CVS auto-texted that they had his meds ready to go.

They did not even have one of them on the premises yet, and told me to come back between three and four. And you know that means come at the later end of that. Rush hour. Oh fun.

Four-thirty: the lead pharmacist saw me come back in and went uh oh and directed staff towards opening boxes. One was above waist high. Finally, found it! She apologized that I’d have to wait while she filled the prescription.

No problem. Yay for the chair. I was about to start the decreases on a hat.

Problem: the second circ I’d thrown in was both a size too large and had a gouge in the wood that refused to let stitches move past it. Well that’s a bug.

Got the med finally, got out, decided to stop by Trader Joe’s to get Richard’s favorite mini ice cream cones. Except by then it was after five and the place was jammed.

There was a woman, late 70s? Eighty? She had the biggest scowl on her face and was holding a basket sideways as if to get people out of her way.

There were two young petite Asian women talking and they didn’t notice her fast enough. She rammed them with it and pretended not to have so much as seen them, much less any apology. I was horrified. Yeah, I thought, and I bet I know who you voted for for President, lady.

There was a tall Asian man at the other end of the aisle who saw her do that and was likewise horrified and he was still angry when I tried to smile at him a minute or two later because his baby of about 15 months was adorable.

Understandable.

Where the check out lines form a sort of W near the door, I got the middle line and a dad was close by in the one next to me with his toddler. Out came a finger puppet. Then the tall Asian guy appeared on the other side of me, and he was paying attention to his little one and not being mad anymore. Out came another finger puppet with another “Happy Birthday!” and the little ones could see each other with theirs and this was great.

Then a woman I hadn’t seen previously finally caught up to her husband, pushing a second cart with their older toddler.

She was with the tall Asian guy.

The clerks were slammed, mine was working as fast as she could (really fast, I was impressed) but looked like all she wanted was a place to just sit down and breathe a moment.

I found a little wooly giraffe for the woman’s little girl.

Now we had a club going. The clerk found her second wind, loving this. People farther back in the lines were all smiles. My own day was rescued.

And as the couple walked out the door with me, the woman asked, Did you make them?

I buy them from Peru, I told her. But they are handmade.

Their little girl waved goodbye as we got in our cars. Her mommy and daddy had had her say thank you but she wanted to do it of herself as well.

Summer, college town, new people moving in, always a new medical intern or two. (Being sick at a teaching hospital in July means the new ones haven’t yet had time to get a little experience, but what I saw years ago from the patient side of it is that they are very very earnest about it and trying.)

So: to welcome everybody and help them get to know people, it was announced at church that there would be a picnic in the park next week. Potluck. With a pet parade. There’ll be a softball game that anybody can come and go as they wish, any age; last time, they said, we had a four year old–and Hank!

A bunch of people laughed.

I noticed that some clearly wished they were in on whatever that was all about, so I raised my hand and said, For those who are new: Hank is 95.

A four-year-old playing ball on a great great grandpa’s team: the rest of the room laughed for sheer joy at that mental image.

And, I have no doubt, at being noticed and included, too.

It was a good start.

Alright! Twenty-five hundred and eight stitches later, the raptor is finished, and from here on out it’s plain stockinette sky and seed stitch edging with a minor game of yarn chicken and this will be done!

I’m working doubled from two cones that I think were 600 and 900 grams and I can always break off the rest of the 900, wind it in halves, and work from there. But I don’t wanna, so we’ll see if that smaller cone makes it through.

There are general knitting rules like, go down two needle sizes for ribbing edges, that cable work averages a third more yarn to do than stockinette (which is one reason cabled commercial knitwear usually weighs and costs more), and when you’re picking stitches up the side of a piece to work a perpendicular edging you work two out of every three side stitches unless you actually want the ripply edge one of my kids’ afghans got years ago.

If there’s a guideline for yarn usage for seed stitch vs plain, you’d think I’d know it by now. Clearly the backing-and-forthing of the seed stitch will take more.

But if anyone wants to hazard a guess how much so, I’d love to hear it. Thanks!

Clara Parkes on her Substack today asked, if you were to make a sign to welcome people in here, what would it say? A fact? Something humorous? Encouragement, wisdom, suggestions. What would it be?

It took me instantly back to a moment when I was at the point of death and in no way sure which way it would end up. But what I felt!

There was also this: that it was required of me now, that it was more important than there could ever be the words for, that every person I ever encountered after that should feel that, too.

Which was utterly beyond mortal power but I knew in my bones I had to try, while grateful to still be here to give it my best.

So my answer could only be this:

You are loved.

Almost ready for the soaring raptor, whose flight feather details are echoed in the trees. Didn’t get as much done as I wanted the last two days because…

…Oh look, the NY Times had an article about a stomach bug associated with green onions that exactly described it. (I had already decided what was left of mine looked questionable and had tossed them.) So that’s what was going on while I was bellyaching about politicians to try to ignore my own. Today was a lot better, although dinner questioned its wisdom somewhat.

My fervent thanks to the workers who delivered groceries from Costco this afternoon. Which I’m mentioning because a friend needed that recently and didn’t know they do that. Ours does, anyway.

Platner did the right thing and he’s out in time for Maine voters to choose someone else–Monday was the deadline for a special election to be called. May the best future Senator win.

Mitch McConnell, per the reporter who had been listening to the police scanner, had paramedics arriving seven minutes after they were called for an unconscious man in cardiac arrest, with McConnell taken to the hospital from that address.

The Republicans in Kentucky changed the law two years ago to where the governor could no longer appoint a successor to a Senator from his own party as previously required but rather that there would be a special election called. Let the voters decide. Honor democracy. Sounds good.

Except that that special election could not be held closer than 56 days to the general election, and short of that, Kentucky would just have to go with only one Senator till the next general election.

Their party spent big bucks defeating Rep. Thomas Massie in his run for Senate because he’d thwarted Trump and championed the cause of opening the Epstein files, pushing the bill to do so till he won. He lost his primary–but they want to make sure he stays out and is not the incumbent, however briefly. Voters do tend to love their incumbents. Just ask Mitch.

Oh wait you can’t.

So they’re pretending they’re talking to McConnell from his hospital bed and that he’s recovering nicely and that deadline against calling the special election is coming right up. You know that he’s suddenly going to take a turn for the worse, no, worst, but only when it’s convenient for what they want.

The video of a CNN reporter demanding one of them call McConnell right now, live on the air, and let the audience hear his voice to prove he’s alive–and the immediate backtracking and squirming and blustering and flustering and refusing to do so–said it all.

If Mitch McConnell is indeed brain dead–and seven minutes of cardiac arrest in a sick, old man before medical help arrived means he is–then every one of those men lying about it is committing outright election fraud.

We have this 14th Amendment for them (among other things.) We just have to use it.

Governor Beshear sent a letter to McConnell at his hospital room asking for an official response from him on his condition, as fellow representatives of the good people of Kentucky. Well played.

Coming to the dinner table tonight, he mentioned: I like your little sheep.

Me, grinning: You finally noticed it!

He was a little surprised when I told him it had been there since yesterday after the mail came.

B(w!)aaahhaahah…

Blame my friend Trish. She showed off hers. Five bucks.

Baaaaad news, I tell ya, and yeah, mine came today.

Waiting for a certain someone to notice.

I have yet to get a good photo of this. The trees are actually going upward in a diagonal line right to left, for one thing, their trunks, seed stitch, and the yarn gloriously soft.

If I were really ambitious I would have added the concrete Ghost Ship as it’s known locally, a concrete boat (do those two words really go together?) built too close to the end of WWI to ever go to war or even be finished and was instead towed to Monterey Bay, where it was used for a dance hall and a tourist trap and a good time to be had by all. Take a romantic stroll on the pier, watch the birds, fish a little, hey, watch out for those sea lions!

It slowly fell to pieces over the years and the much-repaired pier to it washed out for good in a storm three years ago. What’s left of the ship lives on as an artificial marine reef.

All war-making equipment should be so lucky.

We can see the tops of the usual fireworks from in front of our house so there’s no point in adding to the crowds and traffic jams.

Sunday there was a five-acre fire right where we were driving for our anniversary dinner the evening before, right by Richard’s old office. Statewide, a lot of places have canceled their Fourth of July shows.

What there’s been so far (9:30 pm) is what appeared to be a helicopter. Nothing went boom. It hovered several minutes, then moseyed on out.

But somehow that felt like just the right touch. We didn’t need explosions or pollution, but a bright and shining light that everybody can see on the Fourth of July going forward where it wants to go? We could use that.

(I went back inside and checked to see if they’d canceled the show over the Bay. Turns out they’re just starting a bit later than I’d expected. I keep wondering when they’ll replace the explosives with drone light shows.)

Edited to add: a small plane came and circled above the fireworks over and over and over and over, and near the end, a second plane followed it, also circling. And then a third! That one only went around twice and then was the first to leave when the show was over.

I would mutter something about Silicon Valley oligarchs, but then we knew a fellow grad student who took his light plane *through* the fireworks when we were at Purdue.

I couldn’t resist at least exploring the things.

What’s that!?

A Pluerry, I told him. Andy’s had full boxes and one half box and I bought the half box out of sheer curiosity. It’s a cross between a plum and a cherry and it’s supposed to be very sweet. I don’t know if I should try to let it ripen for a day or if the cherry part means it isn’t climacteric and we should just go for it.

A discussion from there about the weirdness of that word and how did someone make it mean it can ripen after being picked. (Wait, let me go double-check that…) Merriam-Webster’s says “The marked and sudden rise in respiratory rate of fruit just prior to full ripening.”

Did anyone else just picture cherries having an asthma attack or was that just me?

I knew I should have changed my college major to botany. I seriously considered it.

That thing looks like a mash-up of Bugs Bunny’s squirting flower, Dr. Seuss, and the old Archie McPhee catalog. (Hey look! It still exists!)

Remember how, when we were little kids, it was a big thing for kids who hadn’t taken piano lessons (yet, anyway) to sit down and play Chopsticks? Some were taught by older kids, some proudly figured it out on their own, but it was a way to show off and make the most noise in the room for attention. While the older siblings with their friends over would roll their eyes and groan at having to listen to it yet again.

I never did. I wanted to play like my big sister, not little kid stuff, and as soon as my teacher deemed me old enough I was in. Lessons!

For years and years in my knitting I didn’t know how to knit lace and I didn’t particularly want to; the word itself meant great-grandma stuff, like, y’know, antimacassars (it took me a long time to find out there was a word for those), i.e. big cotton doilies for draping over the backs of stuffed chairs.

For protecting them by absorbing the grease from–think of every picture you ever saw of George Washington and his hairdo. There you go.

For decades I knew people here and there whose one and only lace pattern was feather and fan for making afghans. Some used the occasional purl row. Some did not. They assured me it was easy, and unlike plain stockinette stitch, the edges didn’t curl.

But I thought, but if the result is everybody-makes-that and they-all-look-like-that, why bother? Where’s the learning? The new?

And then Schoolhouse Press republished Barbara Walker’s stitch treasuries from the 1970s: the bible of the knitting world, written because Walker, according to a recent piece in the New York Times, didn’t want knitting to be boring anymore. Thousands of looks that simple stitch sequences could create.

I found out what I was missing. I taught myself lace knitting by trial and error and determined hours with her first book in my lap deciphering her how-to graphics at the front.

Still it took me nearly 20 years to get over myself and knit an actual, unembellished plain old feather-and-fan into anything. (For the non-knitters: think sine waves.) It definitely has its places. I was avoiding them. I think it was the pandemic that left me thinking I had the time to finally just get to it.

I woke up this morning with the sudden clarity: Feather and Fan! It’s the Chopsticks of lace!

It starts off so simple but there are so many variations... (Have fun!)  (Bugs Bunny!)

The trees are coming along.

I didn’t manage to squeeze the whole thing into the picture and it was a quick photo in the fading light but this gives you the gist of the thing.

Their church is a few blocks away and every now and then there’s a knock on the door.

It was two young women offering fliers for a convention of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Cool! I said. I’ll trade you for a copy of the Book of Mormon?

No, no, that’s okay, they smiled, turning away quickly, but as they started to walk away I told them, Thank you for being willing to share your faith publicly.

They were not expecting that. It clearly made their day, and the smiles on their faces made mine.