What a week

Hi, all --
Thanks to everyone who left comments -- I'm so sorry I haven't responded. We left town last Monday, and this trip has really not gone quite as planned. The night before we left, my younger daughter woke up with an ear infection, so Monday morning, we were off to the doctor before leaving town, which took two hours, and put us a bit behind. We made it to Sacramento by 6:00, which wasn't half bad for covering 500 miles. On Tuesday, I went to Clear Lake to do some linguistic fieldwork (this is the part of my life that has nothing to do with knitting; more on that later when I'm not doing a frantic catch-up post), and managed to get hit on the windshield by a rock. By the time I'd driven another 300 miles (some of it over very wash-boardy dirt roads), the crack had propagated over quite a bit of the windshield, which meant I knew we'd have to get the windshield replaced before heading home. I picked my husband up from the airport that night, and Wednesday morning, we headed for the Bay Area to visit his family. Of course, that didn't exactly go as planned, either; DH's bike was stolen from our locked car roof rack while we were in Moe's Books on Telegraph. In broad daylight, on the fourth of July, on the street. From a locked rack (which is now destroyed). So, that's two more deductibles (one for the car insurance for the roof rack, one for the homeowners for the bike; our insurance is fairly cranky about all of this). Then off to Novato to visit DH's grandmother, who, it turns out, had just been hospitalized for severe dehydration (very long story); when we visited, she was in a complete delerium (there is a sort of strange fascination with watching someone see things that no one else can see, but it has been tremendously hard on all of us to see her so helpless). So, we spent the better part of two days in and out of the hospital with her (I can't believe how well the girls are holding up with all of this change and strangeness). She is still there, and it now turns out that we are staying several extra days to help out with getting her out of the hospital and into the rehab hospital.

Hence this quick post. I didn't want anyone to think I'd fallen off the face of the earth permanently. With luck, I'll have a few extra minutes tomorrow between hospital visits to write a longer post. For the moment, on the knitting front, I'm halfway done with Hanami, but did not finish it for the wedding reception yesterday (of a piece with the whole trip, no?). On a good note, I'm guessing that I'll be getting a lot of knitting done on the two pairs of socks on the needles while sitting next to Grandmom in the hospital (as an interesting aside, DH's cousin and I suddenly noticed that what seemed like random hand twitching was actually Grandmom doing imaginary knitting -- she seemed to find it as soothing as I find the real thing... what a strange thing, that she was knitting, even though she hasn't knitted in the real world in the 18 years that I've known her. It's funny what we go back to...). Anyway, if anyone is reading, thanks for sticking with me through the silence.