Covering a hole in the wall

We had a new water shut-off valve to an outside faucet put in. This required cutting a hole into the top of the wall in our basement family room.

Afterward, I struggled for a long time trying to figure out what to do with the hole. Part of the trouble is that the valve handle projects out about an inch from the wall surface. And we need to be able to get to it, occasionally, and turn it.

I started making a sort of panel to cover it, but gave up after a while because of the access issue.

Eventually, I got the idea of just making a little curtain to cover the hole. I found a piece of fabric, and figured out what size to cut it--usually a curtain should be at least 1.5 times wider than the opening you want it to cover, for fullness. I hemmed it on three sides, and made a tunnel for a rod on the other.

In our hardware stash I found a short tension curtain rod that was a good length for this project.

The next thing was figuring out how to hang it all up. I saw that since the hole was at the top of the wall, and the curtain and rod were very light, one possibility would be to hook onto the ceiling drywall.

A slight disadvantage is that the curtain would not hang any wider than the hole at the top, because of the hooks. Below, it could fan out a little.

For hooks, I first thought of using wire in the shape of upside-down Ls. But it seemed to me like the downward pull of the curtain rod would tend to make the hook tip, rest only on the corner of the drywall, and then possibly slide right off.  (I later confirmed this with a small paper-clip model.)

My second idea was to bend the wire in the shape of a 6, with the top curved over enough so that the weight would rest on the drywall on a single point, which would be safely away from the edge. The curtain rod ends would go through the loops of the sixes.

For wire, I found two handles from Chinese take-out boxes that I had saved at some point. I bent them to match, and tried them out. They worked well, and the curtain is definitely an improvement over the bare hole. The folds of the curtain even disguise the projection of the shut-off handle.

Mileage

Driving around in pursuit of bargains is not free; there are costs in both time and money.

The IRS's mileage rate for business use of a car in 2019 is 58 cents per mile. This includes both fixed and variable costs, so it's an estimate of total cost per mile.

I used their mileage rate a few years ago to determine if walking to the more expensive neighborhood hardware store could actually be more economical than driving to a larger store with lower prices. It turned out that the neighborhood store was indeed the better deal overall...although it closed its doors not long after that, possibly because their service was rather poor.

When we do drive longer distances to buy things, it is usually not about lower prices, but to get better quality, or a wider selection.

When the toddler wants to paint

My husband bought a "Buddha board" recently. It is a flat, square surface on a stand; the stand also has a reservoir for water and a place to rest a paintbrush. The idea is to paint on the surface with plain water, which will dry within a few minutes, leaving it ready to "paint" again.

This gave me the idea of letting the toddler paint with water on construction paper on a tray. The paper can be dried and reused a time or two, if it doesn't get too crumpled.

This is an idea I should have had a few years ago, though, when the arboretum put in a new nature play area, including a bare-wood playhouse, a water source, and lots of paintbrushes. Every time we were there, there were a half-dozen or more little children industriously painting the playhouse with water, over and over, as the water dried quite quickly.

Adjustments

I had some free time and was at loose ends, so I picked up my copy of Myquillyn Smith's Cozy Minimalist Home and started reading.

It helped me open my eyes and see that the room I was in, our school room which I had Cozy-Minimalized before, was getting cluttered up again and was short on breathing room. The chalkboard easel was back in there, and the dollhouse-that-never-gets-used-for-dolls had wandered in, homeless. There were also a number of smaller things that just needed to be put away.

It didn't take long to deal with most of them, and as I was moving around the house doing so, I did some more tweaking here and there. The dollhouse found a new home in the family room, the paper pumpkins the children made are arranged on top of a kitchen cabinet, and I made some headway on the general mess in the family room.

Warren makes me tired

She doesn't just want to go in for another round of screwing up health insurance, she also wants to completely overhaul the energy and housing sectors.  As in M4A, this would involve massive amounts of taxpayers' dollars and incredibly complex tangles of laws, regulations, and brand-new government programs...for a sustainability score of 0, right off the bat.

Our local electric and gas utility is already proposing changes to radically reduce carbon emissions, including early retirement of all their coal-powered plants. The state Public Utilities Commission is asking for public comments, and I certainly have some to give them.

For housing, Warren is promising to "lower rents by 10%".  While at the same time promising under her 100% Clean Energy proposal to refurbish 4% of existing buildings and houses each year to make them "green". Supposedly this will be done through the magic of federal funding.

If I do a quick estimate, guessing that there are 150 million buildings that would be affected, with an average cost of $50,000 to upgrade each building, that would be $300 billion per year, or $0.3 trillion; $7.5 trillion over 25 years. Plus a few gazillion dollars to "decarbonize" electricity generation, and a few gazillion more to take away most of our fossil-fueled vehicles. This makes it a modest proposal, actually, compared to the multi-trillion-dollar annual cost of her Medicare for All plan.

I found this laughable:

I’ll also invest in electric vehicle charging infrastructure, including ensuring that every federal interstate highway rest stop hosts a fast-charging station by the end of my first term in office, and ensuring that charging stations are as widespread and accessible tomorrow as gas stations are today.

Given the difference in time between filling a gas tank and charging an electric vehicle (currently in the tens of minutes with Teslas, for a partial supercharge), I don't think that is going to look exactly like she thinks it will. The charging stations would have to be much more widely accessible than gas stations are today, and the sensible thing to do would be to place them mostly at peoples' destinations.

Her affordable housing plan will do little to improve my family's housing affordability or security. It would help if we weren't paying out the equivalent of another place's rent every month for health insurance, thanks in part to Senator Warren's Yes vote on the Affordable Care Act. There was, a few years back, someone who did the math and compared their monthly health insurance cost to the mortgage payment on a $400,000 house; they weren't wrong.

Happily, even if Warren were to win the Presidency, she wouldn't be able to get any of this legislated without the Democrats retaking a majority in the Senate.

Staples

We recently made a trip to Costco to stock up.

Since I had all the packaging handy, I could easily figure the cost per 1000 calories for some of the things we bought:

Oatmeal $0.53/kCal
Flour $0.14/kCal
Sugar $0.26/kCal
Rice $0.21/kCal

This doesn't include the annual membership fee, though, or the cost of driving further than the distance to our usual grocery store.  For the number of times a year that we go to Costco, it probably costs us about $12 each time to get over there and in the door.

Even so, by comparing against the chart I made of typical grocery store prices, Costco comes out fairly well, especially when I consider the quantity of food that we usually buy there.

For just those four items on this trip, we spent $35, and got 141,375 calories. No, these are not the only things that we eat.

Phase Three

After reading this post and this post about maintenance and the lack thereof, I decided to post a thought I had a while back:

Destruction is easy and fun. Building is easy, but not fun. Maintenance is neither easy nor fun.

Which pretty much explains the fall and rise of civilizations.

It also reminds me of something I read somewhere, perhaps in a midcentury book about farming. The writer or the person being quoted by the writer said that all the failed farms he had ever seen had one thing in common:  none of them had an oil can.

Fifteen and fifteen

We have learned that our health insurance will be going up by another fifteen percent. The new plan actually offers somewhat better coverage, but it appears that it will cover a narrower range of services than before. We still have some number of years before it becomes impossible for my husband's employer to offer "affordable" health insurance as defined by the Affordable Care Act, and we all get sent off to the exchange, but the trend is definitely in that direction.

On the brighter side, an elderly woman with a large fabric stash is downsizing and giving her fabric to the sewing circle at my church. She brought in a big stack of flannel, and I came away with something like fifteen yards of it. I will be making pajama pants, cloth diapers and wipes, a few cloth menstrual pads, and from the leftover scraps, some little disposable kitchen wipes.

I have some other sewing planned as well, and did a bit of a cutting-out party yesterday. I like doing the planning, designing, and cutting-out of sewing projects, but not the actual sewing so much. I'm going to move my sewing machine so that I can sit at it for a day or two or sewing; sewing while standing keeps the machine away from the toddler, but gets tiring if I'm doing a lot of sewing.

Also notable is that we recently received several bags of children's clothing from families in our church, whose children had outgrown them. We have very rarely had to buy our children new (or new used) clothes.

A poncho and a headband

I did a very quick and very simple sewing project:  a child-sized poncho out of remnant fabric. I knew that you can make a poncho by joining two rectangles of fabric; the geometry is a little awkward, but I figured out how to do it.

There's a diagram here, third image in the post.

The recipient of the poncho looks very cute in it.

I also did a relatively quick knitting project:  a headband in garter stitch, to go under the hat I made. Sometimes I want a bit more over my ears than I am getting from the hat. I had enough yarn left from the hat for two-thirds of the headband, and then I found a similar color in my stash to finish it off. Once again, I'm glad that I taught myself how to knit in the continental style, which is much faster; I was able to start and finish the headband on the same day.

"Property values" wins again

Background is here.

The voters did approve our school district's request for a 108%-plus increase in property tax levy for operating revenue.

The bright spot is that the margin of victory was much lower than that of the previous measure, which funded renovations and expansion; message sent.

A frugal transformation

The neighbors gave our family a lamp and a small side table. We did need the lamp, for a reading light in one of the children's bedrooms, but we didn't need the table.

The table hung out for a bit in the living room, but it clearly wasn't sturdy enough to survive for long. Looking more closely at it, the top was a hollow box made out of hardboard.

I also noticed that without the legs, the top could be turned into a painting, and hung on the wall as artwork. There was an empty section of wall in the family room that had been needing decoration for a long time.

For colors, I decided to go with the existing family room decor colors, which are basically the rainbow colors, plus white. There's also a lot of pale blue, but I left that out of the painting.

For a design and painting technique, I decided to do patterns of dots. I'm much better at placing dots than at spreading paint where I want it to go, and a structured pattern would counteract some of the visual chaos that goes on in the room. The table top was already red, so I left it that way as the background color.

Then I did the dots, in patterns that varied by color. It came out fairly well--I picked a good stopping point and didn't overwork it--but it's definitely an amateur effort.

With the help of some hardware from our hoard, I hung it up. The wall it's on is not well-lit, so the white dots are by far the most prominent, followed by the yellow dots, and the rest are much harder to distinguish from the background, without moving closer to it.

Warren's Medicare for All

I'm reading Elizabeth Warren's proposal for Medicare for All and how to pay for it now. I have not forgotten that she was in the Senate in 2010 and voted to pass the Affordable Care Act health care reform that was supposed to make health care affordable for all.  [Unladylike snort]

Warren believes that removing the risk of bankruptcy from medical bills and the risk of death from unaffordable health care is worth a massive expansion of government bureaucracy, and also an expansion of IRS power to go after "the rich" to get money to pay for Medicare for All, along with an expansion of immigration and a large reduction in combat and counter-terrorism spending.

She claims that she can eliminate health insurance premiums for the middle class while not raising their taxes. Buried in the details, though, she mentions that the income that the middle class would no longer be using to pay health insurance premiums would be subject to the Medicare tax--substantially increasing the amounts that households are paying toward Medicare, even if the tax rate stays the same. This income would also be subject to Social Security and income taxes.

She claims that no one would have to save for medical expenses any more...something that I do not believe will be possible until Revelation 22:2 comes to pass. No earthly plan can cover everything.

She claims that her plan will cover "every single person in the U.S.".  That's one heck of an incentive for the illegal immigration of sick people, some of whom will die painfully on the journey.

She plans to limit growth in health care spending so that it tracks growth in GDP, thus attempting to repeal by fiat the "cost disease" that has caused health care costs to grow far more rapidly than the quantity or quality of health care services. I was at one point working on a post on cost disease, but I got stuck. In some cases, it is clear that the perceived "good" of the service makes people inclined to purchase it even at an unreasonably high or opaque cost, and it seems that sometimes these social perceptions can bubble up to absolutely unsustainable levels. Warren is all the way up at "Health care is a human right!" in social mood, but she plans to sustain it by beating the costs down and the revenue up in any way that she can.

The cornerstone of Warren's Medicare for All plan is to turn employer contributions to health insurance premiums into employer contributions to Medicare. Supposedly she will scale them down a little and save employers a bit of money, but her plan is to make employers pay Medicare contributions based on the average health care costs of their employees. Since Medicare for All will offer more generous coverage than many employers do now, this is likely to increase costs for some employers, and it does nothing to reduce job discrimination against older and sicker people. There is also no guarantee that employers will pass any cost savings on to their employees, except that under collective bargaining agreements, employers can reduce their Medicare contributions by doing so. Which creates an incentive on both sides for increased unionization--and helps the Democrats win back union votes.

An aside:  I believe that unions are only really sustainable when they create enough value for the consumer to justify the costs of the union benefits.  In the old triangle of Better, Faster, Cheaper (where you pick two at most), unions won't be cheaper, and won't really be faster either, so they had better be Better.

Over time, Warren wants to transition the employers' Medicare contributions to a per-employee rate based on a national average cost of health care. This would be quite nasty for employers in lower-income areas, especially when compared against the promises that she is making to adjust some health care providers' pay rates based on regional differences.

Besides workers and employers, her other sources of revenue for Medicare for All are:  tax evaders, the financial sector, big banks, large corporations, multinational corporations, ultra-millionaires and billionaires, legal immigrants, naturalized illegal immigrants, and defense spending. Altogether, her revenue estimates for these only add up to $20.498 trillion, not even half of the nearly $52 trillion that she estimates Medicare for All will cost over ten years. Much of the rest seems to be expected to come from redirected state and federal spending on health care, including the health care benefits paid to government employees, but I can't see how she expects to get to $30 trillion.

Interestingly, she doesn't say anything specific about the money from the premium subsidies currently being given to people buying health insurance on the exchanges. It took some digging to find a national number for this, but from this article it appears that it was $55 billion in 2018, which over ten years would be $0.55 trillion.  Only about 10 million people receive these subsidies, according to this page.

Warren's plan only looks forward ten years, which I believe is too short a time frame, especially when it is based so much on soaking the mega-rich, who tend to not sit still for that kind of treatment. And there are only so many of them.

She has no plan for the thousands and thousands of workers in the health insurance industry who would lose their jobs thanks to Medicare for All.

If you take that number of $52 trillion, and divide by 10 to get the annual number, and then divide again by the approximate population of the United States, 330 million, you get a per capita cost of Medicare for All of $15,757.58.  Unsustainable, in every way.

In the second-to-last paragraph, she says that Obama supports Medicare for All. They'll get it right this time, for sure!