An inch so far today, with two more by tomorrow night. And the wind!

Friends a few cities over have lost power. We haven’t so far, but it did have me deciding dinner was going to be some of the more expensive food in the freezer: it should be enjoyed, not worried over.

And so the stuffed chicken breasts are in the oven and the thought occurred to me that if the lights go out now, what would we do.

That little creme brûlée torch that was his favorite Christmas gift a few years ago. Can you cook chicken parts with it? Here, let’s just pry open that center there with a fork and melt that cheese… That would work. Right?

(Update 9:00 pm: It sounds like a large branch of a tree is being dragged across the roof by the wind, resting a second, gusting and dragging almost right away again. It is loud out there. And I am not used to hearing much of anything as being loud.)

Should I take the unwieldy afghan that would get on the floor of the garage?

That’s a question I can’t answer, he responded, reasonably.

So, I finally decided, I guess the boring usual, then. Lucky me, there was one skein of Mecha that was already wound up. A dark teal green.

Which got me thinking.

I don’t spend a lot of time in waiting rooms these days, but sometimes, and so somehow I did, I had three plain Malabrigo beanies sitting waiting to find out whose they were supposed to be.

I checked their website. The three of them had been running the garage since the original guy who’d opened it in 1952.

It’s not in walking distance and I had no ride so I was just going to sit and wait while they worked on the car. I could call Enterprise Car Rental if it came to that; they pick you up.

Oh–are you waiting? she asked me. (For so long they didn’t let you; now they’ll let one person under the relaxed covid protocols.)

They got right to it, then.

I pulled out my needles and cast on.

I did the nine rows of ribbing on the usual 70 stitches of Mecha.

Someone else popped in to give his key and say his car was here.

I kept knitting.

I did some of the solid area above the brim, and at about 90 minutes in the mechanic stepped into the office area, glanced over at my knitting a moment, and said my car was done.

And then he shook his head with her a moment talking about the 24 year old Buffalo Bills football player who’d dropped on the field in cardiac arrest–so young, so young. In the ICU. But it was like that basketball player, he said.

Len Bias, I piped up to his surprise.

Either there were two basketball players or he didn’t remember that name; it’s been a long time.

He went back to work on the next car.

Len Bias was in Maryland, I told her, and I’m from Maryland.

Ah, she said, and rang up my bill.

While wearing a shirt and jacket in the very colors of the feminine one of those hats. The other two were in Vaa and Solis, darker green on the gray side and the other a bit brighter. I was knitting teal green. I was wearing two layers of green sweaters. Tuesday’s for the color green, today.

Two guys back there? I asked, just to confirm.

Two guys back there, she confirmed.

Having waited for my bill to be finished so it couldn’t affect it in any way, I pulled out the three hats and thanked her very much.

She’d just seen me making one of those. She instantly knew I’d made those. Her jaw dropped, and then she hurried to go share as I waved goodbye and headed out the door without even asking if they liked green.

The guy who’d worked on my car hurried out the big garage door to catch a glimpse in time but I was on my way.

I drove off feeling like, where have I been? Man, that felt good. Do it some more. You’ve got some catching up to do, hon.

So the neighborhood didn’t blow up. Suddenly that last tomato variety’s name up there has a different twinge to it… Thank you, firefighters.

The blue lines in the forecast continue: 5.95″ still to come between now and next Wednesday and it looks like it’ll keep going after that. This Wednesday and next Monday look to be like the big day we just had. Stay home.

Shasta, the biggest reservoir, is still only at 57% of normal and 34% full. Etc. But day by day we’re getting there.

As it was pouring down today, I opened my new Burpee catalog–now that it’s had a few days to dry out so you can turn the pages, and then I ordered visions of Spring.

I always think I should plant marigolds to protect my tomatoes from the squirrels, since they hate the smell of them, but I never do. With our overhangs, I don’t have bright window space for much and then it always feels like too late for a round two of starts.

20% off? (Enter code BSC23 till 6/30/23) A new color variant that I like? Strawberry Blonde. I ordered the plants, which I never have before, and I don’t care how small the marigold seedlings turn out to be when they get here: they’ll be actual plants, not wishes. This year those tomatoes are mine!

And I bought sunflower seeds. Their new Creme Brûlée. I mean, sunflowers this year of all years, yes, not to mention that with a name and look like that how could one not. Slightly burnt-looking stamens on the back catalog cover, reminiscent of what the Ukrainians have endured, but deeply satisfying to the eye, the heart, the birds: gorgeous flowers, absolutely gorgeous.

And, yes, the squirrels will be thrilled. Let’s see if I can get them to grow on the far side of the house from the rest.

—–

Update: I just got a notification that a major tree is down and blocking one of the more problematical creeks. That’s an emergency, and the mayor of the next town (not sure if it fell to or from their side) is on it.

Anne was right, of course: it was the section of 101 that goes around the airport and just north of it that flooded, the stretch where it offers a beautiful view across the Bay, where you can see the ships lined up for the Port of Oakland–and where, two weeks ago, I was thinking as we drove that stretch that it would be the first thing to go when the waters rise in the coming years.

Meantime, I did some serious progress on the stalled afghan, and being that close to done makes me want to finish it. It feels good to have that motivation back.

Richard was out taking a walk while I was typing that and came in saying there was a massive smell of gas in the next block, he’d put in a call to the city’s utilities department, and the fire truck had arrived before he even made it up the block.

Okay, the night just got a little more exciting. (The blog timestamp’s off, it’s 10pm.) Well, huh. We’ve got a reverse-911 system here if they decide they want us all out of here, but I’m not expecting it.

As of 6:30 pm the amount of rainfall for this year for our city is 13.51″.

The amount of that rain that fell in the last 24 hours is 3.25″, as measured up in the foothills where it gets more than down here, but it all comes through town on its way to the Bay. The city said today’s amount is three times what the National Weather Service had predicted.

Should we happen to need to go to the hospital tonight for any reason (we don’t, and let’s not) we would have to go sideways and up across the foothills and around the flooding and the closed roads, hoping. (To Anne, who recently moved away from here: El Camino’s underpass just before the Stanford Mall is completely under water.)

It’s still coming down hard but is supposed to drop off by bedtime, and then Sunday is supposed to totally be a day of rest. Bright sunshine. Take a break.

And then we will start off the new year with a projected 4″ across the next eight days with about half that as a deluge on Wednesday. Don’t go anywhere Wednesday.

I am so grateful for a warm dry house (and that we finally finally after over a year on the waiting list *got the roof fixed*.)

Those reservoirs still have a long way to go to get up to normal. Keep going.

Happy New Year, everybody! We were going to do to a pot luck with some friends but it got canceled. Next year.

Rain or no rain, I drove to Fillory Yarn today. The owner’s had medical issues and the place is up for sale. I wasn’t sure it would still be there past the first of the year and I had to at least show up before they go.

K had a big order needing winding on her hands and offered to do mine for later pickup. I had her simply ring me up, thanks.

I told her about how I don’t wear nor generally knit yellow and yet I’d bought some from them and how that and Malabrigo Rios in Teal Feather had turned into matching Ukrainian flag hats for the Ukrainian Consul General in San Francisco and his American counterpart; I thanked her and the store for being part of that. I’d had no idea when I’d bought it. It had just seemed somehow the right thing to do at the time.

That was very meaningful to her to hear. They’d been able to play a part in offering that support, which Ukraine needs in every way possible.

There was no one sitting visiting at the big table and I reminisced a moment over the group that used to fill it Friday afternoons.

There’s a group on Thursdays, she quickly answered, ticking off names of people I’d want to see, and I do.

Meaning, next Thursday. Yes! And how about the next. And the next? Let’s see how far out we can take that. Anyone want to buy a popular yarn store in San Jose?

Meaning, Protector of the City.

Let me give you the link to her picture on Instagram: Miss Ukraine, competing for Miss Universe, in a costume that took four months to create under repeated power failures and missile strikes.

Beauty pageants are so not my world. But that costume is one for the history books.

I was able to match someone’s yarn and dye lot so she could finish her sweater, and could there be a better Christmas present for me than that.

I drove past marshland on my way to the post office. You could tell it was vacation week–and that it was during a break in the rain that’s projected to continue past next Friday; there was a family with young kids skipping happily near the bicyclist sculpture dedicated to the environmentalist who’d worked for decades to get the marsh habitat restored, a group of people on the other side of the southernmost pond as if on lunch break from the nearby offices, someone birdwatching towards the Bay. The green grasses were lush, the winter water was running high.

The trail was long enough to keep them all at good spaces between each other.

There was a magnificent red-tailed hawk perched on its favorite light pole over the road. It was taking in the scene and not the least bit perturbed by all the people. I had seen it there before. It was a thrill to see it again, with the suggestion, then, of territory. May it choose this place to raise the coming year’s family.

And just beyond it, farthest away from anyone else, there was a couple walking.

I’d guess early sixties. What was striking is that he looked like he was having a political or family or some kind of argument, if you can call it an argument when only one person is carrying on with it; he didn’t look angry, just emphatic, hands waving and finger jabbing towards the air away from her as he made his points, not looking threatening and a little stooped but maybe a bit bothered. She, it seemed, was putting up with it. Maybe it was all old hat to her.

But you get someone out taking a walk in nature and you might already know what they’re going to talk about but they’re also going to get some exercise and feel better when it’s done and so will you so you might as well go, right?

All these impressions of the lives of complete strangers that flashed in the few seconds on approach. And then you go past.

I almost pulled the car over. I wanted to say, Did you see it? The hawk? It’s been observing you. It’s gorgeous, look how big that thing is! Don’t miss it!

I thought, whatever he’s talking about, they won’t remember it five years from now but that sighting, if they finally looked up, they just might. Red-taileds like to soar high and that one’s so close. You could see so much detail.

But I didn’t. And neither, as far as I know, did they.

I got past the light way ahead and pulled in at the post office, mailed my small box, and again made the deliberate decision to take the longer way home rather than the freeway on the small chance that the hawk might still be there.

They were not. I’m guessing that had been their car by the bicyclist statue.

The hawk still was. Cool as the water in an incoming northern tide.

Answering Jayleen’s question: it was a small road with no cars on it but mine. Nice and straight, and the little kids on bikes, even if they were at the end of a path through the marsh and a few feet away from the road, were excuse enough to take it slow.

I was going to tell her how she’d saved me: the audiologist (not the tech this time) got me in last week, fixed the issue of the air filter that had fallen out into my ear canal and blocked the sound (and got rid of some wax while she was at it), she reset the aids to be 1 dB louder, and best of all, she plugged them in for a software update.

So much better clarity! I could hear!

We were heading to a niece’s wedding tomorrow and since despite last week’s Arctic blast it was supposed to be in the 70s in Texas, I was going to wear the embroidered dress I’d gotten from Ukraine.

It’s gorgeous. It was priced well below some of its competitors, but I actually picked it because at the time it was the only one in that color and that pattern and I loved how it looked. The seamstress, in making the whole thing from scratch, altered the neckline a little bit for me and it came out perfect.

I decided to try it on one more time before packing it. It had been too cold to wear it here since I’d gotten it and I just wanted to admire it again.

Good thing I did. That thing was LOUD! Wait, what? Since when do clothes make sounds like that?!

I have a blouse from Ukraine with machine embroidery where they put a fine facing on the back side to hold the fabric steady as the colors were worked over it, so clearly at some studios that’s how it’s done.

I guess when you’re making do in wartime–well, this woman had used paper. You can carefully, slowly, tear it away from the backs of the stitches afterwards (and you’d better or you’ll clog your plumbing as it disintegrates when you wash it) but with limited light and power she hadn’t and with the sleeves, front, sides, and bottom all embroidered, I sounded like I was noisily crinkling up a big wad of paper with every step or movement of my arms.

I had tried this thing on before. I’d had absolutely no idea, I couldn’t hear it, wasn’t even aware the paper was there, I just thought it felt a little stiff because of all those embroidery stitches.

Now I could. Thank you thank you Dr. Clark.

Y’know, I thought, linen is just not a great thing to put in a suitcase when you want to look formal on the other side anyway. Forget that, and I grabbed something that wouldn’t wrinkle. Including an elegant hand-embroidered blouse from, you guessed it, Ukraine, no backing used.

I was going to tell her the gist of that with a laugh, and I still will, but…

I got a text from Southwest last night. I got another one this morning, but it’s kind of a moot point to cancel the second flight when you’ve already canceled the first, don’t you think?

They have thousands of people from last week still trying to get to where they’re supposed to go, so many suitcases that were boarded but the people were not, such a mess to untangle and that big storm so badly handled.

Three airports at our end, two at the other, and they had not one single seat available at any hour or price. Well, $6300 on another airline given the next-day ticket, and we actually know someone who’s paying one way of that plus a three hour drive across Texas because she absolutely has to get home, but to start the trip?

With apologies to our niece, I went to the post office to remove the hold on the mail.

The rain began about 6 pm and is expected to do the atmospheric-river-dumping thing for eight of the next ten foreseeable days, and maybe even more after that. Not fun, but so needed.

Meantime, this is a few years old, it is long, and I will warn you on the language, but someone clearly writing under a pseudonym wrote an essay on what it’s like to be an ordinary Russian living in Russia. With photos. It’s real, it’s heartbreaking–and it’s who the Ukrainians don’t ever want to be.

The author despairs that his countrymen will ever rise up against the corruption because, as he details it, they live it themselves every single day in order to survive. He gives the example of a child pointing out the injustice of an ingrained bribery at school and the teacher harnessing the power of bullying kids in order to have them be responsible for shutting him up so that she won’t get in trouble for what he said. And she wasn’t even the one being paid off.

The only video I clicked among the guy’s links was the one of the missile being officially blessed bottom to top with official holy water right before it went off.

It tilted left as it lifted, it tilted right, and then it flopped over and exploded right there on the ground.

I can just hear the Ukrainians of today giving their blessing on that outcome.

We had a wonderful, wonderful day, and I hope you all did, too. I’m just going to write about a little moment on the side because I’m never going to remember the details next year any other way. Maybe do 325 next time.

Hunk-o meat, we call it. If he wants a large cut he cooks it, an arrangement going back to when his widowed retired dairy farmer grandmother filled a large grocery bag with part of a cow out of her freezer and sent it home with us. T-bones? Broke newlywed students are supposed to know what to do with those?!

We’d gotten a James Beard cookbook as a wedding present and he had fun learning and in retrospect, I think that’s what his grandmother was going for all along.

We rarely eat beef these days. We’d rather the Amazon not be bulldozed for it. But at Christmas he likes to go big–even though it would just be the two of us this year, because hey freezers and leftovers and faster meals later and all that but whatever, he just really wanted that beautiful rib roast.

Start it high, Beard says, then after so long you turn it down.

He did all that.

Only… he had set a timer for the amount of time at 425 and later, since I was in the kitchen anyway, could I change the oven to 325–nah, make it 350 when it goes off.

Sure.

There’s the timer timer and the oven timer and he’d set the wrong one. The oven was now off. I turned it back on. No biggy.

It was about 20 minutes before I went, wait a minute…

I always use the lower oven because I am not a fan of standing on my tiptoes in front of major heat to see into the top of the thing.

He’s 6’8″ with a back that has opinions. There would have to be a really good reason before he’d ever use anything but the top one.

Duh. I turned his back on but it had already lost about half its heat. It, of course, went into full blast mode to make up for it.

Also, now the timer was and had to be the one on the thermometer and I couldn’t hear it at all, though I did hover nearby and rescued it at two degrees above what he was aiming for.

We really thought we were doing okay.

There is only one way to describe the result.

The beef.

It felted.

I think, on further reflection, that we ought to be able to measure felting levels and call them Kevlars.

Chicken and fish, I tell ya.

The car is running fine while we need it to.

The Kitchenaid arrived and I didn’t even tear open the box a day early to make sure they sent the right color; I know you’re so proud of me.

A friend stopped by. Every year we give each other socks as a semi-gag, semi-not-a-gag gift for Christmas, and we always like what the other picked out. We did it again.

Only, she threw in a little bottle of pomegranate juice from a local grower and I gave her a little granulated maple sugar from a not-local grower. (Ohmygoodness they’re selling spray-can maple syrup now? Can you just imagine what the littlest kids would do if they got into that? Spray straight into their mouths and then need their hair washed and then run off to see what they can gleefully zap with it. Add the spray whip cream and their heaven is complete.)

She happened to ring the doorbell as I was just about to put some pumpkin muffins in the oven so she got to watch me shaking my jar of the stuff over them, and they will be served at the lunch after church tomorrow for any taste testing.

Felt so great to see her.

Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, all the best of the season to all at the returning of the light in the world.

…Oh, and, a random comment on a news story about dressing warmly had me going, the say what fiber? I rabbit holed. So far I’ve found out that deer are farmed but highly invasive exotics in Australia, red deer are producing 20 g of fiber per animal per year in New Zealand and it’s a reliably 13 micron count. Cervelt, they call it.

And if your deer escapes in Australia and you phone your neighbors they have to wait seven days for you to retrieve it but if it does and you don’t notify the neighbors they are required, not requested, to shoot it or to notify official shooters to come do so. Deer eat a lot and the feral ones’ counts are exploding like rabbits.

Okay, so now you officially know the Next Big Thing in fiber arts before just about anyone else. Merry Christmas!

Our sweet old car just runs and runs and runs, which is a good thing because it’s still not a great time to replace it.

Last Friday, we pulled into the ice skating rink parking lot and turned it off.

The motor was still running.

He hit the Prius’s power button again.

Still running.

It IS in park… What… It took about six tries, with me wondering out loud just what we were going to do if it didn’t before it finally complied.

Is it KitchenAiding us? I asked, stunned.

No problems since. But it’s going into the shop after Christmas.

Meantime, the new mixer made it to the Central Valley this morning and is set to be delivered tomorrow, now that it’s outraced that huge bomb cyclone storm.

You all stay safe out there for me, y’hear? Please? So you can have yourself a Merry Little Christmas, alright now, sounds good. And Happy Hanukkah, too.

Edited to add, especially for those in the storm: a raccoon trying to catch snowflakes.

I have a 5 quart Kitchenaid mixer. It’s my third. I like them, they’re what I’m used to, and in my experience they last about a dozen years.

And all of them, when they started to go, the on-off button started getting iffy.

I learned this the hard way thirty years ago when the first one switched itself on while my hand was down in the bowl working on the bread dough. Broke my wrist.

Now, here’s where the story meanders to the Christian bookstore that has since been bulldozed, but it had a title someone had recommended I read and had told me I could find it there.

The internet not being a thing yet, knowing where a book was was way better than traipsing from store to store searching.

So. I go in there.

And I see a whole labeled section of straight-up anti-Mormon hit pieces, three long levels of shelves. Huh.

I found my book, went to check it out–and after a fervent little prayer not to blow this but to be able to live my faith no matter what response I might get, and for their sakes, too–I had to ask.

In gentle curiosity but not complaint: Why do you stock those books?

The man squirmed. Well, because Mormons aren’t Christians and they’re going to hell, that’s why.

I loved him in that moment for trying to do his best as best as he knew how but boy what he didn’t know as I said simply, I’m a Mormon. Jesus Christ is my Lord and my Savior.

My smile was sincere and steady as I looked him in the eyes.

He looked at me. For some reason he then looked at the black splint on my broken wrist at some length; I guess I seemed harmless. He had no answer other than his surprise turning to a thoughtful expression as he silently rang up the sale but I had no doubt he was relieved when I walked out his door: he clearly had questions but it seemed he didn’t dare be caught asking them, not there.

A Going Out of Business sign went up not long after. Then the place was gone, and I don’t know that the business was resurrected somewhere else, I think it was just gone.

So. I took the mixer to a repairman and he disabled the switch entirely so it couldn’t break my wrist again but the speeds were suddenly gone, too: it was plug and unplug, on and off, full blast or nothing.

The second machine took a faster nosedive from the turning on randomly stage to the never turns off  at all unless you unplug it stage, so I gave it and a warning and its accessories to someone who couldn’t afford such a machine at all. At least that way they could have one for awhile. Carefully.

Here we are again, and sometimes this third one will turn off when you turn it off but most of the time now, no. It’s been several months and I’m tired of having a scary machine. I have this fear that it’s going to snag my hair as I reach over it to the plug (two individual hairs by the roots so far), and the cord’s too short to reach the other one.

Metal recycling is now a thing here, and I think that would be the better option.

Kitchenaid is apparently closing out the lift-bowl-model 5 qts at long last–meaning I could get it at $200 off, ie at the price I paid last time, thanks, but only if I want it in pastel aqua or black. Black, thanks. I don’t need a bigger machine but I do need to be able to continue to use all these bowls I’ve accumulated; they’re highly useful.

This morning it was on a truck in Texas. FedEx claimed it was going to be here tomorrow night.

I’m looking at the weather reports that are saying that that record-breaking cold front is hitting hard and fast (has Dallas ever had a windchill factor of -7 before?) and all I know is–

–I don’t want anyone breaking any bones for my stupid mixer. Drive carefully out there, whoever you are, and if I need to I can certainly wait. Saying a prayer for the truck driver.

(Checking: nope. Still in Amarillo. I’m going to say that’s a good thing. Merry Christmas.)

Our daughter and son-in-law have dear friends back in Alaska who have a child, an identical twin, with cancer, and the dad broke his back. They have a GoFundMe that I offered to pass along.