Anne gets the thanks for this one. A note from her got me looking: Ukraine is of course known for its sunflowers and as a large producer of sunflower oil.

What happens when you grow lots and lots of big bright yellow flowers?

You get lots and lots of honeybees.

I had no idea that Ukraine produces 10% of the world’s honey, although of course they do; it’s just that most of it never makes it over the ocean to here.

In the US, Congress has allowed corporations to adulterate both olive oil and honey and to sell deliberately mislabeled blends as the real thing. If you’re allergic to corn like a nephew of mine, that’s kind of a big deal on both counts. Can we please vote in people who care about people?

Which is why it’s wonderful to find a company that tracks its sources down to the individual farmers and verifies that what they’re passing on to their customers is nothing but true pure honey. (Re the olive oil: California’s law requiring Californian-grown organic extra virgin olive oil to only be that has been grandfathered in. That one you can trust.)

So. Anne found a jar of Ukrainian sunflower honey from a company that not only does that source tracing but is donating 100% of profits for it to World Food Kitchen and to Medical Teams International’s efforts on behalf of Ukrainian refugees in Moldova.

Even with the FedEx shipping, that sixpack of bottles comes to $12.50 per two-pound jar. The local stuff I’ve been buying is a dollar an ounce.

Do you have friends who need Ukrainian sunflowers in a jar for Christmas? Some of mine suddenly do. And it’s already here on our side of the ocean. While the money heads over there where it’s so badly needed.

The weird thing is, it’s not just that the back twinges–it’s that it suddenly refuses to hold me up and I find myself on the floor. If I can hold myself up with my arms (I learned in the shower this morning) I can breathe through it and it lets go before I have to.

This gives new meaning to the word backpack. Just ordered one. It should help a lot.

In between dealing with all that, I’m a good way through reading “Dearest Ones” by Rosemary Norwalk. Highly recommended. She was a Californian who ran a Red Cross outfit at a port in England during WWII, offering coffee and doughnuts and a smile to every single soldier whose boat came in or left from where she and a few other women were stationed, be it 4 a.m. or 11 p.m. the same day.

There was a big fuss made when the millionth such soldier arrived. And again at the two millionth. Red Cross headquarters: You want HOW many more pounds of flour?? They didn’t believe it. They had to come see for themselves. And then they sent more women to help out as well as supplies.

I have a friend who was born just after his father went off to serve–who never so much as contacted his wife and son after the war was over but vanished into some other life. Rosemary described friends who hadn’t seen their spouses in four years falling in love with people they served with every day in spite of themselves.

She was not going to become serious about anyone till after the war was over and she could see them in their normal lives, not this temporary circumstance that by its nature tended to make people feel close as the Nazis changed from bombs you could hear incoming to ones you could not. Not her, no sir, just here to do her job and serve.

She wrote many a letter home, signed, Love, Roses, and asked her folks to save them all–while writing in her journal the extra details she didn’t want to tell them yet.

And those became this book and a glimpse into the world of her youth.

Don’t tell me if she ended up marrying Bob, clearly she did but I’m not there yet. (There are at least three Bobs so that’s not a spoiler. Mostly.)

It’s always the most innocuous thing that finally nabs you after all the warning signs: all I did was lean down to put two small Corelle plates in the bottom of the dishwasher.

…And give an almost-four-year-old two piggy back rides two weeks ago. A sleepless night last night probably clinched it.

Ice, stretching exercises, more ice, along with consciously relaxing the muscles that want to seize up, and hopefully tomorrow will be better. Realistically, it will be a process.

I knew I should have kept doing those exercises this past week.

Sometimes when you order something internationally on Etsy they don’t show more than the country the item is coming from until it’s got a tracking number attached to it.

And sometimes, under the circumstances, shipping doesn’t happen immediately.

There’s a vendor in Ukraine who’s been selling embroidered clothes, but also a few printed t-shirts and totes with the colors of the Ukrainian flag, of their national trident symbol, and of celebrating the sinking of the Moskva warship.

I ordered an embroidered toddler dress from them. Pretty flowers for Lillian.

Turns out that vendor was in occupied territory. It isn’t, as of the past few days, but it was then. I was gobsmacked.

The courage of the Ukrainians in standing up for their rights and their freedom of speech! We should all treasure what we’re blessed to have like they fight to keep it.

Post #2 for the night: Richard just found and fixed the other problem with my email and it is apparently now throwing out everything that it’s been telling me it sent but it didn’t for the last ten days? Two weeks?  Anyway, if you get something from me that seems weirdly old, it is, and my email works again. Thanks.

This is a little bit out on a limb–and yet.

I’ve mentioned how I was instantly smitten with a beaded sunflower necklace designed by Oleksandra in Ukraine. I waited several weeks before ordering it to see if its effect on me would wear off; the lower sunflower in particular is really big and I don’t naturally tend towards the ostentatious.

And yet. Those flower halves lifted as wings to the sky, the inner petals below curled as if caught up in the velocity above: it spoke to strength, resilience, survival. It reminded my eyes of peregrine flight, if you remember my volunteer remote-cam work towards their recovery. Yes, I could wear that. Thinking of strangers’ eyes lighting up on seeing me wearing a vyshyvanka: I would. For them.

It somehow felt a compelling part of the historical moment that I wanted to bear witness to. My father would have loved the art of it as well and I missed him, and that was somehow wrapped up in it, too. My little sister and I were with him on the plaza in Santa Fe when he fell in love with a shadowbox turquoise necklace and spent a long time talking to the artist about how her creation had come to be and about her work; he’d bought it for Mom, just like his dad had once picked out a large turquoise and a setting type and had watched another Navajo artist create a ring to surprise Dad’s mother.

That ring was big. It was almost ostentatious. And I treasure it. I’m the granddaughter who got to inherit it.

And so, wondering which granddaughter’s this would someday be, I bought that gerdan in July, back when there was only one, and I’ve written here of the long international back-and-forth wanderings that thing has been taken along on ever since.

My longtime mailman rang the doorbell Friday and I said quite gladly, You’re back!

He enjoyed that.

He’d been away when the post office had been unable to figure out where to send that gerdan. I knew he wouldn’t have had a problem with it.

Meantime, Oleksandra had been avidly following that tracking every day, even though for me it hasn’t changed since September 17.  She sent me a note a couple of days ago to let me know what the American postal service hadn’t been able to say: it had arrived back in Kiev! She was going to go retrieve it, repackage, and re-send it. She had made another two of those necklaces anyway even though I had told her that if it never showed up to please consider it a donation and not to worry about it.

But she was determined, and luck turned her way, and so, one way or another, there are strung-glass sunflowers coming my way shortly. Maybe it will spend the usual month or two waiting in Kiev to leave the country again; maybe it won’t.

And here’s where part of me can’t say/part of me can’t not say it so I’m just going to put it out there:

I was woken up very early this morning, October 3, by a dream that stayed vivid and still is, which is not a usual thing for me: that, however long it might take this time, I was once again at my front door opening it to our longtime guy and he was handing me a package. It was, it was my long-hoped-for necklace from Oleksandra, my personal connection to a family with a loved one defending their country there.

And as he handed me that package from Ukraine it totally capped off the day for both of us as we found out that we had both heard the news:

The war had ended that day.

Ukraine had won.

I know that all the fiercely wanting it to be so does not make it so. I know a dream does not require reality to bend to it. And yet the wild irrational hope holds on hard and it utterly refuses to let go, and all I can do is pray hard in grief and love and longing.

All I can say is, we shall see.

And that I wish that there could be overnight delivery on that thing.

Well huh. Colourmart’s cardboard cones are supposed to weigh 36 grams. I think I have enough yarn left over that I could have done one row more if I’d been willing to risk it, but I wasn’t. I did have another cone but I couldn’t absolutely guarantee the match on the color.

Then I weighed the cone out of curiosity to see how close I’d come.

The scale said 32.

The next step is to scour it in hot water to get the mill oils out. It will bloom and fill out and look prettier and brighten up and lay flatter and once that silicon coating is gone, it will be so very very soft.

It’s not perfect but you know what? I like it.

57×45″. It is amazing how much progress you can make when you’re sitting for two-hour stints watching LDS General Conference, and Sunday, at 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. Pacific, I get to again–and will clearly finish it, assuming my hands hold up.

The middle tree’s a bit distorted here. There’s a raptor needing one more row to the left above it.

I really, really want a decent daytime photo.

50/50 cashmere/cotton. I have roughly 40 grams left of the original 900 on the cone and I think I’ll make it without having to use any of the next one.

Berkeley Breathed, the guy who wrote Bloom County and does again intermittently on Facebook, posted a video recently of him walking out his front door as noted by his security video and later watched by his horrified wife.

Either that young western diamondback rattlesnake pulled back really fast–or (as it appears) he kicked it in the head and walked on, completely oblivious as it recoiled fast. From there, the camera shows the snake gathering itself up and moving forward again after a moment, jaws very wide this time and tongue flicking, going across the front of his doorway and beyond.

While you see some of the guy’s shadow as he’s presumably getting in his car having no idea how close he just came.

So of course that was the first thing that came to mind when the kids up north sent a picture of their five and three year olds staring at the 18″ or so long snake slithering across the pathway right in front of them.

It was pretty.

Their parents let them respectfully hold still and observe this benign new bit of nature–but told them that if they were at their grandparents’ houses (Arizona/CA) and saw one, it might not be the same kind and they were to move away from it right away.

Love nature first of all, a healthy respect for what it could do after that. I was so proud of them all.

(And here I’d thought the skunk on our doormat had really been something.)

I went looking for a pumpkin variant on the almond flour muffin theme and played with a recipe I found at Iheartvegetables.com. (Note that there’s 1/3 c more almond flour from when I first played with this last September.)

My updated recipe as of December 2022:

Bowl 1: 1 2/3 c almond flour, 1 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, 1 tsp cinnamon. (Yes her baking soda might have made it lighter. This is why I will never ever put it in, much though I still love that old college roommate, and the texture was quite light just the same.)

Bowl 2: melt 3 tbl butter in a glass measuring cup–almond oil works fine–swish it around, pour it into the now-empty third-cup measuring cup you used on the almond flour, add a maybe generous 1/4 honey to the butter-coated glass one: it makes it so much easier to get all the honey out. Beat together 2/3 c canned plain pumpkin, 2 eggs, the butter, and a tsp vanilla, then add to the almond flour mixture.

Note that if your honey is crystallized go ahead and use it anyway, just beat well.

Twelve muffins. Sprinkle crunchy sugar on top. I used the maple sugar that had been sitting in the cupboard for two years needing to be needed and it was a superb choice. Highly recommended. (Tripping and spilling batter like I did the first time these went into the oven, not so recommended.)

Bake at 350 with paper liners for 22-23 minutes.

These do not have to be put in containers to keep overnight, and the texture improves markedly when fully cool vs first coming out of the oven–they hold together better.

My mail got hacked last week and yonder computer nerd worked on it briefly and all seemed well–except that I’ve found that at random times it will both say that I responded to a message and that it got sent while telling me it did not, in fact, send it. I can only guess. So if you’ve sent me anything and I haven’t answered, please know that I did but I can’t tell if it got anywhere and trying twice made no difference–and yet at other times everything’s perfectly normal. We’ll get this fixed, and sorry, meantime.

Back to the trip.

Sunday, Spencer wanted to play with yarn, too, so while Maddy was putting every bit of her concentration into her stitches, he kept batting her ball around.

Maybe we should tell him this is not, in fact, how you make socks.

I looked at him with blue yarn all over the floor and pronounced to his sister with a grin, Spencer is a cat.

She enjoyed that very much: it is always fun to pretend to be a cat. But she was too busy to join in just then.

I remembered then that while getting ready for the trip I had come across a very small ball of turquoise Rios in the bottom of my purse that must have fallen out from the carry-around project previous to the one that I didn’t know would be important on our flight in a few hours. So. It was too small to worry about and just enough yards to tangle with to his heart’s delight. It was the same color and yarn as the baby blanket I had made four years earlier for–you guessed it–Spencer.

And so he could have his own, truly his own, to play with to his heart’s content. (While keeping a close eye on him just to be sure.)

I cast on five stitches of Malabrigo Mecha for Maddy, a soft thick wool, and did the first row to get it started.

Random draping back loops and added and missing stitches later, she had herself a little rectangle (mostly) and asked me, But what do we DO with it? Knitting clearly made practical things as well as beautiful and she wanted to be part of that, too.

I asked her to let me add a little to it, and I doubled its length with some nice steady stockinette stitch and then showed it to her doubled over.

She instantly figured out we had a finger puppet there, and she was right! So I got out a yarn needle and sewed up the sides for her.

She is very proud of her finger puppet and how it lets her show off her knitting.

I debated dubbing it the Cookie Monster but quietly decided that was up to her; a seven year old might not want to be associated with toddler motifs.

Actually, it kind of looks like Her–now His–Majesty’s guards with the bear hats thing going on, only in blue.

We’re going to take a detour on the story here to go to the ringing of the doorbell today.

I had ordered a dress two months ago for my high school reunion, which was to be next weekend–and which got cancelled last week because not enough people had RSVP’d. Oh well.

Tracking said it had arrived in town Friday; the woman in Ukraine who’d been doing some special tailoring had gotten it out in time for that event–

–but once again, there was no mention of when it might actually be delivered, just where it was. Right in town. Going nowhere. After my mail was held over the weekend, this morning’s Informed Delivery notification said no packages today nor soon on the way. Great, I thought, here we go again.

I opened the door to find the new mailman. He asked me my name. He asked me my address, which confused me, I mean, you’re right here, right. He asked if I knew Juliaa, looking briefly at the yellow puffy package.

Yes, from Ukraine, I answered, I’m expecting a package from there, (with my vyshyvanka silently backing me up that that’s something I do.)

He asked again just to make sure. I said Juliaa… Plumarii? That was her business’s name–which was not on there. But I told him it was a dress.

And then he explained why. I didn’t see till later that the Contents box on the label said Embroidered Dress. I’d clinched it for him.

Because, again, the street address had been bungled, with the first of the three numbers gone missing but at least this time it had the other two. He was very proud of himself that he had worked out that this was mine and clearly relieved at the certainty with which he could say that now because it could be awful if it turned out he’d been wrong. There did used to be another Hyde family at the far end of this street. He wasn’t about to risk handing something international and important to the wrong person and he was new on this route and didn’t know anybody yet.

I thought, what is it with Etsy and this street addresses thing? Is it the Cyrillic alphabet/Ukrainian translation? That’s two vendors now. I thanked him profusely for having gotten it to me.

We probably both knew in that moment about the fuss I’d raised over the package that is still listed as “in transit” on its way back to Ukraine that I’d tried so hard to retrieve first. The Post Office had sent me a survey afterwards and I’d wondered what effect my responses would have on our guy, because the lowest person in the pecking order always takes the worst heat whether it’s deserved or not. So I’d tried not to yell, but, This Was Not Okay.

I need to make sure they hear that I’m so happy at what he did for me this time.

I thanked him again as he left.

It came. It had gotten through. He’d gone the extra mile.

And the dress, oh, the dress: it’s perfect. All of it is. The color, the fit, the quality of the fabric and the work. I’d requested it be of a piece with no slit at the neckline and no opening above the knees like so many of the traditional ones do. (I fall a lot and ya gotta maintain at least some dignity.) They did all that, and the embroidery is on both sides of the seam, going all the way up to the closed embroidered crewneck rather than how it is in the picture. It’s exactly how I’d wanted it to be and the whole thing is just glorious. I will love it for years to come.

The motifs, Juliaa had told me, are representative of the bounty of the harvest.

It was too big for a selfie so Richard helpfully tried, but when someone is 15″ taller and looking down, even while trying to crouch down his photos still made my head look like a swollen basketball and maybe I’ll ask a friend so you can see it. Or we can try again when his back is feeling a little better.

Speaking of which. We did have such a great time playing with the kids on that trip.

Just walked in the door, haven’t checked my messages yet, just a quick note before we collapse.

It’s the weekend before Spencer’s fourth birthday and we flew to go celebrate with the grands there.

Taking a cowl project out of my purse to get a few stitches in, I found myself with my seven year old granddaughter asking if she could work on it. More on that later. She first asked me who it was for, and I told her, I don’t know, as I thought of the times I’d worked on it during knitting zoom meetings and a doctor’s waiting room with that same question in mind.

Still not done, and it was still that grayish blue from stash that just didn’t do it for me so it had been in no hurry. I’d started it to try to make that yarn find its rightful home at long last. Someone out there would love it if I used it.

I had, as it turned out, enough time on the plane and enough yarn on the first of my two balls (I think it was shade 3251 there) to do two last repeats and that was all it needed.

The plane did some descending. I was casting off.

The plane went lower still, though the view out the window showed no signs of city lights yet.

I used the tip of the needle to work the yarn ends in as if I were knitting stitches into existing edge ones. Finally, I left little dangly ends that needed to be trimmed off because enough already, and I called it done with less than five minutes to spare. We touched down.

I eyed that ball band on that second ball: Plymouth Solstice, baby alpaca/extra fine merino/yak, squishy and soft.

I told myself, don’t be dumb: don’t save the ball band for some possible future project and recipient when you have one right in front of you that you won’t have time to say a word to about anything. It says hand wash only as well as what it’s made of and she needs to have that information and I don’t have pen nor paper. So I did, I took the band from the one and wrapped it around the new cowl by way of introducing her to it.

We were getting our stuff from the overhead bins, just steps from the front of the plane–and she’d vanished. Even just saying, Where is she? while looking to left and then right was holding up the long line behind me.

Turns out the tall male flight attendant was blocking the view. She looked up at my question and in that moment we saw each other, and I pressed it into the hands of this older black flight attendant who’d put on a good face to the passengers the whole flight, but up at the front, had looked like she just might cry in spite of herself at any moment. She needed someone who understood her situation, whatever it was. She needed a hug.

I could do none of that in the time that I had but I needed to do what I could.

I wanted to say, Thank you for helping to make it so that we could go play with our grandchildren this weekend. I wanted to say, this is how you take care of it, tepid soapy water in a sink/as little movement to the water as possible/the lace will stretch out once it’s wet, that’s normal. I wanted to say, snip off those ends it’s okay sorry for leaving those/no scissors. I wanted to say, I am with you all the way wherever you are and whatever it is.

Instead she simply got my eyes meeting hers as she exclaimed in disbelief, having watched part of this coming to be in my hands those past 80 minutes, “For me??!”

(Anybody want that second skein, just let me know. No band, sorry/not sorry at all.)

And now I know why the kids had a last-minute change of schedule not of their making that meant that we changed our schedule to a flight an hour earlier than had been planned. Change fee $0 was a nice touch to top off how that worked out. Thank you, Southwest.

We have a quite elderly widow in our ward at church, probably the oldest person there. She’s lived in her house with the big back yard and tall trees and winding creek up near the hills for most of her long life.

Someone had an idea that I want to pass along: that her friends who could should bring themselves a sandwich and gather at her house for lunch on Fridays, clean up afterwards to make sure she doesn’t have to do any work to have us come, and give her company and laughter while being sets of eyes looking out for her for the sakes of both her and her children across the country.

We had such a good time today.