Upgrades

I was able to repair a sink strainer that wouldn't stay in the open position by taking a piece of plastic tube from a marker, the fatter kind of children's marker, and cutting a slit down the side so I could snap it onto the stem of the sink strainer to hold it up.  It would have been easier if I had cut it to the right length before making the slit.

I also experimented with making a simple dust jacket for a book out of quilting fabric.  It looks nice on the shelf with the normal books, although the fabric sticks out a bit at the top and bottom of the spine.  I expect that it will collect dust and need to be washed and ironed at some point.  I perhaps should have pre-shrunk the fabric.

Yesterday I used a handed-down upholstery remnant to replace the seat on a freebie metal patio chair.  The chair uses splines in channels at the sides to hold the fabric in place.  The original plastic mesh didn't have hems or channels sewn at the sides, but I put them in the replacement, for strength.  It took a considerable amount of work to put the new fabric on, with the splines in and with tension across the width.  I am sore today, but not nearly as sore as I should be, thanks to milk.   I had sore muscles before I started.  I'm somewhat doubtful about the strength of the fabric, but it supported an adult's weight, cautiously applied.

During my break I painted new letters on my keyboard.  It's not that old, but almost half of the alphabet had disappeared.  I used a contrasting color of nail polish to paint the missing letters on--in Morse code.  I didn't get all of them on very clearly, but it has helped me learn some more.

Back from break

I'm going back onto a semi-regular posting schedule.

Eldest child is doing well.

I finally have No! Children! In! Diapers!!  And they can all buckle themselves in, on their own or with a little help from a sibling.

I also have Multiple! Teenagers!!  I can go for a walk whenever I want, and we can easily go through two gallons of milk in a day.  I didn't have to hire a random stranger to babysit when I had jury duty last year.

I did a lot of stocking up on books, tools, and supplies, which has turned out to be timely, because there is apparently some law of the universe where my family's finances can only flourish under a Democrat administration.  I don't mistake the money economy for the real, real economy, though.

I've also been writing a teenage-level fiction book, which has been a lot of fun. 

Merry Christmas!

The table leaf worked out very well, although we had to turn the living room into a dining room with two tables to seat everyone.  A little too much work to set all that up again for Christmas, when it is just our own family.

Christmas is also going merrily.  The family sculptor improved on a gingerbread house's chimney by adding two Santa legs sticking out of it.

The oldest child has improved rapidly, and is scheduled for surgery in a few weeks to prevent a recurrence.

Set

I found several Georgette Heyer books at the thrift store, and remembering Practical Conservative's love of the author bought them.  Not my usual genre, so we'll see.

My life this fall has been apples, election, and hospital.  An acquaintance with a backyard orchard had a bumper crop this year, and we easily picked thirty bags' worth.  I learned how to make apple butter, and that is what I'm doing with most of them now.  It turns out to not be so easy to dispose of quantities of apple scraps in the city when you are stubbornly refusing to order and use the organics bin that you are being forced to pay for.

The hospital was for my oldest child, who is doing well despite taking a Grand Tour of the medical system across seven different sites this month, for a congenital issue that suddenly became a problem.  There is some lingering non-obvious aftermath, but she is chugging through most of the functional tests faster than I would. 

A neighbor gave me an old table leaf that is more or less the right size for our round living room table, and I put two coats of polyurethane on it.  I plan to have Thanksgiving dinner in the living room again; the house has no dining room and it is much more memorable than crowding into the kitchen as usual.  The next challenge is the table base:  it is a pedestal base--for an oak top that can be six feet long.  Someone in the past tried to reinforce the weak point by pounding in a lot of nails.  I think I can repurpose the frame of my old homemade dinner table, if I shorten the legs.  The hard part will be getting it into place around the pedestal and up under the table top's rails, but it shouldn't be too bad because the frame's legs are attached with removable pegs.

Walz off

I am not a fan of Tim Walz.   I went back and read from this blog's archives of the end of May 2020 into the following June...

...when he let the Twin Cities rioting get so bad that multi-county curfews had to be imposed...

...on and past my baby's due date.

My baby was smart and waited until well into June to be born; thankfully with no need for emergency transportation.

Many places that we had been to as a family over the years were looted and burned.  Several of those places were totally destroyed.  $500 million dollars damage in the Twin Cities.

I've also seen the ways Walz has been devastating Minnesota since then, which accelerated once the Democrats took control of the Legislature for the "trifecta".  

And it's not just Minnesota; Minnesota is now a destination state for abortions and gender transitions. 

Walz and Harris are centering their campaign around "joy".  Walz has a very convincing jolly warrior act, partly because he's had a lot of training.  He is probably not an organically-grown candidate at all; I think he may have an interesting history with the teachers' union.  He certainly favors them now, despite increasingly dismal education outcomes, which are both bad and barely above the national average.

A few years ago, Walz said something about how if Minnesotans don't like living with immigrants, they should leave.  I have not yet unearthed the exact quote.

Anyway, when I see Harris-Walz, I don't see joy.  I see fire, destruction, and death. 

Getting Biblical in Minneapolis

Yesterday afternoon, we were driving through Minneapolis when we came into heavy rain, and then, right on the 35W Bridge, there was hail--I think it was about 3/8 inches diameter, but I was busy looking at the road.  Cars were clustering at the sides of the road under overpasses for shelter.  We had been through larger hail in our larger vehicle before, and I just carefully drove out of it. 

I haven't seen anything about it in the local news, even though the highway cameras probably got some good video of it.

Preliminary results

I came across a little tiny online mention of a connection between Vitamin A deficiency and bleeding, and I realized that there was a possible recent correlation in my own life, memorable because of jury duty.

Here's the abstract of a medical paper on using Vitamin A to treat menorrhagia, from 1977:  "menorrhagia was alleviated in more than 92% of patients".

Sources of Vitamin A include carrots, eggs, and butter.