This is the link to the webcam at Nepenthe: the beautiful resort in Big Sur (scroll down a bit to see a collage on the left of days’ worth of views) founded by Kaffe Fassett’s father.  Discovering Kaffe’s “Glorious Knits” book is what helped bring me back to knitting nonstop eighteen years ago.  I feel I owe the man, and I have met him several times at Uncommon Threads booksignings: he is warm and gregarious as well as infinitely creative.

The SJ Merc today says that Kirk Gafill, grandson of the founder, his brother, and four others are refusing to evacuate to try to save Nepenthe.  They have their fire-retardent gel at the ready.  All those affected are in my prayers.

Happy Fourth of July!

Something I learned in spinning surprised me: you could fill up a bobbin, fill up a second bobbin, and then when plying the two together, get most of the yarn of both of those onto a third bobbin before you ran out of space.  Shouldn’t it be just half, twice?  Shouldn’t one full bobbin plus one full bobbin make two full plied bobbins? But no, over and over I would get most of the way through the singles as I plied: the plied yarn was denser, but it didn’t take up that much more space. I got really good at spinning just enough of the singles–a little more than 2/3–to fill the plied bobbin just to the tippy top.

When I’m joining yarns from different skeins together these days, I apply some of what I learned from that.  If it’s a multi-plied yarn, I break off a few inches of half the plies (one if it’s a three-ply), knot the two strands just at the points where I’ve thinned them down, and then wind each thinned-down yarn end tightly around the full thickness of the strand I’m attaching it to, both directions.  The tip of my needle is pointing towards where the doubled-up length is after I’ve done this.  You can see in this picture at the bottom of the smooth loop to the right the slight bulge where the knot is–not the knot itself, but the joining strands arcing slightly away from it right at the knot.  But that disappears into the knitting.  I do dampen that doubled area and rub it vigorously between my hands to help it felt together if it’s not a superwash yarn.

I know. Knots are Not Done.  But I’ve heard too many stories over the years of people’s knitting coming apart at the skein seams in the wash, and I refuse to go there.  How tightly you tie the knot affects how it feels in the finished garment or whether its presence is even discernible, and I am careful not to overdo it.

I like this shawl. I’m not quite entirely sure yet it’s the one.  Purlescence is closed this week for the LYSOs’ vacation, and when they open Monday, I’m going to go put this one next to the Casbah one of mine I loaned them for display.  If the Casbah feels more right when I see it, that will be the one going off in the mail to Marc’s wife.   (Nathania, Sandy, Chloe–I’ll knit you another one.  Bring on the Handmaiden.)  But I’m finishing this one up quickly so as to have a good choice.

Eleven years ago, our friend Conway told me that one of his sons and his family had been visiting and were just going out the door for the airport to leave when his son, a doctor, looked at him and asked him what was wrong.

Conway told me he’d answered that he was fine, saying, you don’t want to miss your plane, but that his son went, No, you’re not. And over his father’s objections he’d called an ambulance and thus had saved his father’s life from that heart attack.  Conway was bursting with love, pride, and gratitude as he told me this.

A month ago.  We arrived at the Loews Hotel on Coronado Island for our son’s wedding, started to unpack, and it was time to go meet up with Kim’s family somewhere around the lobby and then head over to the rehearsal dinner.  At the foot of the grand spiral staircase, I saw a few people I didn’t know and Kim a bit away, talking to someone.  I approached a 40-something man and asked, “You must be Kim’s uncle.”  I figured he would either think I was crazy, or, I was right.

The man smiled broadly and said indeed he was.  He was Kim’s Uncle Marc, Conway’s son who is a doctor.  I liked him immediately.

His brain tumor surgery Tuesday has had complications.  We wait to hear.  I had his age and kids’  mixed with his younger brother’s, though, yesterday.

I may not know him well, but what he didn’t know when we met in May was that I have been grateful to him for eleven years for dropping everything on the spot and giving his dad a little more time on this earth for those who loved him.

And the knitting for Marc’s wife continues.  It’s what I can do.

Suddenly there’s so much to process in a hurricane all at once.

A new relative we just added into the extended family just found out he has a malignant brain tumor. Metastasized.  He has young children.

A young man my son met through their internships in DC turns out today to be Marc, the son of a friend whose husband was killed in an accident just after they moved away from here back when Marc was in I think kindergarten.  I lost touch with his widowed mom when she moved the second or third time and have wanted for years to get a chance to reach out again and talk to her.

My son called in great excitement to tell me, not waiting for me to get to my email for him to share the news.  Marc emailed just now that his mom was just as excited as I am at our all finding each other again.  Synchronicity is wonderful stuff.  And he mentioned something to me about his wife–while I’m struggling to picture the little boy as the grown man.  Wow.

The day his family moved away, a number of us at the young-child stage got together at their apartment on Stanford campus, where Bryant, his dad, had just finished his PhD, to box and scrub and watch kids and help out.  Anything to lessen the pain of their moving.  Bryant bought us all pizza at the end of the day, a rare luxury for us all, and we sat or stood under the scrawny pine trees just outside their door they were about to close for the last time, reveling in the friendship with the poignancy of loss that they were leaving.  How much Bryant was going to, just a few months later, we could never have known.

When Bryant died–he was a pedestrian, struck by a passing car–there was a tremendous need here to do something.  We their friends here got together with one person setting up a video camera, and shared our stories of their father’s kindnesses from people the boys would likely not even remember when they grew up.  So that they had something to remember Bryant by, so they would know the kind of man he was, so they would have his good image to live up to.

So their father would be real to them.  Compassionate and human.

Marc marveled that I remembered his brother’s broken leg. I marveled that he remembered any of us at all. But he did.  But then…  Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised.

Get out the video camera, take out the tape recorders.  Write up questions to ask.  Get the older folks talking about back in the day.  Their children and great great grandchildren will cherish every word.

Meantime, I’ve definitely got some knitting to do.

I have an ancient curling iron that long ago lost its on button.  I am not a fan of the old gray plastic department-store-type knitting needles, so it gave me a way to put an unloved dpn to good use–in ten years of poking it into the on switch, I’ve never bothered to replace the iron.

The TSA inspectors must have dropped it out of the suitcase and the flying public is now safe from my deadly weapon.  I had to go looking for one of its mates in the Unloved Needles case.  And found–my old casein needles!

I’ve always thought these were pretty. I wonder, though, who ever thought that milk protein, of all things, would be good for knitting with.  There are urban legends of them melting horribly into one’s knitting in hot cars, but I don’t know.

I picked them up just now, curious.  The 9″ set I bought way back when turned out to be too long for comfortably knitting socks, so they’ve never really been used.  I pressed into them and then raised my thumbs and they came up partway before detaching from my skin and falling back down.  Hmm. Might be good for when you need the needles to hold onto a silky, slippery yarn.  Dunno.

I wonder what the strangest needles and uses for needles others have encountered are.

I don’t wonder what the strangest knitting material I’ve ever heard of is: that would be the salmon skins knitted into a jacket that won a prize at a World’s Fair in the early 1900’s.  Hmm, thought I read about that in “No Idle Hands,” but it’s not in the index.  Googling for a reference led me to these.  (No, those are not leather.  Not in the traditional sense, anyway.)

Should I ever buy one, I’ll keep my casein needles out of it.  Just in case.

Jessie, our niece, dancing joyfully with her nieces, Hannah and Jane.

Jane in her daddy’s arms afterwards.

One very small boy got into the spirit of the occasion by taking his mommy flowers: and since living ones are always better, he scooped the whole thing out of the ground, rootball and all, ever so carefully, when nobody was quite looking at the right moment–little ones move fast–and brought them to her, two footsteps away. This picture was taken right after they replanted it together while I laughed and snapped his picture.

The funny part was when other guests introduced themselves and asked if we were there on the Hyde side or the Williams. Uh, yes, um, wait, let me explain… The groom’s last name was the same as the bride’s mother’s maiden name (no relation, though). And his mother’s first name and her late mother’s first name were nearly the same. (Think Kara and Karen, Laura and Laurie, Janet and Janice–that sort of thing). So it took some clarifying.

Jessie and her new husband at the end of the reception, ready now for Happily Ever After.

They are moving to our area when they get back from their honeymoon, so we’ll get to see them often, and I can’t wait!

Jetblue does that flight once a day. Yesterday’s was cancelled. We’d heard there were delays due to smoke, and yesterday’s had been delayed so far into the night that Jetblue bagged it.

I was really afraid, with my asthma, of coming home to what we would find with all those new fires. So just picture my excitement, after all that worry, as we drove down the freeway: look! You can see the lights on the hills! Look! You can see the Oracle tower clearly! LOOK! It’s CLEAR!!!

Richard, pleased, said the seabreeze was blowing a good one tonight. And all was right with my world.

As we got further south, the sky started to muck up again, but that’s okay; I can handle it now. I saw that air further north. Maybe tomorrow I go hang out at Creative Hands yarn store (are they open Mondays?) in Belmont. How often will I ever get to claim this about a LYS: it’s for my health.

Jessie’s wedding was wonderful. The skies back home in northern California, at 1100 fires now, not so much. There’s a huge temptation not to get on the return flight in a few hours.

And then yesterday, driving across the foothills of Salt Lake City, one could see the smoke plume and the fire from clear across the valley: exploding propane tanks inside a burning building way out in the industrial area. Alright, alright, I’ll get on the plane–can’t run away from it, can I?

It sits there, looking so innocent. Like a kid going who, me?

Awhile back, my phone rang in the middle of the night. Not, with my ears out and on the headboard, that I noticed. And my husband can snooze through anything. We were pretty horrified at the message we discovered on our answering machine in the morning: “Is there something really wrong over there, or can you shut that thing off? My son’s family and I are leaving for Thailand at 3:30 am, and we really want to get some sleep first if possible.”

Which was far nicer than what I would have wanted to say had I been them. Sometimes we don’t deserve our good neighbors.

Our ‘00 Chrysler minivan, or, for those teens-learning-to-drive years, the dentmobile, has a psychotic alarm system that maybe four times in its life now has randomly gone off of its own accord, honking and braying and kicking up its lights. How To Win Friends And Influence People. Not. Overcast, drizzly days have seemed more likely to set it off, but with the rarity of the event that might be just random attribution, akin to what Californians call “earthquake weather” (ie unseasonable warmth at a cool time of year, based on which past earthquake I have yet to figure out, but the Oct ‘89 7.1 Loma Prieta got lots of comments of, well, it WAS earthquake weather…) Ie, it could be that drizzly overcast was simply what the weather was, the days that that van did its Heavy Metal act.

That story wasn’t finished, though; our neighbor kept not coming home from that trip, and we around her started calling each other: have you heard? No, you? It was a month after that call that I happened to step outside to see if the mail had come yet, just at the moment S stepped out of a car dropping her off at home. She saw me, I walked over to ask how the visit with the grandkids had gone, and she threw her arms around me and bawled.

They had been going to take the grandkids to the beach that one day. In Phuket. Somehow things fell apart and they just didn’t get there–which meant, when the tsunami hit, they were safe. They spent the next month visiting survivors they knew in the hospital, one of whom had seen her sweetheart pulled away from her, running relief supplies, driving the trucks, being keenly needed every single moment.

And now she was coming home to a quiet house in a quiet neighborhood where nobody knew. And I happened to step into sight at exactly the moment she most needed, offering her a transition to home and a shoulder to cry on.

Last night, I was making some of what is basically strawberry pie filling, for spooning onto all kinds of things to make them taste good. Strawberries pureed with a little sugar and a little cornstarch. Amount of cornstarch depends on number and runniness of the berries, and sometimes I get the equation right for it to set, but if I don’t, well, hey. Nuke for long enough to boil one minute or maybe more, but not less. Add juice of one Meyer lemon if you happen to have a tree handy.

Someone was asking me about new Crohn’s meds. That’s mine. It does seem to help.

I needed a lemon. I walked outside, thinking, man is it dark out here! All the ash in the sky from all the fires–842 in California at last count I heard–and all our usual city-lights-nightsky was smudged out. It looked very overcast. It was a bit strange out there.

The puree took all of two minutes to prepare, and into the microwave you go. As it cooked, it hit me:

Go disable the alarm on that car tonight.

I hadn’t thought of that thing in months. How do you even do that, given that it sets automatically? None of us remembered. I was going to have to look it up in the owner’s manual. A bit of a pain.

Compared to what it did that one time?! Go disable that alarm. Remember how S’s whole trip started off.

I’m going! And I did.

Hopefully, my neighbors will never know what didn’t hit them. But it stopped me and made me realize, you know? It’s been awhile since I made a contribution to Doctors Without Borders. I need to fix that.

We could use a little of the drizzly to go with our smoke about now. Nothing I can do about that. But there is something major I CAN do some small thing about. And I lay in bed last night, marveling at how the connections came to be for me. A nudge to go make sure my beeping car stays quiet.

A nudge to make the world a more gentle place.

(With thanks to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee for her Knitters Without Borders work for Doctors Without Borders.)

For Jessie and Jeremy. The picture refused to shrink and felt in the Adobe wash, so I had to cut it with the Picasa scissors. The front edges of the shawl are folded back on themselves.

Thank you to those who emailed: my Crohn’s is settling back down like we told it to, and in time for their wedding, too. Isn’t it nice to have an obedient disease like that?

Specs: Monterey pattern using Blue Sky Alpacas Alpaca Silk, a heavier yarn than used in the original, so I swapped out the pattern and used the Constance pattern from “Wrapped in Comfort” as a template to get a smaller stitch count. Size 10 US (6mm) needles, four skeins, using 14 g of the fourth 50g skein.

Wait, Karin, here’s another lesson for you. I put down the hairdryer and went and blogged all that, came back in the room awhile later, and I’m not quite sure what the time lapse was, and it was still morning, but.

Let me say first in my defense that I am hearing impaired, that I am normally very careful because I happen to know that about me; there was a fan going on in the background that was hard to hear over. When I checked the shawl again after my blogging, it was hey! Bone dry now! Cool!

Maybe cool wasn’t the word. The shawl’s temperature was slightly warm. Wait a minute…I went to check the hairdryer, and burning my hand, dropped it fast. I unplugged it immediately as I realized I’d left it on the lowest setting that whole time rather than clicking it all the way to off, that I hadn’t been able to hear it was still going. The air being blown was only barely warming–no problem to the shawl. But the motor was well overheated.

Um. Oops.

But that first semi-blocking gave me the information I needed to know about how much it would stretch out, and it talked me into knitting another repeat of the pattern, so I’m glad I did it.

Risking burning down the house, not so much.

The work is done, the shawl is blocking, none the worse for any of that, I checked it this morning and even all spread out like that, the thing was still damp.

I glanced a thought towards the hairdryer, and thought, not on your life.

I have occasionally mentioned here and on the knitting lists my idea that if you want to get an idea of how your crumpled tin foil-y-looking stuff will look like in real life once your lace project is done, or if you simply want to like it better or show it off better while working on it, rinse it gently in tepid water, still on the needles, and lay it out to dry overnight to let the stitches settle into their natural patterns.

So, knowing this was probably a dumb move, I did that last night. With about 300 stitches of a thicker-than-my-usual yarn on one not terribly long circular needle (knowing full well I should be using two or one unusually long one), all bunched up. Okay, you can see the outcome already, and so could I, but I really really needed to know how long this was getting to be, having never put that yarn with that pattern before and knowing that some silk yarns have a tendency to stretch out when wet. The overall weight of the shawl affects the hang of it more than you could learn from a small swatch, which is one excuse for why of course I didn’t swatch it; the other being, I already knew it would fit when I was done, so hey. But I did need to know that length now.

Which is why I winced but took the hairdryer to it this morning. No, it’s not as long as I thought, no, I’m not done after all, and I do need to finish it today. No, I do not recommend potentially shrinking your shawl with a hairdryer, so I set it on low in penitence. Before I turned it up in impatience.

1. A bird’s-foot view:

Lene posted a photo she took of bird tracks that were probably made by pigeons, and it instantly hit me that if you turned them towards you and drew a circle around them, you had the Peace symbol. The Dove of Peace–I wondered, whoever drew the original, was that their inspiration? So I googled, found this, and have to think they did not make that connection. But it’s fascinating how well the two symbols converge.

2. Catapulted:

I was reading reviews of the Shake Awake, a silent alarm clock to put under one’s pillow, and had to laugh at one person’s descriptions of why it was such an improvement for her sound-sleeper hearing-impaired son: she said that before that, they’d had to throw the cat at him every morning to get him to finally stir.

3. Toucans help too:

I had a cardiology appointment this week, and if ever a doctor is likely to be suddenly interrupted and delayed, it’s a heart specialist. (It was just a follow-up to verify that yes, I’m fine there, my cardiac cough went away when that lupus flare did this past winter.) Definitely a bring-your-knitting appointment. As I waited, a very well-dressed elderly woman was wheeled into the waiting room by her attendant, who caught my eye, nodded at my stitches, and silently smiled at me.

The old one in her string of pearls and silk sat there in her wheelchair looking terribly bored and unhappy; it took me awhile to glance down from my knitting and notice that her lower legs were scabbed over in signs of old sores, many of them. Her shoes were perfect but her skin gave her away. She avoided eye contact. I noticed her attendant had pearl earrings on too, and I thought, you’re both generous souls, then; good for you.

I thought about it, then searched in my purse, looking for a particularly bright and cheerful one. And intricate. I wanted intricate. Something particularly nicely made. I found one, a toucan-looking bird, and just as the nurse opened the door and called my name, I reached across the small aisle between the seats and offered the old woman the finger puppet. A child’s toy? But an adult’s delight as well in the skill and pride that someone, somewhere in Peru had put into creating the piece.

The old woman’s face totally lit up in surprise and delight, and behind her, her attendant’s did too. So did the nurse’s. I didn’t want to delay the office by stopping to describe where I get those from, that no, I didn’t knit it, so as the door closed behind us going down the hallway, I mentioned to the nurse. I figured, if the patient wanted to talk to her about it, she could tell her herself. If they had time. The nurse’s call, not mine; the important part had already happened.

It’s hard to be old and lonely. Saying to somebody that they are noticed, even just in a small moment, can make a world of difference to them, and the rest of us too. It was so easy to do.

4. Now she sees it:

My daughter had an eye doctor appointment and I don’t even remember why I came with and waited for her, but I brought my knitting and did. A woman, I’m guessing Chinese, was walking past, saw the work in my hands, and stopped on the spot and came over and sat down next to me. It is amazing what you can convey with pantomime: she had never seen circular needles before. I demonstrated how you use them just like straights, and that no, the circular shawl I was knitting wasn’t a closed circle, it was back and forth; I pulled out my book and showed her how it would look finished. Oh! Then she wanted to know how to do lace. I taught her on the spot. Ssk, slants this way, k2tog, slants that, purl into a yarnover this way. By the time I left, she had it and she was thrilled. I couldn’t ask her how long she’d been knitting, I couldn’t ask her anything not communicated with waving hands and needles. But there is a universal joy in sharing knowledge and in learning how to do something new. I can just picture her running to me, wherever she is now, with her needles in hand to show me what she’s making now.

5. It’s all your fault:

And if you bought ME a Shake Awake, this being California, I’d probably need that cardiologist, thinking the San Andreas was going off bigtime.

(Say that fast. Sorry, couldn’t resist the chance for a bad pun.)

Slipping back towards the bad old days: I made it through about a half hour at Purlescence last night. Someone brought in their dinner and I had to move quickly away before my stomach did violence to the surroundings from the smell of the food. My daughter, who’d dropped me off and gone to the nearby library, was hovering from a few blocks away and texted me that I probably wanted to go home now?

So I came home and collapsed. But not till I’d had a conversation with a fellow knitting Crohn’s patient about a new drug approved last month. There is? Really? Yay!

Hopefully, though, give this a few days and it’ll settle down on its own.

Meantime, Michelle had gone and looked up bluejays: they stay in pairs even when it’s not nesting season (I often see two) and they’re loud–until you get near their nest. Then they get quiet so as not to attract undue attention.

Oh goodness. And I’d had that thing squawk at me across the yard and finally get quiet near the apple tree after I flicked the hose towards it. I don’t think the water even reached it, but suddenly I wanted to go apologize to the baby birds. I will be the one who’s more respectful now (and curious as to where the nest is–I didn’t see it.)

To change the subject: when my husband and I got married, my parents were so happy and so glowing, you’d think they were the ones getting married! I saw the love mixed with the difference between being young and in love and middle-aged and in love, and told Richard I looked forward to the day when we too would have the time, experience, and maturity behind us like they had. I wanted to be them when I grew up.

And here, a generation later, I think we’ve done okay, and here we are looking at two of our own kids and their spouses with love and gratitude ourselves.

I didn’t take Jessie’s shawl to Purlescence. I figured it was too complicated to be an on-the-go project, especially when I was still at the stage of starting the main pattern and trying to keep track of the stitch count. After I got home, I picked it up and wondered if my fried brain could make sense of those jellyfish, Barbara Walker’s Showers pattern turned upside down.

And you know what? To my surprise, my laceknitting had become middle-aged. No angst, no worries, just do it. Why had I thought this was hard? Knowing which way to wrap the yarnover when the next stitch is a knit or purl is as natural now as breathing. Knowing what to do coming up to a double yarnover is like remembering that the green light means go. The purl through back loops of three stitches at once is a meandering knit along a beautiful country road.

I’ve always loved this pattern, and now we’re old friends, too.

Knitpicks.com has all their books on sale, 40% off; they’ve also been sponsoring a “Wrapped in Comfort” knitalong where I’ve been checking in to see if anyone needs any questions answered. Thought I’d mention.

Although, if you’d like a signed and inscribed copy, Purlescence is where to go.