I hope you had a merry day yesterday but I sincerely hope you didn't eat as many cookies and candy as I did. We have so much leftover too. That crazy yellow spidery thing above is actually a citrus called Buddha's Hand. There is a tree a few blocks from us and the owner of the home used to pick them and put them on the top of the brick wall with a sign that said help yourself. They might be gone now because they don't do it anymore and it makes me think new people might be living in the house and maybe they aren't as generous. At this time of year you'll also find people with boxes of persimmons and lemons near the street with signs saying, take me, I'm yours. I never really notice persimmon trees until a big wind comes along in the fall and blows all the leaves off a plain old ordinary, unnoticed tree and then all of a sudden, wowzer, a persimmon tree surprisingly appears that is positively loaded with fruit! A friend gave me several and I waited until they were ripe and mushy and I scooped out the flesh and put in the freezer to make some persimmon bread next month. I don't need to bake another fattening thing for a good while. I don't know if you can see in the picture of the tree, but there were a dozen noisy birds pecking at the fruit. If you don't pick them and ripen them in the house, the birds will eat them for you.

Last week after I finished my Watercolor Blanket, I started a new scrap project because I love to have at least one scrappy no-brainer going on at a time. It's a free pattern called Stripes Please and uses fingering weight yarn and is part of my grand scheme to use up all my oddballs. Ask me how I'm doing on that. Well, I've made several big oddball projects recently and I actually think I've made a dent!

We have family arriving tomorrow; step-daughter, husband, granddaughter and boyfriend and we are expecting rain the entire week but I think everyone is happy just to be together and visit and if rain cancels this or that, it won't be a big problem. (You know that when it rains in California we go into shock mode and all of a sudden traffic stops and we forget how to drive and can't find our umbrellas and think we are going to melt or something. Don't mind us, it's just us being us.) I'm hoping my guests will manage to eat up some of the sweets in this house, and yes, (I'm saying this to my husband) I know all the sweets in the house is a situation I created. I knitted matching hats for Annie and boyfriend and bought them matching shackets and think they will love matching and will look positively adorbs I've no doubt. I will be begging to get pictures.

That picture of the three swords needs some explaining. Carter saw them downtown at the toy store and was desperate for all of us to have swords. Desperate! There were a dozen designs but after concentrated deliberation, he was sure that these were the three this family needed. He kept reminding me all month but even though I had gone back and bought them the next day, I kept acting vague like I had forgotten, and so he had to go through the whole description in detail each week, poor fella. There is a dark side to me it seems. When he opened them yesterday, that was it, Christmas was complete. Mine is the pink one and has the magical ability to shoot out pink candy hearts. Carter's is the green one and shoots flames of course, but Papa has not figured out the magical ability of his. He says it shoots out pirates but we don't believe him. They were left here for playing at Grammy and Papa's house and so just want you to know that we three will be saving the neighborhood, and hopefully all of humanity, from the bad guys.