Happy Birthday to my sister!

It’s finally getting down to cold enough tonight that I had to cover the mango tree for the first time this season. This has never waited till January before.

Meantime, last Labor Day I mentioned heading to the Kings Mountain Art Fair via the shorter route that I’d forgotten I’d promised myself I would never drive again, even more so with part of the northbound lane, it turned out, having fallen down the mountain from last winter’s storms. This is the much easier road I took home with much better visibility.

Um.

And yes that’s an origami-style (totally stole that description) Tesla Cybertruck that that guy probably made history when he hit. I’m picturing the high school basketball chants of, We are #1! Hey!

Poor kid…

Laying flat it’s 22.5″ across, 16″ shoulder seam to shoulder seam, 25″ long, and 26″ from bottom of the cuff to top of the shoulder seam.

I mean, it sounds like I did a pretty good job of following whatever pattern it was, but it sure doesn’t look that way on me. The yarn isn’t terrible but it’s nothing special; it’s either a third or a quarter mohair mixed with acrylic. I had just started knitting again after reading Norman Cousin’s Anatomy of an Illness after my lupus diagnosis and this was back when wool yarn was only described as wool, not sold by breed nor micron count nor softness (or at least not as far as I knew.)

The ’80’s were all about the mohair anyway.

So I have this very plain white hand knit sweater that swamps me, particularly those Princess Diana wedding dress-style puffed sleeves. The photo understates them: they are not shy.

If anyone wants to save this from whatever fate awaits it in the Goodwill box, let me know and I’ll send it right out to you. If you’d like it on you, it’s on me.

(Edited in the morning to add with a laugh, hey, you guys, didn’t mean to scare everybody away. It’s okay to come out now.)

Yesterday I asked my brother if he’d like some Andy’s apricots.

He knew what those slab Blenheims are like, and Yes he would absolutely love that.

He texted today that he was coming home. (YAY!!!)

Emergency room medicine, I told Richard.

My non-apricot-loving husband got this impish look on his face and told me that that was copyrighted thankyouverymuch.

It doesn’t count if it’s not ice cream on the way home from the ER?

Nope! he grinned. Tradition!

It would be kind of hard to ship Cherry Garcia…

I found a box big enough for a single pound; there was space for more but not for another box, so I emptied most of a second pound into a ziplock and used that for padding.

I’ll just call it emergency medicine. It is on its way.

(I had no idea what was about to happen when I suddenly decided on Friday to make one last long trek down to Andy’s farm before he closed his shop from January 1 till May. I had some of his apricots to tide me over–but I bought a few more anyway. And there you go.)

That amazing evacuation of a plane on fire with smoke already in the cabin.

Turns out, Japan Airlines not only gives a safety lecture at the beginning of their flights, they show a video of inflated emergency chutes and how wheeled luggage and high heels can destroy them. How reaching for your luggage (and having bags fall towards people as you rush and then stop to pull up the handles) means you and those behind you might not make it that far anyway.

Although I imagine the actual flames on the other side of the windows might have concentrated the mind.

Not one person on Flight 516 grabbed their baggage. All three hundred seventy-nine people got down those steep chutes and off that plane in time with not a single serious injury.

Because they’d been informed when there wasn’t an emergency on how to think it through when there was one.

And on a different subject: things are much better and it looks like my brother might be able to go home in a day or two, now that he’s post-op. Going straight to the ER had been the thing to do and they got him in time. I am so grateful. Thank you all so much for your prayers and good thoughts sent his way. You guys rock.

The view out one side of the house vs the other, just before nearly an inch of rain let loose. That patch of bright blue was gone in not much more than the time it took to walk back over there.

Somehow, I didn’t knit today: I wound yarn. I got it ready for when I’d be ready, and it felt just right.

(p.s. This has nothing to do with anything, but I saw this photo and went, Wait. Who thought that was a good idea? What homeowners insurance would be caught dead covering that house? Who would buy a house that couldn’t be insured? Who *did* this? And if the Zillow link doesn’t come through, it’s the 23d photo here on Redfin. “And she’s buying the stairway to heaven…” Can you imagine hauling a couch up to that loft?)

The tops of hats are my least favorite part to do: to keep from growing any gaps between the knitted-together pairs of stitches and those around them, I pull the yarn consciously taut, and I tend to keep it taut all the way around those rows. It makes for a dense, warm top of the head, but it’s a pain in the hands to squeeze those needle tips in there over and over.

But hey, you’ve got two pairs of size sevens tied up till you do, so….

I needed to go finish yesterday’s hat. I didn’t really want to–I wanted to start something new, something brighter, something cheerful on a gray day.

And then the phone rang. It was my mom.

My brother is suddenly in the hospital and he’s going to have a rough go of it for the next little bit and we are all praying hard.

I sat down with that hat and realized it was offering a chance to control one small thing in my life and have it come out the way I wanted it to, right now, no waiting. Make it.

Even working the ends in felt like a relief. Whoever it’s for, including possibly a doctor or nurse taking care of him, it’s ready, and I need to go start another one.

Begin the New Year as you mean to go on….

I hoped to see a particular someone at church today and gift him with a hat in thanks for a kindness of his, but I found myself wanting to make extra sure he got a color he liked.

Turns out he was off visiting elsewhere–but so were McKay and his bride, only, here.

McKay grew up with my kids, so much so that when he ran into my daughter in college someone asked her later if they were seeing each other and she told them, No! That would be like dating my brother!

His family moved away when he was in high school; I was in the hospital when they left, which makes it easy to remember it was 2003, and I hadn’t seen him since. Although I did get to send him and his bride best wishes via Facebook when they got married.

He wanted her to see where he grew up.

And I had two Mecha hats, no sign of that other guy, and plenty of time to knit more for him. But only one time to be able to hand these two theirs in person.

And with that bit of incentive, the cowl I was working on got finished this afternoon (picture pre-blocking) and the next hat went from an unwound hank of good intentions to 2/3 of the way done.

You never know when you’ve got to be ready for anything.

Wishing a Happy New Year to all.

Knitted. Boots. Made of a fine strand of leather. $4,100.

Huh. Wouldn’t those be scrunchy socks in no time? The designer’s gold button will help pull those right down.

Yeah, I did. I looked. 1 mm “yarn” is as fine as I could find but you’d want a longer skein of it than I was finding on Etsy. Kind of a fun idea, though, and leather slipper bottoms are easy to find.

What I want to know is, how does it look where they ran the ends in and does it feel okay to walk on them?

I don’t know if you can see this, but it’s an article in the San Jose Mercury News that describes how this happened yesterday.

Agitate a particular plankton type at night with the energy of the waves from the correct angle and intensity and have the moon’s light just so, and–

–you get bright glowing blue waves in the dark in southern California. So cool. YouTube link.

New Jersey had Chris Christie’s famous, “Get. the hell. off the BEACH!” during Hurricane Sandy. (Also the famous drone photo of him enjoying lounging on said beach with the crowds all gone, drink in hand.)

Combine a King Tide (the highest of the year, according to the state) with a big storm coming at us over the water and that was basically the message officials tried to get out there today: do not come running to sightsee the effects. Especially do not bring your kids to play in the ocean. Do not come near it. The waves are going to come in twenty to as much as forty feet high and you do not want to be pulled in and you will be pulled in. Stay far away from the shore.

I guess these good folks didn’t think this was too near. 

Yeah, don’t do that.

It does look like those kids had a ball while they were rolling like one.

Yeah no, don’t do that.

We had a spur of the moment lunch out with old friends, a great time, and a restless toddler at the next table where two couples were doing the same thing we were.

A panda puppet. Happy faces.

On a side note, if you take my favorite blueberry cake recipe, use Forager cashewmilk yogurt because the dairy-allergic kid is gone and it needs to be used up (but real butter because I can again), swap 2/3 c of the flour out for 2/3 c of almond flour, and sprinkle the tops with half the blueberries and then maple sugar and bake for 23 minutes, it makes eighteen blueberry almond maple muffins and they came out very very good.

Maddie couldn’t wait: she wanted me to help her knit. She wanted to make a finger puppet. She wanted it to be one she had made.

And so I cast on ten stitches, did the first row, and showed her how. Only, this time she was half a year older than the last time we’d tried this and she had that earlier experience under her belt and she took right to it. It became a dozen stitches, sure, but she did nearly all of this by herself. All she needed help with was figuring out when turning the thing not to knit into the too-loose stitch-below-the-stitch at the beginning; yarn tension was not a thing yet.

She wanted it longer but asked if I could add the last few rows to it.

Sure. Did she want it folded lengthwise and sewn?

No, widthwise.

Oh, well then you’re pretty much there. A row or two, she watched carefully as I sewed it, and then it was gleefully declared done and tried on.

It didn’t need to have a face or wings to be a finger puppet to her, it needed to be something made by her. And it was. She’s a natural. It was the day before her ninth birthday and I hadn’t learned till I was ten, I told her (and a half!) She’s good!

(This isn’t the one, it’s just one of the many like it.)

What I wanted to make didn’t seem to matter: the same old same old Malabrigo Mecha in Teal Feather is the skein that jumped into my purse for the outbound flight. Clearly, it was the boss of me.

I was going to make a fancier pattern at least, but on the first row above the ribbing I found I’d goofed the stitch count for that. I didn’t have the patience to risk tinking back the stitches twice: seventy in plain stockinette it was. Again. No openwork for you!

It was a shorter flight than the one to Seattle so this hat wasn’t done when we landed.

We played with grandkids. The five year old challenged me to a game of chess–not that he really knew the rules yet but it was something the big kids did and he wanted to show that he was one, too.

His daddy did a we’ve-got-this, strode on over, and coached him on moving what where when. “Checkmate!” after maybe my fourth move with his youngest grinning at winning.

Back at the airport all too soon. Time to finish that silly hat. The last few stockinette rows, the decreases that always take longer than you’d expect, the bind off, and then–just do it. I wove the ends in, fished in my purse for the folding mini-scissors to snip off the extra length, and stuffed the thing back into my purse and finally, finally started the cowl I’d planned to make this trip.

Thus the hat ended up in the overhead luggage bin, well out of reach. The seatbelt sign never turned off. No one on our row but the two of us this time anyway.

Curbside, Uber gave us a wait time of an hour. Oh joy. Not two minutes later his phone buzzed again: someone had decided to take the fare and he was already doing the turn-around into the terminal. Yay!

A 2007 Prius pulled up to us. The man’s name was Jamal, an older guy. His accent was pretty thick but his command of the language was as good as any native-born’s from what I could hear; he clearly loved a good conversation and meeting new people and he was just a joy all around. From the back seat I watched the brim of his old thin faded baseball cap moving up and down and around giving motion to his words. Had we had a good trip? He asked questions, then listened to hear the answers like we were old friends.

He jumped out of the car to help get our luggage out for us.

I reached into my purse: “Do you like this shade of green?”

Confusion in his face.

“I knitted it for you.” Then to clarify, “I knitted it but I didn’t know who it was for. Now I do. It’s wool, machine washable wool. It’s for you.”

Our loquacious driver was suddenly speechless.

He took it in kind of a slow motion, eyes on it, feeling the thick warmth of the thing against the chilly air in the fading light.

It was as perfect a Christmas Eve scene as that little hat could ever have hoped to be a part of.

We wished the best of the holidays to each other and each other’s families with a wave goodbye, pulled our bags on up the walkway and away.

We celebrated us some Christmasing. And his big brother’s birthday. And his little sister’s birthday, but mostly hers since that was the one we were there the day of and the day before for.

But grandkid #2 is the one I told the story to of my dad flying home from France suddenly blind on one side, having to have surgeries to get his eyesight back in that eye–and how we were supposed to be coming for a visit soon after. (I think that was the trip home for my sister-in-law’s wedding.)

We came.

Grandkid #2’s daddy was two at the time. And he was kid #2, too.

His grampa was depressed and grouchy while trying not to be, but he was.

That little boy of ours instantly decided that his Grampa was his total hero and yelled, Grampa! and ran to him and hugged him every time he saw him, even if he’d just toddled out of the room and turned around and yup he was still there so hey there’s serious celebrating to do here! Grampa!

If Grampa growled or was loud (he was a bit hearing impaired) it made no difference: hugging him, climbing up into his lap, being with him was what life was all about that week for my little boy.

And you know what? By the end of our visit, I told grandkid #2, my dad wasn’t depressed anymore.

I added, and I’m telling you this because you remind me of that. Because you’re so cheerful.

Grandkid #2, a tween, looked into my eyes. Then he hugged me for a long time. Then he ran and hugged his Grampa.

I could tell, over the next 24 hours, that he was thinking about that story a lot. About how much of a difference he could make–when all he had to do was love people and be his best self. It changes everything.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it, and love to all in this beautiful world of ours.

A crazy-busy nonstop runrunrunrunrun kind of a day like probably a lot of other people had today.

The teacher friend who needed homemade cookies for a party and was even crazier-busier than we were and had absolutely no time for it got handed plates filled with warm ones right out of the oven, courtesy of yonder daughter.

I think we’re ready?