Making do

I've been doing lots of sewing, organizing, cleaning, and optimizing.  Mending towels. Cutting up worn-out fabric for kitchen wipes. I found that scrap paper is also not so bad for wiping out greasy pans.

I unearthed some items that have been wanted for many months.  Still looking for the extra sheet for my bed, which at one point I stored so cleverly that I haven't seen it since. I've been borrowing a sheet from my fabric inventory.

The big universal pot lid of my husband's fits my mixing bowl very nicely, which is handy for when there's bread dough rising.

I have finally more or less pulled together enough seating for the whole family to have a sit-down meal in the kitchen, all at the same time.  (The second refrigerator is needed, but is very much in the way.)

I made a list of low-cost family activity ideas, which we have not drawn on much yet, but it is there.

Thanks to the cold weather, I've not had to do much with the yard yet.  Many of the black raspberry canes were mowed down over the winter, so I'm expecting fewer berries this summer.  Waiting to see if the bulbs we planted last fall are going to come up.

A big load of Easter breakfast leftovers were sent home with us on Sunday.  We have a secondhand vacuum sealer that no longer vacuums but still seals, and I bagged up most of the leftovers for the freezer.

I messed around a bit with painting paper coffee filters and making flowers out of them.  They turned out well.

Eggs cost $7.99 for a flat of 30 now, roughly double what they cost before, but a flat weighs nearly four pounds, so they are still relatively economical.

I've been thinking a lot about a window covering for the library, to replace the temporary paper one I put up.  I've made a number of experimental samples, but haven't found anything that I like enough to invest the time into making in a full-size version.

I knit a dishcloth from the crochet cotton left over from one of the experiments.

Biden's family glitch executive order

Text here: they seem to have forgotten to number this one.

It does not actually contain any specific order regarding fixing the "family glitch", only a reference to proposed rule changes, where apparently the IRS would decide to ignore the letter of the Affordable Care Act law*, and do something different instead, and then everyone else would fall into line, and then we all can have a Kum-Ba-Ya Konga Line off into the sunset....

What Biden does order is that a broad and unspecified set of federal entities look for similar instances where they can SUCK AS MANY MORE PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE INTO THE HEALTH INSURANCE LEVIATHAN.  Including streamlining application and documentation processes.

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*As the IRS has interpreted it so far; there are articles and quotations saying that this interpretation is incorrect and that is why this can be fixed at the IRS level without amending the law.  However, I went back and looked at the text of the Affordable Care Act, in Section 1401(a) where it is amending the Internal Revenue Code, and I believe the IRS is correct.  Affordability is defined relative to the employee's cost, not to the family's.

The fact that the family glitch has never been resolved by litigation--I don't think anyone has even tried to do that--also supports the presence of the glitch within the Affordable Care Act itself.  The left is perfectly willing to send a liberal litigant against a liberal defendant in front of a liberal judge in order to get the judgment that they all want, when necessary.

They have not done that in this case; the family "glitch" was intentional, and their belated fix is only for the sake of furthering their agenda.  Which includes the quiet part that one policy advisor said out loud, where healthy families are needed to pay premiums to cover the health care costs of smaller and sicker households.

2021 enrollment in the health insurance exchanges was only 12 million, by the way, and the proposed rule changes might add a million or so more.

Paul Ryan and his ephemeral majority were such a disappointment in their failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but happily there is still God.

Also, apparently Minnesota did some sort of resolution of the family glitch within MinnesotaCare in 2021.  This is the first I've heard of it.  But supposedly it will benefit fewer than 2,000 people. There is this story of a family paying 25% of their income for health insurance being invited to the signing of Biden's executive order, that doesn't mention the Minnesota fix:

"The options we were given to get out of the glitch were to one, get divorced, two lower our income and qualify for Medicaid, or three convince my husband's employer to be in violation of the ACA and not offer any amount of health care subsidies to my husband."

Too little, too late

By far, the most-viewed post on this blog is my Health Insurance post.  Mostly viewed by bots, I presume, but still.

Biden and Obama just had their little Obamacare celebration at the White House, which I saw variously described beforehand as "promoting" and "pushing" the Affordable Care Act, which is an odd way to talk about an epic piece of legislation that was passed en masse twelve years ago, and that supposedly is very popular, and that is also supposedly politically impossible to repeal.

There have been a number of articles recently about finally doing something about the "family glitch" that I described--where health insurance is deemed affordable if the cost of employer-based coverage for a single worker is within 9.5% of their income, and never mind if they are buying family coverage also--because they are not eligible to purchase coverage on the exchanges at all, on account of the coverage available through the employer.

Apparently Biden is about to solve this problem by executive order [Edit: here], and there may be legislative action later on. 

From what I've seen so far, the executive order would allow family members affected by the glitch to buy subsidized insurance on the exchanges, beginning with January 2023 coverage.  They anticipate that about one million of the several million glitched families would do so, along with maybe 200,000 people who are presently uninsured.

I'm sure that the administration will manage to mess up the implementation of this somehow.  This is especially likely when calculating subsidy amounts, since the exact amount ought to depend on how much the breadwinner is paying through their employer in premiums--which can change mid-year as the employee hits a birthday and moves up a price bracket. 

One feature of our present coverage is that after we pay the premiums for the first three children, the rest are included at no additional cost.  This has been the case across various plans from various insurance companies, but I don't know where it came from and I don't believe that it will necessarily be the case with the plans on the exchanges.

I'm not very happy about the idea of having different health insurance for different family members, and having to learn to deal with the exchange, and then perhaps actually having to do so.  It is complex enough when everyone is on the same plan, and when the employer's HR drone is handling the annual health plan shopping and application process.

People have been complaining a lot about the recent inflation, but the truth is that there is still a lot of slack in most people's finances that goes to things beyond the austere basics.  The Biden administration has to deal with the family glitch soon, though, because many of these families have had much less slack for almost seven years now.  The increases in the standard deduction and in child tax credits have only partially offset the premium costs in absolute terms, and the uneven distribution of subsidies created a substantial relative differential in disposable income.

Finally, this fix to the family glitch would only return our out-of-pocket premium costs to roughly the pre-Affordable Care Act level.  Obama promised that premiums would be lower by $2500 per year, remember?

Well???

There are ways that could be accomplished, but you can be sure that that is how it will not be done.

Soap and sewing

A quantity of soap shavings came home with children after an activity.  I melted down the soap to make new bars.

How I should have started was to heat up a little water in the bottom of my laundry soap pan, and then to slowly add soap shavings and dissolve them.  Most of the time, what I had was a softened, gooey mass of soap.  Not as bad as the time I was melting old, dry, hard bits of soap, but not good.  The laundry soap pan does not have a handle, and it took some time to incorporate all of the shavings.

Near the end, I found that turning the heat up from Low to the lower side of Medium was helpful.  The soap was still not anywhere near liquid, but it was at least moldable.  

I packed it into a pan, let it cool, cut it into small bars, and have put them up to dry and harden for a few months.

I suspect they will end up a bit crumbly, but hopefully they will be usable in bar form.  If they aren't, they can go into a future batch of laundry soap.

In other projects, I have been sewing toddler pants, using fabric from old adult clothes and elastic from worn-out kids' pants.  So far I have made four pairs.  The process is a bit time-consuming when I have to pick out multiple rows of stitching to liberate the elastic, and when I have to piece fabric together to make it wide enough.

It was easier to draw up a quick pattern than to dig out an old one.  So these pants look a little goofy, too, but in a slightly different way than previous versions did.

I also worked through several items that needed mending; still have a bag full.

Yesterday I dyed some fabrics in the washer in preparation for making three skirts.  This morning I was able to sketch out a pattern and cut out two of them.  The sewing for these should be straightforward.  The third will be a circle skirt, from a circular tablecloth.

Mending and melding

I finally took a stab at my mending pile, and was able to adequately repair several items of clothing, one of which required serious darning/re-weaving where a button's stitching had ripped right out.

One of the things I did a while ago, and then forgot about, was to overdye a skirt and shirt in the washer.  The skirt had colors that were too bright, and the shirt was much too pale.  The skirt came out very nicely, and the shirt came out in a dull but tolerable shade.

I did a quick experiment with cutting a milk jug into narrow strips and then crocheting them.  Crochet uses up length very quickly, and it was difficult to cut very much of it because the scissors I was using tended to slide on the plastic.

Then I messed around with ironing the result, in between sheets of kitchen parchment paper. The plastic fused in some places and not in others.

I also tried ironing flat pieces of milk jug together to fuse them, again using parchment paper to protect the iron and working surface.  This worked, but since the plastic shrinks a bit when heated, you can't butt two edges together and expect them to stay there.  It also doesn't come out entirely flat.

At the playground, I found some stringy dead weeds that could probably be made into a rustic basket, if one reliably had their hands free for working.

I counted diapers going into the washer, and indeed as described in The Tightwad Gazette, twenty diapers equals one load of diaper laundry.  Cloth wipes are included in that, and really it is twenty diaperings rather than diapers, because I am putting a newborn-size diaper inside a larger-baby diaper at each diaper change.

And onward

I made a simple cover/sheath for a meat cleaver, from a piece of suede and some waxed thread.  The thread is extra-heavy-duty, and there was no particular need for a strong seam, so I made very large (one inch) stitches, and the sewing went very quickly:  place leather on an old phone book, poke hole with awl, make stitch, repeat.  I used my last glover's needle for the sewing, but an embroidery needle would have worked fine.

I also took up my quilt project from more than a year ago.  The quilt just needed a few more blocks made, and then to be assembled.  The last step is sewing down the edge binding by hand, and that is half done now.

My most-used quilt was waiting for a replacement back, when I looked at the cotton batting that was hanging out of it, and realized that it would need new innards as well.  The top needs more repairs besides the ones I did a few years ago, but it is worth re-using.

I read about a woman making sleeping bags for the homeless from ironed-together chip bags, and old coats, and I thought of doing something similar for making diaper covers for cloth diapers.  Then I found a laminated woven plastic rice bag that I had saved, which is much sturdier than the chip bags I ironed, and I used that instead.  I encased it in fabric in about the right shape, and added snaps. It came out looking good, but it is very much too small in the waist, so I will have to add extensions.  I hang diaper covers up to dry after washing them, so I'm not worried that the plastic might melt in the dryer.

Other things I have used the rice bags for:  wet bags for the diaper bag and for swimming stuff, and a sewing machine cover.

A child and I watched a YouTube video of a guy attempting to make bulletproof armor from milk jugs.  He had a laborious process involving cutting the plastic up with scissors, shredding it in a blender, baking it in a pan in the oven, and taking it out frequently to try to knead it smooth.  Even then, he had air pockets in his block of plastic, and it certainly wasn't bulletproof when he tested it.  From our one experiment here last year, we found that an iron generates sufficient heat to laminate flat pieces of milk jug plastic together, one layer at a time.  That was a small piece, though, and I don't know how hard it would be to keep a larger one flat as it is built up.

Place-making

A neighbor was giving away some pieces of furniture, and gave us a small table.  I cleaned out a neglected corner of the laundry room, and made a quiet little place to sit and work on something. There were also two small shelves that were claimed by family members.

A child was working on making a face shield for sledding, and decided to use the side of a 2-liter bottle.  Since it was curved, the child decided to iron it under a piece of kitchen parchment paper..  Turns out that what this plastic does when heated is to immediately shrink and make large, smooth blisters.  But this worked out in the child's favor, because three of the blisters were placed just right for the eyes and nose of a pair of goggles.  Child went on to build a full face mask off of that.

Later on I did my own experiment with another cut-up 2-liter bottle.  What came out was a smoothly pebbled (with bumps up to about 2 inches across) otherwise flat surface that is about five inches by seven.  It looks very nice, but it would take a lot of bottles to cover a surface of any size.

I also did an experiment into making flatbread.  Cooking it on the griddle and in the oven had very similar results, except that the griddle was better for browning it.