“The full force of goodness and righteousness”

Words of Governor Walz before last night’s action.

Protestors/rioters tried to cross the river from Minneapolis to St. Paul last night, but the St. Paul police held the bridges. Police and National Guard apparently kept most of the protestors on the move, splitting the large groups into smaller groups, and not allowing them to rejoin. They seemed eager to be taking offensive action finally, and not much concerned about niceties like media credentials—according to reporters, who reported about as much on this as on anything else.

There were a number of reports of cars without license plates, which continued into today, and while there were some reports of out-of-state plates on several police calls, most of the 150+ arrests made seem to have been of Minnesotans.

Shots were fired at various times, and there were reports of visible guns.  There may have been a campaign to flood 911 with fake calls; Minneapolis’s web site was under cyber attack last week.

People were defending their streets and businesses, in at least one case making a group of protesters
turn around and choose a different route, by brandishing baseball bats and clubs.

Two bodies were found in the last couple days, although the story that there have been no deaths so far is persisting.

Tonight there is curfew again, and a 5 pm closure of major highways.  There were protests at the Capitol this afternoon, and now the protesters are marching along the freeway toward Minneapolis. Other protests under way in Minneapolis, with two hours until curfew.

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Update:  For some reason, they were unable to close Highway 35W on time.  Many protestors/rioters now on the 35W bridge—the one that replaced the bridge that collapsed into the river with people on it some years ago.  There’s a gas tanker on the bridge which they are attacking; it is reported to be empty, aside from the poor driver.

One thing I noticed last night is that a bridge could be a bit hard to get off of, if your opponents are at both ends of it. Hmm.

Too much to keep up with

But sometimes taking a low-information approach helps to make the big picture clearer...like in that artist technique where you squint at your artwork to see what is wrong with it.

More or less the entire Minnesota National Guard is being deployed. Major highways into and across Minneapolis and St. Paul were shut down at 7 pm.  Curfew at 8, again being ignored by numerous protestors in Minneapolis, despite being told in four? press conferences today to stay home. Last time I checked, the main body of protestors at the 5th precinct building (I think) was splitting, some on the move, some staying put.

Some reports of shots fired in various places, and there are hints that police and National Guard are being more proactive tonight. An AR-15 was confiscated.

Minneapolis neighborhoods were making neighborhood-watch-type preparations, clearly having little faith in their leaders.

Blocking urban streets with concrete barriers only slows cars down, it doesn’t stop them—there are too many ways to get around them.

Arrest records (such as they are) do not support officials’ assertions that 80 to 100% of rioters last night were from out of state.

In the 6:30 pm press conference, St. Paul Mayor Carter went on for some time about why the protestors wouldn’t be satisfied with justice being done only for the Floyd case...and then in the sentences following he used the words “demonstrate” and “double down”.  I don’t think any of that helped.

That did not go well

Most of the protesters ended up at the 5th precinct police building, which became the center of more destruction for a couple of hours. Police and National Guard mostly disappeared during that time, leaving many people asking where they were. Even a couple of Minneapolis City Council members. Around midnight, hundreds of police and National Guard troops advanced on the 5th precinct location to disperse the crowd, and were met with resistance, including some gunfire, but they appeared to be retaking the area and to finally be starting to make some real arrests. Metro Transit had said at some point that they were not going to help transport arrestees.

I took a break, and came back not much more than an hour later to see Governor Walz doing a press conference and admitting to failure. The TV station's sidebar said there had been "several" arrests.

Power Line's take on the night and the press conference is here. Includes links to press conference videos. Walz did really say something like "Sorry we couldn't protect your small, minority-owned business, but we had to protect the Federal Reserve first." Mayor Frey (paraphrasing):  "This all makes me so sad...I just know we're better than this!" Walz said Frey had been awake for 72 hours straight.

Walz gave his overall priorities as preserving lives, protecting property, and re-establishing order, in that order. He seems to be trying to avoid the appearance of using force that could be characterized as excessive or lethal, under a belief that it would provoke a shift away from rioters primarily damaging property, to widespread person-on-person violence. He claimed that they didn't have the "resources" to make arrests, and were going to increase National Guard numbers to 1700.

Notable from the press conference is that he put some blame on organized rioters, specifically "white supremacists" and drug cartels. What about Antifa? I'm listening to some of this morning's press conference now, and this point about organized rioting is being very strongly emphasized. Walz said he believes only 20% of the rioters are Minnesotans! There were pleas for protestors to obey curfew and to not provide cover for outside agitators, and he was definitely painting it as an Us versus Them situation. That is new, and it's an interesting shift in the psychology of the response to the rioting.

Finally some overnight arrest numbers were given:  about 20 in St. Paul. I didn't catch exactly, but it was said that all, or most, or many, of them were from out of state. St. Paul was much quieter than Minneapolis last night.

Minneapolis had 15 to 20 arrests. Total! The number of buildings damaged must be into the high hundreds by now.

Even the Star Tribune was criticizing Walz on Friday.

About to start

Minneapolis and St. Paul announced 8 pm curfews this afternoon, followed after a while by inner-ring suburbs, and two neighboring counties. Probably many people have yet to hear about them. There are some exemptions apparently, including traveling to and from work

There’s a large protest going on now in Minneapolis, which blocked the 35W freeway for a while, that doesn’t look like it is going to comply with the curfew.

Businesses all over the place have been closing early, many being boarded up.  Many volunteers were helping with clean-ups today.  The governor appeared for a news conference this morning, announced that he had taken over from Minneapolis Mayor Frey in the middle of the night, and was asked what he intended to do about protestors violating his executive order by meeting in groups greater than ten.

National Guard last night were given limited roles, mainly defending the Capitol and firefighters.

No reason to stop in either case

Both the peaceful protesting and the unpeaceful rioting and looting increased yesterday. Target stores all over the Cities were closed, and Metro Transit bus and train services shut down.  Mail service suspended in a few areas.

Last night's madness included the mayor of Minneapolis ordering 3rd precinct police to abandon their building (the precinct headquarters mentioned in previous posts), as rioters broke into it and set it on fire. Some police gear was apparently looted from it. USPS trucks stolen and used to ram things. Other fires were going on in the same area, extending the devastation of Wednesday night (which people had been working on cleaning up throughout the day). Some other parts of the city also saw smashing, looting, and fires.

There was also a large and mostly peaceful protest in downtown Minneapolis of thousands of people, circling around and stopping for a time at the Hennepin County Government Center, where I had a spell of jury duty once. The presence of the county jail right across the street perhaps helped to keep the peace there; police acted to disperse the crowd when it was moving on from there through downtown.

In St. Paul, mostly along University Avenue, there was rioting and a number of fires and according to police over 170 buildings damaged or looted, although some of the rioters broke off and left to go see the 3rd precinct fire when the news reached them.  It looked like police continued to protect the SuperTarget.

Looters and arsonists were spreading out a bit:  robbing businesses along Grand Avenue in St. Paul, where there are many upscale boutiques, and apparently also setting fires in businesses along Energy Park Drive, which is a somewhat industrial area that isn't central, but just sits there in between other places. Out in the first-ring northern suburb of Roseville, there were break-ins in various places, apparently including a group forcing their way into the Rosedale Mall. Suburban police had warned businesses and malls to prepare for things like this. In the southern suburb of Apple Valley, a courthouse was set on fire. 

It is harder to get news of these smaller and much more dispersed events.

The National Guard was finally called in by the governor yesterday, 500 of them, but they were visibly deployed in only a few places, so far as I can tell. The governor has also not been very visible for the past day or so.                                                                                                                                                                                        

The mayor of Minneapolis in a press conference was asked about what President Trump had tweeted about him, and I'm pretty sure that his response to Trump was far more forceful than any of his responses to the rioting have been so far. Trump has mostly stayed away from the topic of the riots, probably for the best, since there are a nontrivial number of people around here who hate him so much that they would go out and start burning things down just to spite him.

Trump's idea in his partially-censored tweet, that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts", is at odds with Minnesota law, which doesn't allow the use of deadly force to defend property, and would require federal intervention, I believe.

And into St. Paul

We also lived in the St. Paul Midway area for a while.  Today:  Looting along University Avenue; police protecting SuperTarget.  This guy also has his reporting from last night’s rioting in Minneapolis, if you scroll down a bit.

Further update

List of damaged buildings with some photos and videos, across the affected neighborhoods. The library did get damaged.

There were reports of shots fired near Target in the early morning hours, along with some looting still going on even now. Several other cars were burned, possibly at an auto repair place. City street sweepers were out clearing broken glass from the streets.

Minneapolis has a new food desert

At one point, we lived in the neighborhood where people have been protesting the death of George Floyd. The protests have spawned riots, which are still ongoing [into the early hours of May 28]. Note:  the times in the article are given in Eastern Time, while Minneapolis is on Central Time.

The area around the police precinct headquarters where businesses are now being looted and burned was where we did most of our shopping when we lived there; the Target, Autozone, and Cub Foods grocery store were very familiar sights to us.

Undoubtedly many of the protesters and rioters are coming in from other areas. Minnesota’s gradual easing out of the shutdown, with very high numbers of people currently unemployed, is probably a factor. The relations between the Minneapolis police and various subpopulations (not all of them racial minorities) have been poor for many years.

Update:  The mainstream news reports so far tend to understate the extent of the damage, but from following various Twitter links, a more complete picture can be put together.  Autozone, Wendy's, an affordable housing complex under construction, and someone's car went up in flames. A large number of smaller fires were set here and there. Windows and police cars were smashed up at the precinct headquarters. Target was practically cleaned out, and trashed throughout. Cub Foods was also trashed, but only partially cleaned out.  Graffiti everywhere. Stores and charter school spaces in the strip mall adjacent to Target were smashed and looted. Window smashing and looting extended for many blocks along Lake Street, apparently mostly to the east, but also to the west a bit. Three banks and two auto parts stores besides Autozone, two or three liquor stores, and an Aldi's were smashed and looted, plus nearly all of the small businesses in between. Basically only the businesses that were actively guarded escaped major damage, and even then not always, as apparently a pawn shop owner shot and killed a looter but ended up with the shop looted anyway. No reports of damage to the public library.

Cars were coming and going through almost all of this area the whole time, as far as I can tell, including right in front of Target, which facilitated the looting.  Police presence was concentrated around the precinct headquarters and the Autozone fire, and was only extended further a couple of times by lines of cops pushing the protesters back, such as when the police were trying to make room for the fire trucks to get in. Most protesters followed the mayor's directive to wear masks and practice social distancing.

At various times, police were firing rubber bullets and flash grenades and tear gas, which sent people into Target to get milk to pour into others' eyes. Rioters were shooting off illegal fireworks, not necessarily upwards.

Some other smashing and looting happened in other areas of Minneapolis.

Protests are starting up again today at the precinct headquarters, with smoldering ruins right across the street.

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Update (6/5/29):  Star Tribune article.

Finished the bowl, and a few other things

I decided to use puff paint to cover the gap between the lining strip and the upper inside of the bowl. The gap proved to be a little too big to bridge with paint alone, though, so I found a piece of twine, stuffed it in, and then painted over that. Now the bowl is finished, and in use. With the paint colors that I used, it looks very Eighties.

I also made a new seat for a kid's chair. It's an old school chair, with a metal frame and a plastic seat and back, where the seat had broken. I mangled the rest of the seat off, and then the chair sat for a couple years waiting for the right piece of scrap plywood to come along. I cut the plywood to shape using our scroll saw, found bolts in our hardware hoard, and drilled holes in the plywood for them.

Then I noticed that the bolts were slightly too large for the holes in the metal frame, so I had to drill them out a bit larger. The pointy end of a file will work as a deburring tool (for taking off the little rough bits of metal around the edges) in a pinch.

Out in a flower bed and some planters, I am trying to grow flax this year, from grocery store flax seeds. The idea is from a short article in Farm Show magazine about a Canadian lady who got into growing flax that way.

The magazine looks very interesting, full of very creative homegrown inventions for farm and garden, although I think the single issue of it that I saw was a special edition that gathered these from a number of previous issues. I may try a subscription at some point.

I was growing to try to sprout some of the seeds first, to see if they were growable, but didn't get to that before the time I wanted to plant them, so I just planted away, and will see what comes up.

Doing what I can

Our yard has a number of nice features, but many of the landscaping elements are deteriorating badly.   I was sitting outside for a while yesterday, just looking at all the things that I couldn’t do anything about.

The solution for not being able to do something is to find something that can be done, and then do it, so I started picking up some twigs and leaves that were within reach of my lawn chair.

Right away, I found an agate in the landscaping rocks. That is not so unusual in Minnesota, where some gravel deposits have lots of them, but in this case the timing was right on the mark.

Most have tested negative?, and a project

Apparently Minnesota, with a rate of positive tests that has been around ten percent, is also one of the states with the highest rates of positive tests. At the same time, ICU beds have gradually filled beyond the number that were available before the pandemic started.

The Minnesota State Fair, which is a very big deal around here in the weeks going into Labor Day, was cancelled for 2020.

In other news, I have been working on a replacement for a "stuff bowl"--a decorative bowl that serves as a holding place for stray small objects, until they are put away. I had been using one of my husband's large pottery bowls, but he wanted it back.

So I have been trying out a new craft idea:  a sort of papier mache, but with fabric and acrylic or latex paint instead of paper and glue/paste. For a base or form, I used the lower part of an ice cream bucket, cut to the height that I wanted. For fabric, I chose a stretchy textured synthetic that has proven to have poor durability on its own.

A bowl with some kind of a regular visual pattern seemed best for the location, for balance; there are already shiny and organically-textured things there.

I found it helpful to use a smaller plastic container as a stand, so I could work on the bottom, sides, and inside top edge of the bowl all at once. I cut out a largish circle of the fabric, and made regular cuts so that I could closely wrap the form, gluing the fabric in place with paint.

After it dried, I sponged another color of paint on, to help bring out the fabric's textured pattern, and then gave it a coat of Mod Podge, to help the surface feel smoother.

For the inside, I cut a circle of fabric to fit the bottom, painted it in, and then covered a strip of plastic from the remainder of the ice cream bucket with a tube of the fabric, to cover the inner sides. I hot-glued the strip in place, and painted that too.

The next step is to find something to cover the space at the top of the strip.

Painting the toilet seat again

When I first started doing this a couple years ago, I found that the new paint job would last about six months, based on the first two times.

But the third re-painting only lasted for three months, if that. I don’t know why.

I finally got around to the fourth re-painting, still using the original cans of spray primer and paint. After priming and painting, there was still a little of each left, but probably not enough for another round.

They cost $4 each, so the cost of each repainting is about $2, making the process cheaper than buying a new seat, although there is about 2.5 hours of labor involved each time.

I’m happy to have gotten this done, and will have to see how it holds up.

Velcro for de-pilling

I wanted to de-pill my winter coat, which is woven wool on the outside, before putting it away for the season. I started out just pulling fuzz off by hand, then got to thinking about sweater stones—scratchy     stones used to snag pills and pull them off.

I realized that the hook side of hook-and-loop tape, aka Velcro, would do the same thing. I had a piece in my bag of elastic and bias tape and other sewing bits, so I tried it.

It worked well, brushed lightly over the surface of the wool. The Velcro does clog up after a bit, and it helps to have a pin or a needle or a paper clip wire to get underneath the lint and lift it off the hooks.

Next step forward

Last week version 3.0 of coronavirus modeling for Minnesota was finally released, and the governor announced somewhat loosened restrictions.

I skimmed through the technical document for the model, and there are some interesting points, although it seems that the governor’s most recent order—beginning next Monday—was driven mostly by political considerations. One of them being having Wisconsin for a neighbor, where many things have been opened up, thanks to judicial intervention. A large fraction of Minnesotans live within easy driving distance of the Wisconsin border, and many were already accustomed to going to Wisconsin to buy fireworks banned by Minnesota. (Some of those fireworks are also illegal to fire off in Wisconsin, but can still be legally purchased there.)

So the governor is going to allow retail businesses to open, at half capacity and with other restrictions, and is also allowing small gatherings of up to ten people.

The modeling timeline is that they built the latest version of the model in April, took data from March 22 to April 25, did calibration and runs, and then stopped on May 1 to write up results, which were released on May 13. So data from the last two weeks was not included, perhaps for the better in terms of calibration, since recent weeks have been dominated by the spread of the virus in nursing homes, while the model does not yet have the capability of working with “hot spots”. Or co-morbidities. Or most combinations of interventions.

A couple of numbers from the technical document and slides keep appearing out in the media:  a 37.6% reduction in people’s social contacts under social distancing, and a 55.1% reduction in contacts under the stay-at-home order. The media portrays them as a failure of Minnesotans to achieve the government-planned reductions of 50% and 80%, but the numbers above simply did not come out of the real world, not at all. They came from the modelers’ attempts to tweak these and other parameters to make the model’s output match the data that they had.

One surprising thing I found in the technical document is that according to the Department of Health, 65% of the deaths attributed to the virus have happened outside of hospitals; at home or in a nursing home. Even the model predicts nearly 70% for this.

In an earlier post, I guessed a long-term care rate in Minnesota of 1.5%. It is actually under 1%. If I put that together with the dying-out-of-hospital rate, that suggests that over 6,000 Minnesotans are going to die at home over the course of the pandemic.

The one very definite indication from the scenarios that were modeled is that Minnesota should not follow the CDC guidelines for re-opening, which according to the model would delay the peak in coronavirus cases for several months, and then spread it out so widely that half of the 2200 ICU beds with ventilators that the state has arranged for would never be used.

Under more realistic conditions, the virus is expected to peak in Minnesota in late June or early July.

Sent outside

We have a free-from-the-side-of-the-road table that is not needed in the house, but which could be useful on the deck. I don’t know whether to call it a large end table or a small coffee table, but it is a little over two feet square.

To help it weather the outdoors, at least for this summer, it needed its grooved top protected, and the shelf underneath mostly removed.

I did the shelf part first, since the table would have to be upside down for that. I drilled holes at the corners with a bit brace, started cutting with a keyhole saw, and finished each cut with a regular hand saw. Otherwise, I could have used my husband’s jig saw, but I prefer hand tools, which are usually much quieter, safer, and cheaper than power tools.

For the top, my preference would have been to cover it with sheet metal, but what I had was fabric left over from the latest armchair project:  some sort of canvas with a waterproof backing. I had to piece it together a little, and for this I did flat seams by overlapping two pieces, and then running two parallel lines of stitching down through the overlapped part. This particular fabric was a bit difficult to maneuver through my sewing machine with the size of pieces that I was working with, so the end result does not lie perfectly flat. Just good enough for a temporary solution.

Having run out of upholstery tacks with the chair project, the best solution for securing the fabric to the top was staples, along the sides of the top. I folded the edges of the fabric under before stapling. Like always, I found it difficult to hold the staple gun firmly enough to make all the staples to go in smoothly; many of them got some assistance from a hammer afterward.

And that was it. Ideally, I would like to paint both base and top, in different colors, but that is not a priority at the moment.

Bed week?

Last week I:

Turned and repaired the mattress.

Stitched up some rips in the mattress cover.

Mended a corner of the sheet.

And patched worn-out areas of the quilt.

Lampshade

I finished re-covering an old lampshade, after a great deal of fiddling.

It sat for a long time, while I thought about a lining for it. I was going to use large sheets of watercolor paper, but they were too inflexible and difficult to fit to the lampshade’s slightly tapered shape. Finally I resorted to Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts:  The Art and Science of Keeping House* for ideas on materials. She mentioned parchment, which made me think of kitchen parchment paper...but it was too fragile. I also experimented with freezer paper a bit, but soon got tired of wrestling with it and decided to just use fabric.

I had the outer fabric picked out already. After many false starts, it became clear that the best way to proceed for both the inner and outer fabrics was to machine sew them into tubes, hemmed at the lower edge, and hand sew that end to the frame. Then I could trim the top edge neatly, and sew that down, gathering or tucking as needed, since the top of the frame is narrower than the bottom.

I did all that for the lining first, since it made sense to work from the inside out. At the top, I gathered it to fit. For the outer fabric, tucks looked better.

Where I needed to sew them together, I used the “Frankenstein stitch”/antique seam mentioned in this post.

I was careful at all stages to keep the edges very neat, and to remove all stray threads and lint from the fabrics, because as Mendelson warns in her book, when you turn on the light, you can see everything that’s in the lampshade.

Still, I could have done better with that; out of the four sides, only one came out as the “good” side. But one is enough, and there is always the possibility of adding some opaque trim.

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* A book which is a good reference, but exhausting to read, unless you replace every instance of “should” in it with”could”. The claim in the beginning that she is describing ideal housekeeping, and not prescribing it, are insufficient against the bulk and sense of the text.

Let's see

According to Power Line, only 83 of the 428 total deaths in Minnesota as of yesterday have been of people living outside of long-term care facilities.

At the same time, the official stance is that there could be 100 cases for every known positive. As of yesterday, that was 7234, with possibly as many as 80% of them outside long-term care. So maybe over 580,000 Minnesotans have already had it...that would almost 11% of the state's population.

But let's be conservative, and say that it is half that; 83 deaths divided by 290,000 cases would be a death rate of 0.03% (outside long-term care).

Some of those cases are people who recovered, but some cases are still in progress, and because the pandemic has still been spreading, the number that will die soon could be much larger than the number that already have died; I will make a guess of 1000 additional people here.  That raises the death rate to 0.4%; about 21,300 (outside long-term care).

The epidemic in the long-term care facilities is basically separate. I guessed above that they were 1.5% of the population, or 81,000, but maybe it is only 1%.  [EDITED TO ADD:  It is under 1%.] Clearly their death rate is much higher than the general population, my guess at present would be 10%*.  So say 8100 additional long-term-care deaths, for a total of 29,400.

The latest I've seen from the state's model, which they are supposedly running again this week, is a projection of about 22,000 deaths. The governor's orders don't exactly match the modeling assumptions, so this is probably too high.

Now, to make a more liberal estimate, 83 deaths divided by 580,000 cases would be a death rate of 0.01%.  If I stay proportional to my earlier guess, and say that there maybe are 2000 additional infected people who will die soon, then the guess overwhelms the number of actual deaths, and I'm back to an estimate of a 0.4% death rate, and the same prediction for the state overall.

If I keep my guess at the same 1000 as before, then it would be a death rate of 0.2%, with total deaths of about 18,800.

These numbers partially confirm what my intuition has been telling me:  some level of shutdown is helpful, but the state has been locked down too much for too long. Put more safeguards around the nursing homes, but most of the restrictions on the general population should be eased. People will still act according to their personal risk tolerance, which will do much to "flatten the curve" without any government action.

A couple of days ago, by the way, the health department representative when questioned revealed that 99.24% of the people who died had underlying health conditions. They're sitting on a lot of data that they're not sharing freely, and they are trying to get even more, legally or not.

That 580,000 is also the last number that I've heard for the number of unemployment applications in the state.

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* I noticed while writing that an estimate of a rate of 10%, for something that must be at least 1%, mathematically cannot be off by more than a factor of 10.

Fine adjustments

I have been thinking about something from Cozy Minimalist Home which says that our furnishings should have both presence (style) and breathing room. That was why I was working recently on decorating and painting a cardboard box for the children's paper supply:  the papers are in a very central position on the bookshelves, and without the box, they tended to spread widely.

The puff paint embossing worked out well, aside from the paint coming out of the bottles rather unevenly. I did have to wipe off and redo a few parts before it dried, because I smeared them while working on other parts. After it dried thoroughly, but before painting over it, I did a pencil rubbing, to see how the relief turned out. The paper stuck to the paint in a few places, but only slightly.

The whole thing got two coats of paint, with paint that I wanted to use up as the undercoat, and craft paint for the top coat.  Dried and in place, the box does add style to that part of the room.

I also made one or two other small changes to the arrangement of things on the bookshelves, to help with the breathing room issue.

House arrest continues

The governor extended the stay-at-home order until May 18, while allowing retail businesses to open up curbside service and delivery. Earlier this week, many non-retail businesses were allowed back to work.

The problem with opening businesses, is that their customers may or may not come back. And many businesses have other businesses as their customers.

The governor believes that Minnesota’s coronavirus peak has been delayed until late May or early June. I believe that it is likely to come a bit later than that, just because of the time needed for it to spread that widely. Even when things are opened up, people will still be doing a lot of social distancing.

The best analogy here is to the way that a fire spreads, by fits and starts, flaring up under some conditions, while barely smoldering under others. I have been wondering about computer models of fire spread.  They are probably not very accurate either, because of the element of chance that must frequently come into play.

At present, they are doing more tests and finding more positives, but the ICU population is remaining just about flat, reflecting the fact that the worst cases are coming out of the nursing homes, and aren’t hanging on to life very long after hospitalization.

In any case, I finished up a household inventory this week, and we clearly have plenty of things that we can be doing at home. I sewed a baby sling from fabric that I was intending to use for quilt backing. I divided one hosta plant that really needed it, and moved another that was awkwardly situated in relation to the other plants.

I also used the legs of the coffee table as a frame for winding rug warp, for the little rug that is half woven. This time, I have real cotton rug warp yarn from the thrift store; I had a lot of trouble before with the crochet cotton breaking during weaving.

There are a number of little mending, maintenance, and repair jobs on my list. I have been making progress on those.

Finally, I have been looking for something in the house to paint, and noticed that the box holding the children’s paper supply could use some embellishment. My plan is to lay on a design with puff paint, and then to paint over it all.