Scene: New Hampshire. We were at a party at a friend’s house. Our first child was old enough to walk but not old enough yet to talk.

Music greeted the guests on entering, and soon Larry was taking a bunch of us to the living room to show off his very nice new stereo system while talking about how powerful it was. He was very happy with it.

Then it was on to some other topic and we all moved into the next room for a moment.

Which is when Sam decided she wasn’t done exploring what she’d just seen and toddled straight towards the enticing knobs and buttons the moment our eyes were off her. They were right at her height.

It felt like a physical wall of sound. Everybody else was just standing there gobsmacked at the sudden volume and what had just happened and not wanting to get any closer, so it wasn’t hard to be the first one to get to it to try to turn it down.

Finding the volume button when you’re in a bit of a panic takes longer and it was impossible to shout over that to ask.

The universal shoulder slump of relief at my success!

Gotta hand it to you, Larry, you’re right, we’ve never heard a sound system like that.

(Conversation just now: Did Larry have one of the very first CD players? Or did they come out the next year? Him: I don’t remember. But it would have been if they were, because, Larry. Me, Googling: First sold in the US in early 1983. Yeah, it probably was.)

That all was brought back to mind by the best political line of the day: “If you turn your base up too high you’ll blow out your Speaker.”

Actually, the good ones hold up to just about anything.

Me, yesterday, looking at the state’s update of where the new covid booster was currently available: Man. This is like when the original shot came out, where you have to get out of the blue areas to find any and the pharmacy chains haven’t improved their user interface one iota. Anyway, (it was almost not a question) you want to go up to Santa Rosa?

He gave me The Look. We were both remembering that day trip to get him his first shot in Antioch two years ago and that’s what that would be like all over again. How about we not.

I looked again today because I also learned last time that persistence pays off.

A small mom and pop pharmacy in Newark had just gotten some in. Openings today. Across the Bay and before rush hour gets too bad.

About an hour later we were hopping in the car for our appointments.

They had four chairs set up for giving the shots and the obligatory 15 minute observation afterwards–that was all the space they had. Clearly we weren’t the only ones who had found them and those chairs were filled, one right after another.

Afterward, given that the effects were likely to wipe me out the next day, when we got home I quickly threw together the long-anticipated package with the afghan to the post office a little before closing.

An aside here to Margo Lynn: Yes, that too. Caught the clerk ringing it up as New Jersey and got him to correct that real quick.

I drove away from there wanting to shout, I DID IT I DID IT I DID IT I DID IT!!!

It’s not enough to make the thing–you have to get it to its owner. They are on their ways now towards a sorting facility.

I think I’ll turn in a bit early…

I have had cheap Panasonic microwaves for years and years. They’re familiar. They look decent. They hold a big plate without taking up as much counter space as some. They’re fast. They cook evenly enough, and Wirecutter praised them for that, and you can find them anywhere when you suddenly need a new one.

Which you do, is the problem. Often.

I once came home from Stitches so exhausted that I broke the glass turntable and found out that replacing it cost almost as much as simply ditching the entire thing–and so each time I replaced the oven I would hold onto the previous turntable. Since that one was already paid for.

Bought the same one as ever as far as I could tell last time, and they’d changed the turntable size. Out with the old.

Thirteen months. Eleven months. They just kept dying. Maddening. Just inside warranty (but in the middle of covid lockdown), just outside warranty. I know the way to extend a microwave’s life is to keep it clean, and out of sheer I’ll-show-you! towards that company I did. Then they changed the interior from visible to dark taupe grey plastic that aging eyes couldn’t see the splatters in. Fine, I’ll clean it blind then.

Yesterday the latest one died. Brand new, its door had refused to open till the fourth or fifth try, but over time it had allowed me to get it on the second or even first try pushing in on the thing: my feral cat was getting almost friendly.

And then suddenly it was nothing but a 20x15x12″ digital clock.

Did I mention the lower one of our double oven died last week.

Lots of time got spent today hunting down descriptions, reviews, etc, but when I read Wirecutter praising Panasonic it was my moment of truth: I will never ever buy another one from them. I’m done.

I wanted to have one that I would actually want to have, whatever it might be. I wanted one that was expected to last, I wanted one that *would* last. I checked with Richard, I price-checked.

And then I spent $16 more than Amazon to buy it locally and came home with a Breville Combi Wave 3 in 1. Microwave, air fryer, convection, with a learning curve ahead.

The interior is chrome. You can see in there!

The door is soft close and self-closing and quiet. Quiet doors rah rah rah! in the company’s descriptions and I thought, yeah? So what?

Ohhh. That’s what. Huh. I had no idea that could be something I would enjoy so much.

My justification to myself is that it could help cover the baking, especially to tide me over if the upper oven starts having problems heating up too, and that I finally have an air fryer. But most of all: that it will be no more money than if I’d bought a string of one-year models again and a lot less electronic waste. Cross your fingers.

I got it in the house, then as his work day ended it was his back’s turn and he got it out of the box and onto the counter. It was gorgeous. I tested it with a bowl of broccoli. The display asked for the approximate weight and category of veggie and auto-cooked it on high for 2 min 36 seconds. I went in the other room–and heard the ‘it’s done’. *I* heard it. And it wasn’t even an obnoxious sound to get that to happen, and you can change the volume up or down or off entirely.

Someone really knew what they were doing on that one.

There’s just one thing that made me want to wince/laugh and ohmygosh! in horror. (Pushing me to go find this article referencing Breville’s quality controls that made me feel better about it.)

The turntable. It was the same bleeping turntable. The most-recent Panasonic one that hadn’t fit the previous Panasonic fit right in that Breville should I ever need a backup.

Four years, to prove me right in springing for this. That’s all I ask.

I can hear it!!!

I knitted the ribbing of the next big afghan project and wanted to dive right into the colorwork. But given that I haven’t even sketched the ideas out, bad as my drawing skills are… I thought maybe I should tell myself I wasn’t quite ready?

Conference sessions called for brainless knits anyway, so I pulled out a long-stalled hat. It’s the usual Malabrigo Mecha but it’s the only skein of it I’ve ever seen that was a mess. Wads and straggles, but at least no breaks.

And yet. It could be the hat it was a few inches towards; I just had to want it to. I didn’t want to. I didn’t even love the colors in the first place, though surely someone out there would.

I picked up those needles (I wanted it off them) and…sat down and made it work. Some kluging was involved (sudden thought: doing a Russian join seems an awkward term to my ears these days. Ukrainian? Who knows where it actually came from?) The hanging-by-a-thread part is now nestled inside a nice soft wad, which got stretched a little first. In the end I got a perfectly fine plain soft washable wool beanie that has nothing wrong with it and that someone out there is going to love.

I finished it. I even ran the ends in, specifically because it was the first day of Aftober, the annual get-out-there-and-finish-something-that’s-been-lagging month named after Afton, who started the tradition.

Although. More and more I’m thinking, you know? It’s not really done. Not till it’s found its person. Because that was always the point.

I had this old Ashford Traditional spinning wheel that I’d bought used 30 years ago.

My tall older son in his teens walked across the family room in the dark because he didn’t want to turn on the light that would shine in his sister’s room and wake her up–and tripped over the wheel, his size 13 shoe breaking the maiden (the assembly above the wheel itself) and his tumbling leaving the rest slightly off kilter.

He said he was okay. I said that’s what matters.

I had been using that wheel for Colonial Days history demos at the elementary schools’ fifth grade classrooms and it was known around campus, and so another parent, an acquaintance but trying to help, heard about it and offered to repair it. He unscrewed the maiden (that phrase took a turn later) from the body of the wheel and he took it home and it took me several years to find out that the reason he didn’t just give it back when I finally asked was that it was lost in his garage somewhere. I was later told that that was not the only mistake he was making; I can just picture his ex discovering a what-the-hell in a box somewhere and pitching it.

Meantime, I’d spent the painful $125 that it cost at the time–more than half of an entire new wheel with bobbins, second guessing myself all the way but an extra hundred bucks is a hundred bucks–and bought a new maiden.

And a dear friend’s husband offered to assemble it onto my wheel for me. She’s a knitter and spinner and he got how passionate we are about what we do; he wanted so much to help.

He didn’t know that the uprights are not supposed to move. He set it up so that you twist one to help release the flyer. It’s damaged the wood, and the flyer tends to shake until it frees itself of the drive band and projectile vomits itself across the room.

Which is why you haven’t read much about the spin part of the spin dye knit thing here in a very long time.

Nor have I mentioned any of this to anybody in a very long time.

My friends Sand and Kaye, who were the owners of the much-missed Purlescence yarn/weaving/spinning store that closed about a dozen years ago, have been selling some of their old wheels of late. They are clearing out space–but also because of a serious injury. Sand is finding new channels for her creativity because she has to.

She reached out to me a few days ago. There was this beautiful Kiwi wheel they’d painted. It’s not finished. Finishing it now would be…problematic. Would I like it? She could throw in a Super Flyer if I wanted, though she’d have to charge me for it, but the wheel itself? Free. She really wanted it to go where it would be loved.

It is General Conference weekend for our church, with Saturday and Sunday sessions, but in between those we drove on down. I got to share hugs with my old friends. Oh, man, it had been so long, and with Stitches gone now…

Kaye brought out a box and I got it in the car and thanked her and we continued the conversation and I thought that’s all Sand and I were doing as Kaye disappeared–

–but this time she came back with this.

That’s a gorgeous wheel!! I exclaimed in surprise, and I guess my deafness had tripped me up because I didn’t get it, what were they doing with a second one–I said, You already put the box in the car!

That’s the accessories.

They’d gotten to see my reaction to their painting and just how blown away I was, and man that felt good.

I reminded them a bit about my old wheel and said, I’d almost offered to give you that one to sell–but I, I, didn’t want to inflict it on you.

They laughed.

I promised to send them a picture, and they can decide. There it is. Lovingly stained years ago by–Sand.

A few days ago, it kept looking like a bright red pair of Keds with white shoelaces.

Now it just needs a good daytime photo. And maybe another line under the scuffed-out-grass area so you can actually see it. Or maybe that’s just the bad photo.

It looked like an apple coddling moth and it could have come inside in one of the ones I picked from the tree. But you never know.

200F for 40 minutes or so, carefully only touching the pan. I don’t remember what temp damages super wash treatment for wools, though I know boiling does, but that’s not an issue with these yarns.

Opening the folds up, the center registered 147F a minute or two after I took it out. I let it cool, then carefully zip locked it away for now.

Doesn’t everybody bake their afghans?

While I finish the ribbing on the other side of the afghan…

For those who’ve read my book, the woman in the intro worked for many years at the Fish Market restaurant, which just closed because the land under it became too valuable to the landlord. That beautiful old building with all the carefully tended flowers will be replaced by high-rise housing.

There was an online auction yesterday, local pick-up only: own a piece of your memories.

So. Many. Steamer. Trays. Which makes sense. The glass partitions between sections with fish etchings in them–must bring own tools to dismantle from wall. Etc. There were somehow two and only two springform pans, and they looked like the ones I used for decades till they gave up the ghost and you can’t buy them quite like that anymore, so I made one bid. Oh well so much for that.

I had always wondered about the mounted fish on the walls. Most, turns out, were fake, but they went for pretty good money anyway.

But one. One was not fake.

Caught in 1987, the listing says.

It’s the head of a Great White Shark and presumably the buyer has to find a way to get its 3200 pounds off that wall and carry it home. Probably the only time one would be able to buy shark for $3.55 a pound.

I want to know, how is a taxidermied fish head 3200 pounds? How did they weigh it? How did they get it up there?

How did that wall hold up all these years, especially during the Loma Prieta quake!

Can you imagine sitting under that thing at 5:04 pm for dinner that October 17th?

The idea is just jaw-dropping.

It didn’t absolutely need the framing at the sides, but I like it so much better, as you and I and everyone and anyone knew. One side to go. Thank you!

Edited to add: I wrote this and only then did it hit me: I spent all that time adding the scuffed spot in the grass under the tire swing to give it a sense of motion, the leaves on the flower, snipping the yarn ends, hours counting stitches and doing the ribbing on one side and not only did I not do the door handle, I snipped the end that was going to BE the door handle! Aargh!

So to write down quick what I just did because I got a nice lever handle and I’ll never remember how I did it: I brought the new yarn from below the door frame, crossed it over to the nearest stitch on the door, held that from pulling out while I got out a knitting needle and used the sideways bar I’d just made to knit a stitch into. Then I did a yarn over, then made a third stitch with the bar. Three stitches. Then I crossed the third stitch over the first, then the yarnover over the first, and after pulling the yarn through to knot the end in a point, got the yarn needle (eye type) back out and pulled the  yarn down to the left of what I’d just done to the back. And then I wove in the two new ends.

Oh look at that black stitch that should have been white at the bottom of the door. And guess who just snipped the new white ends off!

The most beautiful sound of yarn being broken off.

Although.

Click on image for greater details. I would do some things differently the next time, but for flying without a pattern and not being able to visualize how anything would look before it already did, I’m pretty pleased overall. (IDIDITIDIDITIDIDITIDIDIT!!!)

The doorknob! It still needs the doorknob! Almost forgot! And leaves for the flower.

That tire swing. It’s great up close. At thumbnail size I’m a whole lot less sure. Maybe I should add the real-life rock ledge nearby. On the other hand, the clouds for all their intricacies look like a burst of whiteflies chasing a sparrow at thumbnail size, so, hey.

It needed more flowers.

It’s already got ribbing at the sides to match the top and bottom pattern-wise, even if the colors don’t. I’m pretty sure I have enough yarn; would you add dark blue ribbing to the sides to finish framing the picture? Or just leave it be?

So we have this standing understanding: friend Lee drives us to the airport, those times when that works out for him, and I bake him a chocolate torte. He always tells me I don’t have to, I always tell him thank you for the ride and that I’m going to, he always loves that I do and I always love that he’s always so ready to help.

Went to the grocery store right after we got home from our trip on Monday. Forgot the cream. Oh well, I had a big enough job to do that day as it was.

Wednesday. Went to the grocery store. Got the cream.

Wait. We were never out of Trader Joe’s dark Pound Plus bars, those are a staple in our house for baking–but we were out.

Thursday. Went to Trader Joe’s, got the bar.

Came home and–nope, not a one. Every last stick of butter had been in the freezer in the garage. The one where the door had bounced open the night before the trip. All we’d been able to do before our flight was close that door and be glad that at least it wouldn’t be five days’ worth of decay when we cleaned it out. Still, Monday, even the vegan cupcakes smelled like they’d gone bad. Out.

And you have to compost-bin the compostables and recycle the recyclables which means half-thawing stuff to get them to separate because the plastic wrap has to come off those chicken breasts and man oh man and glad it’s not a hot day and that the trash guys were coming so the neighbors wouldn’t have to smell that outside for days.

Finally went back last night to the store and this time I didn’t forget to buy new butter. Although by that point I was half-sure I would still be missing something else when I got home. Sugar, cocoa, vanilla, salt, eggs–nope, we’re good this time.

Tonight, at long last, I called ahead and then we drove over and handed Lee his newly-glazed chocolate torte with the extra thick ganache just for them and he was very very happy as he inhaled that deep dark sweet essence.

Here, at least, it was single strands rather than doubled. I looked back at the beginning of the piece and counted: when I was using two strands per stitch I had twenty-five balls of yarn going per row plus two pull-through strands. It was taking me four to five hours an inch. And that is why there is only one lonely little flower down there, though there was a daylily patch later: you grab your sanity where you can.

When I got up to the clouds I didn’t want to untangle balls anymore and decided I was fine with breaking off five or six yard lengths, using them up, and pulling them through the blue that had gotten wrapped around and around and around the white after they’d been worked behind each other at every stitch. Along with the ends of those strands every second or third row as they ran out.

I cut out the gray tire-swing chains I didn’t like and replaced them with black so they’d show up against the background and added a stitch to round out the tire better. I embroidered flower petals on the sunflower. I added a beak to the raptor. I finished the clouds yesterday, and the rows above the clouds today, and somehow all of that part is over too now and I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it.

Knit one purl one knit one purl one in dark blue to have the end edging match the beginning edging.

I have been working steadily on this since May. I am eight rows away from being finished. Maybe I should kluge that squirrel idea in there after all.

Which means I’ve been going through my phone and photos online of the C&O Canal, wondering if that’s the picture I knit next. Swain’s Lock, where I accidentally dumped my sister and our cousin over into the canal when I used my paddle to try to keep their rented canoe from hitting ours (the big sisters’) back when we were teens and they were visiting from New Jersey?

Or maybe I shouldn’t remind them.

Last Friday night we came from the airport, picked up Mom, and in a stab a finger on a Google search and do that one, picked Himalayan Kitchen in downtown Salt Lake for our dinner. Our youngest joined us once he got through traffic (it was bad.)

Halfway through the meal, I called the waiter over. He came right away, looking like he was hoping everything was okay but worrying that I thought it was not because our glasses were full and why else would we….

Me: There is (name of the restaurant) in (name of the town) near us that is in the Michelin Guide, and I’ve had their lamb saag many times.

Yours is better.

His face lit up and he motioned in excitement to I wasn’t sure who and said, I’ll go tell her! It is her recipe!

I was expecting some grandmotherly type, but no, it was the young woman busily busing the tables who came over, absolutely beaming, and I repeated what I’d said. She thanked me and about danced away from there.

I have now found my place to eat in that city. It’s noisy, but the food is great and so are the people.

I was on my way to the post office, driving down the quiet road alongside the bayland marsh, the freeway a cement-and-chain-link fence away reinforcing why this nice little straightaway closer to nature is the way to go.

When suddenly there was a long narrow orange and black beetle crawling and flying around in the car. The types around here come out in September but I’d never seen one quite like that.

I had found myself out of shipping tape so the box was open and the last thing I wanted to do was to mail that bug to Massachusetts and have it fly out in my daughter’s face when she opened the thing. I tried cranking a window–knowing that only blows things back into the car–and, giving up, turned into a small pull-out spot for birdwatchers and hikers along the Bay. I opened the car doors and tried my best to find the thing and get it out of there. It, on the other hand, either flew out the bottom of the door when I wasn’t looking or it went into hiding to who knows where.

Just then a white car went flying past on the road right behind me. I am serious when I say he was probably doing about a hundred–he was there and gone in a fast blink. No cop car followed in pursuit; he was just doing it because he could.

I was suddenly acutely aware of what that bug had just done for me, all the more so for my cousin’s death by a reckless driver last month.

The winter coat left behind got sent on its way, I turned out of the post office, and got back on that road.

And darn if a buzz of orange legs and thorax didn’t suddenly come straight at my chest while I warded it off with one hand, the other on the wheel and eyes firmly on the road. Okay, so it didn’t hitchhike to Boston. Good. Glad to know it. Now go away.

I think it went down the far edge of the dashboard.

Remind me not to park under the tree till the weather gets colder.

While a small part of me answers, Maybe.

Big Arrows pattern, specifically.

A couple of weeks ago I was at Cottage Yarns for a reason that had nothing to do with that skein of Malabrigo Arroyo that also came home with me. But the colors! And the softness, and the practicality of washable wool when you have no idea where it’s going to go when you’re done.

It wanted to be a cowl on 3.75mm needles and it became my carry-around project immediately no matter what my plans had been. I got a good enough start on it in the Urgent Care room waiting for Richard that working on it became a self-fulfilling knitacy.

I worked on it on the plane Friday and finished it that night in the hotel room, running in the end, rinsing to get the crumples out of the lace, squeezing the water out, wrapping it in a towel and standing on the towel, then hanging it over the shower rod: I wanted that thing dry by morning.

And in the desert air it almost was.

By the time of the funeral a few hours later it completely was.

My cousin Amy greeted person after person after person after person and loved every one of us in the extremity of her loss.

The moment I saw her I knew. I mean, by that point the offer was planned, but…!

I gave her that cowl from that impulse purchase. All of those random knit-this-first feelings, the hours spent, the medical waiting-room times of my own. The airport. The flight. The ‘I see you and I am coming’ behind it.

It wasn’t just a collection of good colors on her in mostly blue: it matched the dress she had chosen to say goodbye to her beloved husband with us in. It totally matched. She marveled.

Kevin was looking out for her still.

—-

Edited to add for my mom, who’s not on Facebook: Kevin’s daughter went to scatter her dad’s ashes, and at the place where he had talked about in a random conversation about the somedays, she found herself suddenly afraid somehow that the ashes would blow back in her face. Her cousin suggested a different spot nearby with a beautiful view of the river below. They went there and the family piled out to see, whereupon her grandmother told them that that: that was the spot where her husband had proposed to her 76 years earlier.

The daughter read a poem, her uncle said a prayer, the young children took it all in alongside the adults, the great-grandmother stood there with her loved ones, quietly remembering, remembering, and as Amy’s daughter described it, I am so sad and everything is beautiful.