Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker and I lived in Pismo Beach for 16 years. Oh, we’d vacationed there for years beforehand, and collected shells on the beach years before we could order drinks. It was a familiar, beloved place. So when our lives more or less collapsed a couple of decades ago, we looked around and thought a bit and said: Let’s go hide out at Pismo.

And so we did. And it was wonderful. Kage began to write with an actual eye to getting published; within the year, she had sold the first of her Company series. I followed the Faires with increasing determination and success. We became aunts and godmothers repeatedly; people were married in our garden, children learned to walk on our lawns. We lived in sight and sound of the Pacific Ocean all those years – in a town only a mile wide, it’s hard to get out of reach of the sea on one edge. We grew roses and apples and tulips and plums. It was an idyll. We were mutating happily into entwives,  comfortably settled in a semi-rural town where fishing boats went out every dawn and sunset, and cattle grazed on the hillsides above Highway 101.

Those hills are called the Irish Hills, because Pismo was apparently first settled by Europeans in the winter, in the wet season. Between November and March, the hills turn an exquisite emerald green – new hay, wild mustard, oats, native bunchgrass all grow thickly. For contrast,  lupine and poppies form pools of blue and orange on the slopes. Oaks and sycamores bud out to roof the canyons with leaves. The topsoil is no more than a thin shell of fertility over the decomposing granite of the hills, but for those months they are clothed in glory reminiscent of the Isles of the Blest.

That’s how they looked when I left there, last year. I drove away on a bright booming day with the wind off the sea chasing ripples in the grass on the green, green hills, and I hoped that I would never see them again.

Pismo Beach is now haunted ground for me. That’s something I never expected, and the strength of the revulsion is startling. But the whole Central Coast is now overlain by a cold vacuum that is the absence of Kage, and it sucks the life out of me when I go through it.

While Kage often talked about retiring to Catalina Island, the odds were high we would never have left Pismo again. We intended to grow old there, really old, walker and white hair old; be a couple of old biddies tottering along the boardwalk, watching the surfers with harmless appreciation. Most of all, though, we saw ourselves together through this all: somehow, it never occurred to either of us that we would not kick the old jam jar within, say, 24 hours of one another.

So we didn’t lay any plans for that. I have no scenario, no outline, no plotline on how to live without Kage. Oh, I have duties and contracts and promises and obligations – but those do not make a life. And if I had tried to stay in this haunted little town where every doorway holds a shadow where Kage is not, the weight of all those would have borne me down into darkness by now. Leaving Pismo Beach for our native Los Angeles was the best thing I could do. Also the only thing I could think of doing – and when your mind cuts out like that, as mine did for a lot of last year, you just cling desperately to whatever ideas you summon.

It’s been a good choice. Being with my family is healing. Sometimes I am even happy.

I look at Pismo every day, through the webcams on the Pier. It hurts, but it’s a discipline. When I drove through there Monday and Tuesday, the accumulated scar tissue of that daily pain protected me. It cut at me – a real pain, like something sharp moving in my chest – and I cried all the rest of the way into San Luis Obispo. But I made it. I went to the Courthouse and completed my business successfully – despite the fact that it was flanked on one side with the neon-decked 1930’s movie palace Kage loved to distraction, and on another by the library where she first found her agent’s name. Despite the fact that it was  three blocks away from SLO’s one-building Chinatown, which had fascinated her. Despite the memories of walking every damned step of the fancy paving with her, back when we were safe and happy there.

When I was done and drove away, heading south to the shelter of Los Angeles, I turned on the radio in the car. And what was playing?  Down By The Water, by The Decemberists:

The season rubs me wrong
The summer swells anon
So knock me down, tear me up
But I would bare it all broken just to fill my cup
Down by the water and down by the old main drag

Man, what emo deity is choosing my soundtrack these days? I changed to CD, put in a Steeleye Span album, and drove back to L.A. crying and singing about a spotted cow. And Kage sang harmony in my head.

Kage Baker died over a year ago now, but some of the most mundane ripples are still coursing through the pond of my life. Which is a pretentious way of leading into the multi-dimensional horror that is … Probate. (Insert theramin chord here – ooo-eee-ooo-zing zing zing … )

(First, Dear Readers, I apologize for not being true to daily postings here – over the weekend I was counting things, and then on Monday I drove North. On Tuesday I made my obligatory court appearance and then drove straight home. Being either gibbering with terror or exhausted during most of this, I couldn’t get my brain in any shape to blog. I’ll make up for it now, though.)

Yestreday I had to be in court to submit and discuss the inventory of the wordly goods Kage left behind. Also, to explain why I had not submitted it earlier – which was pretty simple: no one had requested an inventory. Probate closed back in August, and as far as I knew, there was nothing left to do. I was, lamentably, wrong … I did know that, if an inventory was required, a notice would be sent to me. What I did not know was that if one were sent and I did not receive it, the next step was this summons to the judicial bench to explain my lack of appropriate response.

It must be noted: the folks in the San Luis Obispo County Probate Court are, one and all, very nice people. They deal with distraught folks all the time, and are gentle and polite. But they do not answer questions. Any questions. They most emphatically refuse to discuss anything that might be construed as legal advice. I can understand this – we live in a litigious society, and giving advice can get you in a lot of trouble.

But from time to time, this geas under which they operate produces insanity. I have been refused mailing addresses, on the grounds that telling me where the court was might be taken as advising me to use only that venue; instead, they gave me a website with all the courts and departments and divisions and told me to find it on my own. They will relay requests from the judge, but absolutely will not tell  me why he wants something patently absurd, nor if a form exists to fulfill the demand – naming a specific form evidently can also influence what you do, and thus be construed as legal advice.

Aaaargh. And yet, I do realize, Dear Readers,  that despite my travails and the very real pain they cause me, I am getting off easily. As Probates go, this is simple and swift in execution. Kage left no land, little physical property, no big-ticket items, no trusts, no savings – almost no money. However, this doesn’t seem to make any difference to the judicial juggernaut that must have every I crossed and every T dotted.

My favourite requirement thus far has been that I supply the court with a letter wherein Kage’s heir (one Kathleen Bartholomew) states that she has no opposition to Kage’s nominated executor (the same Kathleen Bartholomew) being approved by the Court. I had to sign the letter twice, too – once as heir and once as executor. I was reminded of the legal requirements of Hobbits’ wills; which need, as I recall, the signatures of 7 witnesses in red ink …

The judge was very sympathetic about my not getting the inventory request, and admitted no sign of it appeared in the file. But he still wants my explanation in writing. And as it turned out, hewanted more detail on the inventory I brought on Tuesday: which means, I guess, that now I have to itemize the dozen hoodies with different pirate motifs. Likewise the box full of Hawaiian shirts, and the other box full of logo T-shirts that had once amused Kage. The  huge plastic rings she collected in her teen-aged years, and never, ever wore: she just liked the colours, though they were actually fairly hideous examples of 1960’s kitsch. The contents of her desk will be especially hilarious – item, 1 wind up dinosaur that shoots sparks; item, 1 rubber figure of Mr. Krabs; item, 1 bottle full of water from Glastonbury Hill.

It has been suggested by a friend that future historians will be interested in this recounting of the material culture that produced Kage – well, good luck to them, says I: most of what made Kage herself happened in her head. She didn’t leave much behind to provide clues. But if some poor undergraduate someday finds relevance in the fact that she wore high-topped sneakers that left skull-and-crossbones footprints, more power to them! Historians need all the primary sources they can find. What Kage cherished may not give a look into anything resembling the cultural norms of her time (in which she had little interest) but it might explain the jackdaw fascination with shinies that she translated into her unique prose.

Or not. Who knows? But making the list will get the Court off my back, and maybe bring back to light something I have forgotten in the past year. No knowledge, after all, is useless.

So I’m heading back into the mind of Kage Baker: at least, as much of it as is represented by every version of Treasure Island she could lay her hands on, and a collection of back stage passes for Jethro Tull. I’ll let you know, Dear Readers, what else I find.

Tomorrow: driving through Pismo Beach with my eyes closed

Kage Baker‘s estate requires me to deliver some papers to the Court in San Luis Obispo this Tuesday. So today we are closed for inventory.

Kage Baker would have been glued to the television today. She would have been watching the footage from Japan. She would have been horrified. She would also have been conscious of how astonishingly the world has become interconnected – that she could sit in a room on the coast of California, watching live – LIVE – footage of a tsunami rolling over a Japanese farming community.

That’s what I did for quite some time last night. When the footage began to repeat, and the reporters began to interview one another, I turned off the telly and went searching on the Net. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. The Coast Guard. The NWS, the NOAA, the DOC, the USGS. That wonderful maternal CalTech seismologist, Dr. Kate Hutton; who, when queried about the proper response to a tsunami warning on the California Coast, said bluntly that going to the beach today would be about the stupidest thing you could do. Stay out of the water, she said. The currents will be dangerous. That’s why we issue the warning. She didn’t add D’uh! – but she should have.

After awhile I ran out of sensible sites and began exploring the fringe. People online ranted about tsunamis, spoiled vacations, armageddon scenariae, the gravitational attraction of the Moon this month, how the Japanese deserved the earthquake for eating whale meat. The longer I searched, the farther afield, the later the hour – the crazier the comments became. I finally gave up and went to bed.

Checking this morning, the crazies seem to have partied all night. Non-earthquake-fixated crazies have apparently spent the night dismantling the American middle class, blowing up non-co-religionists all over the world, and throwing fellow party members (of whatever party they espouse) under various busses. The more geophysically inclined are waiting with panting eagerness for more killer quakes, giant tsunamis, flaming cracks in the earth and the death by chaos of every skyscraper-ed, neon-lit, glass-and-metal city in the world; they are happily waiting for monsters to arise from the deep and march over the earth.

Godzilla jokes are rampant.

And yes – I recall very well that I’ve spent the last several days joking about Chthulu in the Catalina Channel and Lizard Men under downtown Los Angeles. But, you know what? It’s not hard or painful to make jokes about a million inconveniently placed dead sardines. The fun goes right out of it when what you are watching is a 30-foot tall wave rolling across farmland, with burning greenhouses borne along on the shoulders of the waters like the torches of an invading army.

Luckily, the non-crazies have been busy, too. There are lots of good people on line; though they are quiet, and harder to find than the ravers. I’m going to go check on the International Red Cross, and see what I can do to help the other side of the world.

Kage Baker would so enjoy the ongoing Redondo Beach Million Sardine Party. Theories are still proliferating down here in Southern California as to what caused it, and are now ranging from bad weather to leaking natural gas to marauding right, fin , blue or humpback whales. Or maybe mackerel.

The moon is waxing – maybe the tidal pull is cracking the floor of the Catalina Channel and allowing plutonic essences to escape.

The whales could be a good guess, though: humpbacks and blues are frequently seen off the coast of California (I’ve seen them myself. Amazing.). So could the squid – not the chthonic ones, just plain old Humboldts. But they are big – 6 feet at maturity – ferocious, and hunt in packs.

It gets interesting off the Central Coast this time of year at night. Fisherman are out hunting squid; and, the last couple of years, the squid are out hunting fisherman. Several fisherman have been mauled by them in the last few years, so the average sardine probably heads for shore in a hurry when they’re on the hunt.

It could be orcas or dolphins: there are pods of both off the coast. It could be Great White sharks, which the local surfers refer to as “the landlord” (as in “Outta the water, dude, the landlord’s here.”). It could be manta rays, or whale sharks – their usual range is farther south, but in the last decade several frankly tropical species have been wandering up past the Sea of Cortez. The honest-to-goodness sensible possibilities are a treasure trove of exciting strangeness.

In the meantime, dogged teams are down at King Harbour, filling Dumpsters with fish and hauling them away. I imagine a few of them have been given new homes in someone’s frying pan; I rather hope so, as it seems a shame to render such a huge catch into chum and fertilizer. As of this morning, they are blasting the sardines off the bottom of the harbour with air lines – whoosh! – and then scooping them up on the surface. Apparently the harbour is a few feet deep in fish. It’s estimated there are 30 tons of them down there.

And it’s hot. It was nearly 90 yestreday, and right now it is almost 80. King Harbour is in danger of becoming the world’s biggest bowl of bouilabaisse.

Kage would be so amused and intrigued. I don’t think it will ever be known exactly what caused this – no one has any stories of it happening before. So Kage would have been free to speculate of all manner of outrageous or unusual-but-natural events. As am I. There’s someone’s grandson out there who is apparently rooting for a pleisiosaur. (Hi, Paul!) Sure, I know Chthulu and dimensional portals are unlikely – and I realize grazing whales are just as interesting as pirate squid. They’re just not as dramatic. Or as much fun.

And believe me, with a king tide full of sardines sloshing up against Redondo, we need all the fun we can get.

Kage Baker would have just been fascinated with yestreday’s mass fish death in Redondo Beach. She loved peculiar and mysterious things like this, and usually pursued them as long as she could through the news.

Which, thinking of her, I have done. Despite the overwhelming gravitational pulls of Charlie Sheen’s antics and local elections, the fatal sardine run made the evening news – and not just  in their WTF files, either. Of course, King Harbor being literally carpeted with dead sardines is rather more than just a human interest story. Some expensive boats found themselves with high fish marks yestreday …

Volunteers and city workers have come from all over to bet the floating dead and take them to a composting station. Presumably they will all be converted to fertilizer. Maybe they’ll end up spread  through the city parks. In these days of cash shortfalls and decreased park maintenance, that would be a noble ending.

The general theory now is that the sardines came to shore in a huge mass, terrified of the wind and wave action on a very windy night. We had both wind and wave warnings two nights ago, and the Channel is not very deep just there; there must have been a very turbulent upper layer of the ocean as well as a lot of silt being stirred up. So the sardines headed away from the tumult and got themselves trapped behind the King Harbor breakwater.

Most of the harbours on the L.A. coast have breakwaters, because without them – well, we basically have no harbours. The coast along here is soft-serve, not much more than mud with a hard-on.  Until people started dredging harbours and putting in breakwaters, there was nowhere for vessels to dock. But this time the fish got trapped by the man-made topography. Millions of them crowded into a couple of fathoms of water, and used up the oxygen – and then they suffocated. And voila, the sea was carpeted in dead fish.

One cannot help but wonder, though, if it was just the windy weather that stampeded them? Kage would certainly have wondered … could it be volcanic vents in the Channel floor? Imagine the dull red metallic glow, like liquid tinsel, hanging in curtains in the silty water – heat pulsing out from it to boil the nearest sardines and send their kin fleeing for the cool tide-line … only to find that the life-support system couldn’t handle the strain! Despairing fishy gasps, a storm of silver bodies flashing light in all directions, and then – devastation.

Or it could have been a Megalodon – an extinct ancestor of the Great White shark,  roughly the size of a sperm whale. Six men could sit in the arch of its jaws; you could use one of its teeth as a boogie board. We don’t really know what might be still surviving in the depths of the sea, he he he, although we can now scratch about a million sardines off the list … but if one of these vanished 50-footers was cruising out there, I would certainly run for shore.

It might even be something worse than giant sharks! It might be dark chthonic gods rising from the suburbs of R’lyeh out near Catalina Island – tentacles with suckers like man-hole covers, octopus eyes with six-foot tall square pupils glaring through the vasty deeps. Maybe the sardines were fleeing C’thulhu. Or maybe it was only Humboldt squids; but lately those buggers have been attacking fishermen, so something funny is going on out there.

Something Is Out There. Lurking. In the Channel.  In the dark. And only the sardines know …

Kage Baker, as I had previously mentioned, was fascinated with the idea of apports. These are items which appear out of nowhere, out of context, and remain where they can be handled and pondered.

They are frequently stones, jewelry, pieces of silverware or china or glassware. Sometimes they are rains of unlikely things: rains of fish and frogs are well known in both folklore and Odd News articles. Lately, rains of dead birds have been occurring in the United States, although most of them have had tragically mundane explanations related to pollution and agricultural poisons …

(Apports, by the way, should not be confused with “ooports”. Ooports are items that not only are found out of context, but in physically impossible places. Toads sealed in stone are the classical example, but the 20th century has also brought news of other goodies: forged metal chains found in virgin coal seams. Human footprints in solid rock known to be 100 millions years old. Nails, screws and even a spark plug found in presumably ancient rock. Kage felt most of these were the results of con artistry and bad geology, but there are some interesting ones out there in the records.)

Well, here is an interesting coincidence on this topic for us all to savour! In yestreday’s post, I made a rather light-hearted reference to tons of pilchards (sardines) being apportly dumped in Kansas. One of you Dear Readers even pointed out that only European sardines may authentically be called “pilchards”, but I think that the weirdness quotient of sardines of any variety appearing in vast, dead, numbers in land-locked Kansas far outweighs my possible species misidentification. If sardines are going to fall out of the sky over the Midwest, they are just as likely to be Mediterranean as Pacific.

However, for those who like their piscine apports and floods of fish to be from the correct area, I give you this article from today’s Contra Costa Times:

http://www.contracostatimes.com/california/ci_17564875?nclick_check=1

This reports an invasion of “billions of dead fish” at Redondo Beach, California. And they are sardines.  There was no red tide, no presently known force to slaughter all these little fishies. They just appeared, floating dead and pallid, amid the fishing vessels and weekenders’ yachts in King Harbor. In my own gleeful defense, I would like to note that the article says they were first mistakenly identified as anchovies; evidently, identifying dead fish usually found in tins is difficult even for the experts.

While they will almost certainly turn out to be the victims of some ordinary disaster, at the moment it is still an interesting coincidence and mystery. I mean, I could literally drive down there and see them – King Harbor is only about 30 miles away from where I live.

Kage would want to go see them, were she here – I am sure of that. It’s just the sort of thing that she would want to lay eyes on first hand. Of course, she detested fish …  I know just what would happen. We’d get there and she’d have one of her pirate bandannas tied around her face (with her long braid tucked under it as an extra olfactory filter), hanging out the passenger window of the car and exclaiming in delight and disgust at the reeking carpet of dead sardines. And she’d have me drive back and forth a dozen times while she risked her sinuses and her neck to get a good idea of the scene. And then she’d complain about the smell all the way home to write about them …

There’s   been a lot of activity on the Pacific Ring of Fire lately.  I wonder if they show signs of being boiled?

Kage Baker loved the idea of time warps. Actually, the possibility of any flaw, divot, passage or facet in the space-time continuum fascinated her. She believed they were an essential part of the fabric of the universe – maybe not a part we are naturally equipped to see; but then, we don’t see oxygen, either, and that is undeniably real and vital. The experiments and games being played with particle accelerators right now surely indicate that subatomic particles get up to all kinds of Morris dancing when we aren’t watching them closely.

Kage also adored the idea of apports – those things that appear without explanation, out of the everywhere into the here.* Rains of fishes, chunks of weird ice, odd bits of jewelry and household china – they all fascinated her. She especially liked the sort of thing that was reputed to appear, move about under its own power, and then vanish again: phantom coaches and ships. Kaspar Hauser and his ilk. Briefly glimpsed prehistoric beasts.

Clearly, most time warps have to be small; this accounts for the preponderance of wine glasses, dancing shoes and single frogs one hears about. But some must be huge, allowing whole storms’ worth of pilchard to be dumped on Kansas. (In outer space, they appear to uniformly be big enough to swallow the Enterprise.) Some let carriages and people through: Kage figured the width of a freeway lane was probably about right. It would explain why there were so many cars in strange circumstances.

Her all-time favourites were the cars. Kage lived beside California Highway 101 – El Camino Real, The King’s Road – all her life. Most of that time, she could literally look out a window at it, 24/7. She also spent most of her life living in in tourist destinations and holiday towns, like Hollywood and Pismo Beach. Between these two, she spent the majority of her time perforce observing vehicular traffic. And she noticed that there are places where the cars you tend to see are … odd.

Odd as in old. Odd as in really, really good shape. Odd as in having license plates – when they had them at all – that had not been produced in her own lifetime. Pismo Beach is itself one of those places; an astonishing number of cars from the last two centuries can be seen in its streets any week of the year. It’s true that there are one or two car shows there each year; but it doesn’t explain why one can see a Model A or a Merc sedan or a Nomad in the factory-original tomato soup red paint cruising through town so frequently. People who “do” car shows move around, a different show each weekend – like the people who “do” Faires.

But there are always old, perfect, beautiful cars suddenly driving down two or three blocks of Pismo Beach.  You see them, you gape and point, they’re gone – totally gone, in a town that is all of a mile wide and where most of the garages were built too small to accommodate anything larger than a scooter and are already full of someone’s bass boat anyway. Where’d they come from? Where’d they go?

There is a stretch of 101 near Los Alamos where you can often see flocks of them, 5 or 6 together, rolling along – rarely all the same kind, usually lone examples of their breeds travelling briefly together. Another such stretch appears further North, near the beautifully named exit for Camphoria. On the paved goat track that leads to Muir Beach. In the orchard-lined See Canyon off Highway 101, where we were sometimes passed by a dozen or more exquisite beauties at a time; their drivers, under caps and behind black glasses, never even looked at us – though Kage was usually wailing as if the Wild Hunt were passing by.

And maybe it was. One of Kage’s theories is that some of these perfectly maintained cars are what the Fey drive in these modern times. Another was that there are just freaking holes on Highway 101, and things come through. Mostly cars. Maybe not mostly old ones, but those are the ones that caught our eyes of course – if a Corolla took an unexpected West Coast detour between Lansing MI and Columbus OH, who the heck would notice?

Besides Kage Baker, that is.

*George MacDonald, “Baby”, 1824-1905

Kage Baker was always fascinated with the nature of Time. Always. It began long before she started writing stories about time travel. Even in early childhood, she felt that Time was subjective: not due to innate mathematical ability – she was as anarithmic as someone with a normal complement of fingers can be – but based on her own experiences.

For children, of course, Time is normally subjective; you’re running on body-clock, interest-alarm, fatigue-time, long before you learn to read a clock face; long, short and interminable are the usual intervals. Kage, though,  learned to tell time as precociously as she learned to read (and that was in the analogue clock days, kids, long before digitals). The result was that she had a measure of the difference between the time she experienced and the time the clock said it was from an early age. She noticed it long before her own brain had settled into the accepted rhythm of hours, minutes and seconds. She believed the clock, all right; it just didn’t matter much to her.

There’s no universal version of time, at least not at the level that gets taught to kids. We are taught what time means to our society. Kage formed her own conclusions before the Received Version took hold. That’s my theory, anyway.

Certainly, by the time I had deciphered the mysteries of clock time, she had abandoned it as irrelevant. She never learned to read digital clocks very well, having to pause to translate the linear number display into clock hand position. She could never remember when AM and PM changed places. She had no innate sense of time passing – she was always surprised that wanting to be somewhere required time to get there, that time to accomplish a task had to be calculated into the desire to do it in the first place. If you advised her to hurry (which I often did. Loudly.) she was would reply “I am,” and honestly think that saying it aloud would speed things up. But her objective speed never changed, though I’m sure she was absolutely flying through the corridors of subjective Kage-time.

Consequently, Kage really was one of those people who would have been late to their own executions.  And it would have surprised her, too.

I habitually kept the clocks 10 minutes fast. This succeeded in altering her subjective observation, and we got to appointments on time. Her interior time was flexible, and I learned how to adjust it to run slightly ahead of the world in general. The weirdest part of this was that Kage knew I was doing it, and it made no difference –  she believed me and the clock face, and even if she didn’t agree with it, she courteously used it as baseline. The only reason she got to work on time for 30 years was that I told her what time it was. And I lied.

The older Kage got, the less importance time had for her. Working at home made it easier, of course, since it didn’t matter what time it is when your only working method is sit down and write until you’re too tired to see. It’s not 5 PM, it’s sunset: time to light a lamp. (Self-illuminated monitors were a Godsend.) It’s not 3 in the morning, it’s just time to go lie down before you fall down. Simple. Effective. Immediately relevant.

Anyway: the standard measurement of time didn’t matter much to Kage. Its nature did. She studied what other people said about it: geologists and astrophysicists, horologists and biochemists and candle dippers. Einstein. Hawking.  She especially liked the idea that Time only seems to runs forward because our brains are wired to experience current running in one direction and not the other. That amused her.

But the Arrow of Time was not firmly affixed to its post, not for Kage. It spun like a game pointer,  only … weird. Move three spaces forward, do a jig, and then leap over to a parallel. row. Sit out the next hour, or lifetime. Left hand on green, right foot on Wednesday.

Time is a nest of snakes, Kage once said, and all of ’em biting their tails.

Tomorrow: Sizing time warps. Really.

Kage Baker would have had us on the road 3 hours ago.

It is a kickass gorgeous day in Los Angeles – 77 degrees, light breeze that smells of new flowers, distant snow still on the mountains that otherwise look carved from jade and slate. The sky is full of transparent clouds like beaches and fishes’ bones.

I can only drive for an hour at a time right now. So I am going to go drive an hour in a random direction. I’ll sit for another hour and knit, somewhere beautiful – Tejon? The orchards of Santa Clarita? A beach? And then I will drive home.

Now I need to pack my fancy copper-coloured yarn and the #5 circular needles, fill my travel mug with coffee, and I’m off!

Have a good Saturday, Dear Readers.

Tomorrow: Holes in the Space-Time Continuum have to be large enough for cars