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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Charges have been dropped against State Police Officer Ryan Londregan, who fatally shot black man Ricky Cobb II, as Cobb was driving away from an arrest while Londregan and another officer were leaning into the car.
I happened to be going into the Government Center for jury duty on a day that Londregan had a hearing, and I saw some of his supporters setting up in the atrium, but I didn't realize what they were there for until later. There were also counter-protesters angrily shouting slogans like "No justice, no peace!" for a while.
The atrium you can see in the picture in the article extends up the entire height of the building between the two towers of offices and courtrooms, and the protesting was very audible even on the top floor, which is where the jury office is now. It used to be in the basement under the street that the building straddles.
I was surprised that protesting was being allowed inside the building. There is a large paved space outdoors on the north side.
-------------------
Closer to home, it is yard sale/estate sale/spring clean-up season, with two especially interesting finds. The first is a pair of pliers used by cobblers, which incorporates a small, square hammer head, so leather can be pulled taut and nailed at the same time. One of the handles is bent, so I'm going to have to figure out how to straighten it. The other item looks a lot like a golf club, but it has a ridged horizontal metal blade, and is apparently an old-fashioned weed-whacker. It has been very handy, as we have been getting a lot of rain and the weeds have been growing at high speed.
I'm on sabbatical, and working as hard as ever. I discovered that circumstances are no longer hindering me from doing housework at a fast pace: "Housercize".
I finally figured out how to semi-stabilize the cabinet of my spare sewing machine. The cabinet is large and nice, but its support structure was absurdly inadequate. The legs insert into the cabinet, and are supposed to be steadied by laminated wood arcs, connected by a wood rail. The layers had begun to separate after years of being stored in a barn, and wouldn't hold the pegs from the legs. At one point, the whole thing collapsed. I shoved the legs under it horizontally so the plywood protecting the sewing machine compartment wouldn't be crushed, and left it that way for months, while thinking vaguely of making a pair of short bookshelves to support the cabinet at the ends.
I eventually noticed, in my excavations in the garage, that an oak chair back I had saved from a broken roadside freebie would be just about the right size to replace the underframe. It turned out to be exactly the right size, more exactly-right than needed because the legs have lots of wobble in them. I had no trouble in drilling peg holes into the sides of the chair back.
The worst of it was having to set it all back up. I enlisted two of the sturdier children to lift the cabinet while I connected everything together. It is still wobbly, but it will do until I find or make the right little bookshelves.
Another project is a computer chair mat, using leather scraps from the surplus store. These scraps are very thick leather in several different colors, and I bought two boxes' worth. I am following the same modular-width/free-length design as I did in my last quilt, for efficient re-use of materials. Three pattern pieces, for width only: full-strip-width, half-strip-width, quarter-strip-width. The problem of how to connect them is yet to be solved.
I also covered another chair seat with utility leather. The first one I did went from a suede-y dull green to a very polished brown after a few months of use. It shows some scratches.
Before Christmas, we were doing some post-dentist shopping at a new-to-us thrift store. They had two vintage accordions in the store. I was able to go back to the store in January with Christmas money and some savings. The brown accordion I was thinking of buying was no longer there, but the other one was. So now I have a pearly-blue accordion, in good-enough condition. It is both easy and challenging to play. Previous musical experience with piano and school band is helping, along with a couple of beginner videos.
My husband around that time brought home very large cardboard boxes from work; enough for each of the children to have one of their own. It was hard to traverse the living room for a while. Some of the cardboard became cardboard armor and airplanes and rockets. The armorer has developed some rather advanced techniques for making helmets and workable elbow joints.
We also made an excursion to the Axman Surplus store. Some of the kids wanted motors, one wanted plastic clips, and I was pleased to find that they still had some airline china, as I wanted a couple of mini-plates.
I was reluctantly beginning to sew new cushion covers for our glider rocker when several of its joints came unglued and I found that a bushing? was missing. I found the bushing later, and for now we are enjoying having some extra space in the living room.
John C. Wright reviews Lilith also, after previously writing two posts about MacDonald's Phantastes.
Lilith is indeed a very difficult book to understand--I've only read it two or three times, and I no longer own a copy--but at the same time the Lilith character is astonishingly modern in her pride and violence, and one of MacDonald's core messages that runs throughout his writings--obedience to God--is made very clear.
Most of the book is set within a highly-symbolic metaphysical landscape. Within this landscape are a number of scenes that seem to be intended to express spiritual truths. One scene that has stuck with me ever since reading the book is a never-ending furious battle between two factions, both of which claim they are on the side of Truth. This battle has no effect at all on the rest of that world. The protagonist does not engage in it, goes off on a foolish crusade of his own, and eventually has to simply obey instructions about one small rock, which when properly placed brings a great deal of healing.
My understanding of the Lona character is that she appeared to be about fifteen years old, which in MacDonald's time was sometimes considered a marriageable age. The two very similar white leopards are also difficult to sort out. One is Lilith, and I believe the other is the daughter of Adam and Eve who also appeared as the masked lady at the house.
For the Little Ones and the Bags, it is helpful to consider The Princess and Curdie, where Curdie is given the gift of being able to discern a person's moral nature. A wicked person's hand feels to him like the foot of the beast they are morally descending toward; Curdie's good mother's work-hardened hands feel human, and soft and lovely. MacDonald was showing how a person could descend into brutishness and a very thorough spiritual dullness.
