle when a possum or raccoon tries to climb over it, because then they won’t. Mine don’t.

Meantime, the camera isn’t doing a great job of picking out the differences in these blues as I play with the fog/clouds and sky, but I’m getting there.

I put one of my tomato starts in a pot a couple of weeks ago just to give its roots room to stretch out and get a bigger head start. (Side note to Ellen: this is the pot your apricot seedling was in.) The idea was that I have more than enough and a single tomato plant in its own soil would be easily giftable to those with little room or gardening experience.

Apparently the squirrels had buried one of last year’s sunflower seeds in there.

The nights have been in the 40s and even with the pot in a protected spot near the house, the tomato’s been waiting for warmth.

But that sunflower that popped up has no problem with cool weather and is racing ahead–and I haven’t been able to make myself remove one or the other. In my experience, trying to gently pull a tomato out with a bit of soil around the roots is how you kill it; the sunflower’s roots are probably already big enough to damage the tomato if I tried to pull it out.

Hey, let the tomato grow up with a built-in live stake! Right?

Oh wait. I bought seeds for eight foot tall sunflowers for this year but last year’s were mere 18″ ones. Oops.

Well, at the current rate of tomato growth that would be about right. Though I do expect there to be a summer this year.

Flowers and butterflies and birds (and squirrels)? Or tomatoes?

Bring flowers, Rusty said. Plants. Daffodils are .99c at Trader Joe’s. Anything. Let’s make the chapel celebrate our risen Lord!

And so we did. And stood and sang the Hallellujah chorus. To life! 

There was one last .02″ of rain left to come, they said while it was sunny. Amended to, Advisory! Hail in Morgan Hill moving northwest, take cover.

No hail here, but a good half inch of bursts of rain with thunder and lightning. Dinner was a what can I cook the fastest with the fridge and freezer doors left closed as much as possible.

The power held after all.

What is it about a cold rainy day that begs not just for warm food but specifically a bowl of nice hot soup? The power (well yeah that too) of suggestion?

If you ever thought your vote didn’t count…

California voters signed a petition several years back which became a ballot proposition which became law: the two top vote getters in the primaries would go on to the general regardless of party affiliation. The idea was that if the politicians had to appeal to everyone from the get-go, we would have fewer extremists running and better representations of the people–and it has pretty much worked out that way. Darrell Issa the alleged car thief in San Diego who made his millions selling anti-car-theft devices notwithstanding.

The guy who wanted to make it illegal to produce any government document or anything in anything but English, to not provide any translation for health emergencies nor in schools for those struggling to integrate nor for voting materials nor warnings at street level or anything, has at long last vanished from our politisphere. Good.

So.

They’re still counting ballots from Super Tuesday. They are going to the doors of voters whose signatures were wonky: those who mailed their ballots in but forgot to sign the outer envelope or signed it in the wrong place (there’s a line for the voter dropping it off themselves and one for the person dropping it off for them if that happens.) Is this indeed your ballot or not. They have till Tuesday.

Because, in the race for that second place for the House of Representatives, Evan Low, 40, was ahead.

Then Joe Simitian, 71, was ahead.

Then Evan Low was ahead.

Then good old Joe again, termed out from just about everything else after all these years.

Joe gradually went from city to county to state assembly, where he sponsored a contest: There Ought To Be a Law. Once a–week, I think it was, (month?) he would announce the winner whose idea he’d picked and he would submit it as a bill to the Assembly. And that is why you now legally have to turn on your lights in California if your windshield wipers are on.

His contest got his name in the paper, it was a teaching moment for school kids re representative government, and it did some good in this state of ours. Now go turn on those lights so others can see you coming.

The distance has been eight votes, four votes, one single solitary vote, eight again nope it’s four now and if I check again in a few minutes it’ll be something different.

Joe’s and Evan’s totals combined come to about 33%, the guy they’re trying to catch up to won the primary with 21.1%. There were a LOT of people gunning for the seat of the retiring woman who’d been our Rep since our youngest was a baby.

So all of us who want Liccardo to win (sorry Joe) need to remember that his opponent will be in that race by possibly one single vote and ours is going to matter that much, too.

Always.

(Insert side chatter of what a relief it is that Evan, Joe, Sam, they’re all decent people trying to do the right thing. It’s the other race that–yeah. Vote!)

So here’s the story. Someone in my online+Zoom knitting group that I’ve been in for years decided to throw out an idea: how about if anyone who wanted to were to knit a little something for some random other person in the group? Something that was adaptable to all skill levels and universally usable. You wouldn’t be told who yours was coming from, just whom to give to.

How about a knitted coaster, only, they didn’t call it a coaster, it was instantly dubbed a mug rug. Mugrug? I mean, how can you not love a name like that? (Maybe this was an old word to the others, I don’t know, but it was a new one on me.) The group mod offered to do the name drawings and I exclaimed, Oh COOL! quite out loud a few days later when I read whom she’d assigned me to.

And so began the hunt for just the right shade of purple Mecha that was finally found at the eighth and for us last local shop in the Bay Area Yarn Crawl that Nina and I went gallivanting on these past two Saturdays.

Half the skein from Aranea became the darker color here; the lavender was a leftover from some other project.

And here’s what it looks like on the two sides.

I wanted it thick and dense so it would be hard for leaks to get through. I wanted it washable, of course. I wanted it soft. I wanted it pretty. I wanted it purple for someone who loves a good hand dyed merino yarn but especially in those shades.

And it needed to be flat. It is. Even if the edges draw up lengthwise a bit, they don’t curl. (I *knew* that garter stitch creates shorter rows than intarsia’d stockinette but I forgot till there it was, so, there it is–and for this piece I find it more interesting that way anyway.)

Now that the pros have chimed in.

The interloper with the jess attached to her leg four days ago was a nine year old anatum peregrine, a type that sometimes has juvenile-type markings into adulthood, and she has since come back to her falconer.

But while she was on the lam she ignored the male peregrine defending his mate and his territory and flew right into the nest box where Hartley, the female, had just laid her first egg of the season.

The video, per the falconers, showed the intruder excited about that new egg (like a grandma!) and the behavior between the two females was chummy and familiar–like they were at a baby shower.

No you don’t get to brood it, now that’s enough now move along move along hon.

And it is in the mail and on the way. Man, that feels so good.

And then I got back to work on the afghan, adding the long slow curves of the mountains giving way to the sky. Not a straight line across.

So, asked Nina, are you planning your next project yet?

Yes sort of maybe I want to I’m as stumped as I ever was on what to do with all those bright colors–I have about two dozen in superfine merino. My variation on Kaffe Fassett’s Big Diamonds pattern is the best I’ve come up with so far.

The project that I bought that perfect skein for on Saturday? I finished it today.

I’d spent a fair amount of time charting out the idea in my head so that the mental image and the stitch counts would come out right. Nope not that, try again, till I had just the thing and so it would come out just the right size, too.

I cast on yesterday morning to get right to it. Did the outer border area, started in on the color work.

And stopped.

I had forgotten to break off a second section of Perfect Skein so that I’d have strands from both side edges to work from. Either I was going to have to break it and have extra ends to work in on a piece that it was important to have stay flat, or rip the whole thing out and start over, or–

–bag that, let’s just see where this takes me because I was suddenly curious, and I continued with color #2 and made it entirely up as I went along and then I just kept going with that while having no idea whether I was going to do graduated colors above or just these or what and knit knit knit knit knit knit knit knit knit knit

till this afternoon I declared it done. Ran the ends in. Blocked it. LOVED it. No visual connection to the original idea. I would never have planned what it came out to be but I’m so glad it did: it is just the thing.

Now to get it dry and mailed and received so I can do more than offer vague descriptions of all this.

But I am really really happy with it, especially because I know the recipient will be, too.

And to the good folks at Areaneacraftstudio, this is all your fault because nobody else had that most-perfect skein but at 5:45 pm Saturday during the Bay Area Yarn Crawl, you did. Thank you!

There is someone I seldom see and whom I’d like to be better friends with, but where my hearing has gotten in the way as much as anything and we just haven’t made much of a connection.

She is a woman of faith but not of our particular flavor of it, although her husband is.

So I was surprised and delighted to find she’d been asked to give a Palm Sunday reading from scripture of the passion of the Christ to us. And she’d said yes.

She found herself stopping mid-verse a moment to wipe a tear quickly out of the way, and I think I did, too.

After the meeting she happened to be just on the other side of a door I was walking through. I stopped when I saw her, unable to find the right words to convey the power of what she’d offered us all, and simply said, Thank you, as we held each other’s eyes in our own.

Everything felt transformed right then and there for the better. She had no words, just joy, and finally gave a pat on my arm, nodding.

Love. It is all there truly is.

The Bay Area Yarn Crawl continued, and so did we today: Nina and I got to five yarn stores, three of which I had not known existed before we started getting ads telling us about this DIY Stitches on the part of the local shops.

There were poofy white clouds against bright blue skies and it seemed like every time we got out of the car we’d get this little burst of rain on our heads and it would stop while we were in the stores: we were little strings the cloud-cats were playing with. But since there was just enough water to tease, not to soak, it got pretty funny.

We had so much fun! There were other people following the same order of stores at the same time that we kept running into.

We snacked on homemade blueberry orange and raspberry orange muffins.

It was 5:35. There was a store I had scratched off my list because they also sold fabric, and in my experience the sewing stores have almost no yarns so why bother? But it was between us and home without going much out of the way at all and Nina headed for it because why not? We should be able to beat the closing this time.

There. At the eighth yarn store. There in that shop that sold fabric too and only there was the exact shade of the exact yarn that I’d wanted this whole time for a particular project I had not cast on all week because I just didn’t have what I wanted for it (and boy had I looked) and it had been dyed exactly the way I wanted it, heathered but with no splashes of black like so many of those have and I would be more specific but then it would spoil a surprise so never mind. I came out of there telling my old friend Thank you thank you thank you! for taking me there.

What you can’t see in this picture is that the wall past that mannequin on the left is solid yarn–and we’re talking the good stuff. Malabrigo. Woolfolk. Which I’d told Nina she had to come feel this.

She’d never heard of Woolfolk. Oooooooh!!! Five hunter green skeins came home with her, along with two skeins of the Malabrigo Rios that I had picked out one of–we can be each other’s backup plan.

That shop was for both of us the biggest purchase out of the whole two Saturdays’ worth of expeditions.

That’ll teach me.

At last we got home, got the menfolk, and took them out to dinner, and I am sitting here typing way too late, marveling at how much living got packed into ten short hours in one single stretched-taffee of a day.

No cancer. Future risk estimated at 5 point something percent. Come back in a year.

Cool.

Meantime, I stepped outside this evening with rain about to start, suddenly thinking there might be few petals left tomorrow and wanting not to miss fully appreciating them.