All was not calm, but all was bright

We weren't able to see the "Christmas star" conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn on Monday, because it was so hazy that we often couldn't even see the moon, but we were able to see them well yesterday.  My husband has a small telescope plus a wide assortment of odd lenses, and we were able to just see the rings of Saturn.

A bit after that, a tree blew down onto the power lines in front of a neighbor's house.  The power went off, and on, and then mostly off, with a series of power surges from arcing wires.

At least one of the wires broke and fell across the neighbors' driveway and into the yard next door, starting a smallish fire there.

It took some time for the electric company to get the electricity to the wire turned off, although the fire department arrived within a few minutes.

With the combination of for-real pyrotechnics and wind, it seemed to us prudent to load up the family and go run an errand.

After we got back, the power was out for only about two hours more before it was repaired.

Our electronics and appliances seem to all be working fine.

As a test of our emergency preparations, things mostly went well.  The deficiencies that we've identified will be addressed.

Straight out of Mordor

 Where they'll start:

Think long and hard about how far the tentacles of achieving the Green New Deal can extend under the auspices of federal COVID-19 mitigation.

Remember, those who are working on this don’t care about the middle-class and they have not for decades. The visibility of the ‘rust belt’ is the reference. This is about government bureaucrats using their DC power-base to control trillions in economic value and sell their ability to influence the winners and losers to the highest foreign bidder.

Look at what blue states have already done to seize power and control. Now think about that same manipulative intent spread throughout the entire country by weaponizing federal agencies with advanced regulation.

That should start to frame the reference point going forward. Remember, within totalitarian states religion is a risk… the assembly for religious worship is always considered a risk to by those who demand control over free-thought and lives.

 

Assembly lines

Every year I try to make some kind of a homemade Christmas ornament for each child, that they will be able to take with them when they grow up.

This year I took a torn-off notebook cover that was foil-printed with a abstract design, cut out shapes from it, and backed them with aluminum foil.  I embossed the backs using a small glass bottle that had a ring of little dots around its base.  Then I ran them through the laminator--just because I could--made holes with an awl, and put strings through them.  I didn't have enough string, really, and it was too thick, but I was able to partially separate the strands and turn it into four thinner strings.

For another project, I've been working on sewing up a bunch of pieces of cotton, some of them very small.  I was stuck for a long time, until I decided to adopt a simpler and more modular scheme for cutting them and putting them together.

I took a piece of paper, folded it in half, and tore it along the fold.  I did the same thing with one of the halves, and then again with one of the new halves.

I ended up with three pieces of paper:  one at full width, one at half-width, and one at quarter-width.  These became width templates, although I had to remember to always add extra for seam allowances.

With the templates, I was able to cut the fabrics according to the widest template that would work, and on to the smaller ones from there with the remaining scraps.

In putting them together, I worked from the narrowest pieces to the widest:  make a long strip of the narrow pieces, find the middle, and cut it there.  Put the resulting two strips side by side and sew them together.  Then add medium-length pieces on to the end, making another long strip, find the middle again again, and cut and join the two side by side again.  Then add the widest pieces.     

The largest pieces of fabric I set aside, but now I'm at the point where I need to know how much longer the strips (I have four, in different color schemes) need to be.  

That means I'm stuck again, waiting for my laundry helper to wash the blankets I'll be using as quilt batting.

YouTube THIS

 

"There won't be a Shire, Pippin." 

 

I'd rather be doing happy little homemaking projects right now, but that's not the only thing God made me for.

 

Tis the season now

I haven't been feeling the Christmas spirit much, but I finally just turned on some Christmas music and pulled out our two boxes of Christmas decorations, to see what I could put up around the house.  I also pulled out my Joy sign, which can be seen in this post.

I have several ideas for Christmas crafts, but am only just getting started on them.  

The one I did complete wasn't one that I planned.  My husband found a bagged-up broken necklace in his office.  I took the beads, and I strung them on memory wire to make a bracelet that I will give as a Christmas gift.

The memory wire is from a package that I bought at Hobby Lobby quite a while back.  It has a lot of flexibility, but when it is released, it returns to a more or less flat coil.  It's not suitable for younger children, because it will only take so much abuse before breaking.  Also, some beads are too heavy for it to really support well, and some beads have rather sharp edges around their holes that will likely weaken the wire.

I had a tiny helper for this project, and it appears that we have another child with exceptional fine-motor skills.

Milk jug experiment

We did a further experiment with laminating flat bits of plastic milk jugs (#2 HDPE), and ended up with a strong, flat little chunk of plastic.  It's four layers thick, two inches long, and barely bends when I try to flex it. The translucent jug plastic turns transparent when it is very hot.

It made sense to build it up by adding one new layer at a time, instead of doing them all at once, partly because the pieces were small and tended to slide around, and partly so that the center would be heated enough to fuse well.

Plastic bag experiments

A library book called Ecocraft had a project with laminating plastic shopping bags together to make a stronger and more durable material.  My apprentices and I tried it out, and were able to make an improvement or two beyond the procedure in the book.

The basic idea is to place four to eight pieces of shopping bag between two pieces of kitchen parchment paper, and then iron them with a medium-hot iron, first on one side, let cool, then flip over and iron the other side.

The author recommended using clothespins to keep the layers from shifting, but we found that the plastic shrinks a lot as it is heated.  So if the edges can't pull in as it shrinks, then the center will pull outward, and make holes in the middle.

One child also found that the loose edges could be folded over and ironed down, making the perimeter both neater and stronger.

If you let it cool down for a minute after ironing, the parchment paper and plastic will pop apart on their own.

The process gives off a few fumes, but not bad, at least not for humans.  Just crack open a couple windows.  I've been told that birds are very susceptible to this kind of household air pollution, though.

Shopping bags from mall stores seem to work best (#4 LDPE), followed by the better big-box stores, and then the super-thin discount and grocery store bags (#2 HDPE). 

The resulting laminates are flexible and seem tough.  The children called them "plastic leather", and the laminates made from tan grocery bags do look a lot like leather.  Pinching and pulling on one, it stretches only very slightly until I pull very hard.  I don't know about their abrasion resistance yet.  A needle goes through it very easily.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I almost dropped an unbaked pumpkin pie on the floor in the wee hours of the morning.

Preparations

The little papier-mache birds that I made took a day or two to dry.  Then I took the two best of them, drew eyes on them, and left the rest in a primitive, unfinished style.  I put them up on the wreath and I like how they look there.

Jackie Clay's Pantry Cookbook has a recipe for dipping chocolate made of chocolate chips and food-grade paraffin that I am going to try out before the holidays.

I whittled another cedar branch coat hook, but haven't put it up anywhere. It only took a few minutes to make.

Things around my house are coming together in various ways, and it has been nice to see things looking pretty.

Thanksgiving turkey

After the election, Governor Walz decided to play with the lockdown dials again, and did things like forcing the bars and restaurants to close at 10 pm, and restricting Thanksgiving gatherings to ten people.

Now he has new orders out, beginning tomorrow:  no informal social gatherings, indoors or outdoors; bars and restaurants take-out only; youth and adult sport activities shut down; gyms closed.  Retail and schools and child care and churches may stay open, although many are choosing to close.

I'm not a native Minnesotan, but I think it may be a bad idea to shut down both Thanksgiving gatherings and youth hockey leagues at the same time.

In his announcement Walz was making sad faces in the direction of the federal government, hoping that they will print more money and bail the state out.

The funny thing is, if you take the state's number of positive cases, and multiply by the state's estimate of undetected cases (a factor of ten), then it can be estimated that roughly half the state has had it already, and so the present daily increase in cases is very likely unsustainable, and would soon be falling even if the state did nothing.

But this way, Walz and his administration will get all the credit.

Coat hook

I took a joint of one of the cedar branches, removed the bark, and whittled it into a coat hook, one long enough that I could attach it to its support with two screws put through pilot holes that I drilled.

I was wondering if the green cedar wood would be oozing sap or oil to any extent; it doesn't seem to be.  It does have a light cedar scent.

I put it on the side of one of our wooden shelves, in a place where my husband frequently leaves his coat on the floor.  Given the weight of things that he often carries in his pockets, I didn't want to attach the hook directly to the wall.  So far it is holding with no cracking.

Messing around

I finally caught up enough on housework and big projects that I had time to do more creative things.

Family dropped off some cedar branches over the weekend, and I experimented and made a few wreaths out of them.

Then one of the wreaths seemed like it needed a little bird, so I experimented with papier mache and made three.  One has a little cedar stick in its neck to connect a head and a body of wadded paper (with papier mache over all), and the other two are more two-dimensional, built up around pieces of cardboard.

The paper I used was notebook paper from the school supplies, which just falls apart when it gets wet, so it wasn't the easiest material to work with.  For glue, I just whisked some flour and water together.

Another recent experiment was putting sliced apples and brown sugar (or white sugar plus molasses; same thing, nowadays) in aluminum foil and baking them in the oven.  The juice from the apples steams the apples and combines with the sugar to make a sort of apple syrup.  The result was only a moderate success, though; it came across to the family as a poor attempt at making applesauce.  The apple juice -> apple syrup angle is worth pursuing in the future, though. That part of it was delicious.

Paper towel outlook: poor

After the Affordable Care Act was passed, I quit buying paper towels as a protest.  

That protest will be continuing into 2021, as our health insurance is about to increase by 16%, after increasing by 15% last time.  

There are also some changes to the provider network; the base network remains the same, but the insurance company has created an additional, extra-restricted network, and an incentive for people to use it:  a lower deductible.

This annual ratcheting-down of services just to keep the costs on the painful side of "affordable" is not sustainable, especially when health insurance is required by law to provide coverage for a number of services.

Reconstructions

I found a solid-color plastic plate to serve as a tray on the bathroom counter, and it is working much better visually than the patterned one did.

Our neighbors decluttered their grown children's school and art supplies, and gave us two boxes worth.

My mother-in-law dropped off a chair that she had found and painted for us. 

I just finished reading an older book called Tested by Fire. It's the remarkable story of singer and businessman Merrill Womach, who was terribly burned in a plane crash.

The other day I cut out some butterfly appliques from a patterned fabric, and experimented with sticking them up on the wall with plain water.  Most of them fell down after an hour, but one stayed up for almost three days.

I made a sort of tacked-down slipcover for a upholstered chair seat. I had to piece the fabric together, using almost every last scrap. Then I put it on the seat upside down and pinned it at the seams, taking care to put in the pins so that they would be easy to take out while sewing. I used chalk to mark the actual sewing lines before taking it off the seat for sewing.

When the cover was ready, I stapled it to the underside of the chair where I could, and hand-sewed it to the original upholstery where I couldn't.

o

Digging a little

I wondered, after posting the other day, if the drop in the percentage of vote for Ilhan Omar in her district was because of a drop in her support, or because this year there were many Democrat ballots for Biden that voted only for president and didn't fill out the downballot choices.

After looking at the preliminary numbers as of this morning and comparing with past election results, the answer appears to be:  both are true.  Omar received about 12,000 fewer votes than she did in 2018, while Biden in her district gained about 55,000 votes over what Hillary Clinton got in 2016.  Omar did receive about 6,000 votes more in 2020 than Keith Ellison got for that congressional seat in 2016.

I noticed some discrepancies in the vote totals for Omar's District 5, as reported in different places on the state's website:   410,000 votes cast for president, 398,000 cast for Omar's seat, but the votes for Omar, her Republican challenger, and the write-ins in her race only add up to 380,000.  Why these totals are so different, I can't say at this point.  I may be wrongly interpreting the state's text files of results.

Generally, I would say to "Watch the Denominators"; when a percentage is reported, ask:  "X% of what?"

I also looked at how Trump did in Omar's district in 2016 and 2020, compared to the Republican challenger for the congressional seat.  Trump gained almost 6,000 votes in 2020 over 2016, but Omar's 2020 challenger had over 30,000 more votes than Trump did.  Compare that to 2016, where Ellison's opponent had 46,000 12,000 [UPDATE:  Correction.] more votes than Trump did in the district.

So there were lots of Republicans there that didn't vote for Trump this year, but not as many as and more than in 2016.*

Statewide, Biden is up by 233,000 votes.  Trump gained 160,000 votes compared to 2016, but Biden gained 350,000 votes over Hillary Clinton.

Voter participation:  3,279,000 votes out of 3,590,000 registered voters (as of 7 am on Election Day; Minnesota allows same-day registration), out of 4,118,000 eligible to register.  So, 91% turnout compared to registered voters, and 87% 79%** [UPDATE:  Secretary of State corrected their number; see below] compared to eligible voters.  Apparently almost everyone with a pulse and the ability to sign their name voted.

----------------------------------------------------

* In my Ph.D. research, we had to leverage what accuracy we could get out of our computational methods:  "We can calculate A with only moderate accuracy, and B with only moderate accuracy, but we can calculate (A - B) much more accurately, because our errors in calculating A and in calculating B are almost equal."

** I was thinking over the numbers and realized that 3.28 million is not 87% of 4.12 million. Checking the state's website, I found the updated number above.  It looks they miscalculated at first by dividing the number of registered voters by the number of people eligible, instead of dividing actual voters by eligible.  Apparently we have to Watch the Numerators too now.

Turning things over

Sallie Borrink has a new community called Christian Women Seeking Truth going, with a mix of free and subscriber-only content from her.  She's a wise, mature Christian woman with a gift for searching out interesting and informative links.

-----------------------------

I've covered two more boxes with paper for the shelf, and I'm still working hard on my big project, which is now passing through The Stage Where It All Goes to Crap, and entering the Maybe I Can Still Stick the Landing phase. 

-----------------------------

I've also done a lot of organizing of children's clothing. A family at our church regularly hands down their children's outgrown clothing to us, and so I received two more bags to sort out and put away into our "kids' clothes pantry", which now contains sizes from baby all the way up to teenager.

Morning in Minnesota

Currently Biden is up by about 230,000 votes.  Apparently there were 1.8 million early votes; compare that to 2.6 million votes total in 2016.

Ilhan Omar won in her district, but with only about 65% of the vote this time, compared to 78% in 2018.

Our precinct was busy at the beginning of the day, but by the time I got there, there was no line and I had my pick of the voting booths.

Minneapolis had a few arrests, but no large groups of protestors as far as I know. 

----------------------------------

Some numbers on Minnesota hospital capacity finally appear:  908 COVID cases in hospitals; 203 of those in ICUs, and they are beginning to sound alarms about a lack of ICU staff.  If you remember in the spring, the state scrambled to get ICU capacity up to well over 2,000 beds.  The lack of staffing seems to be related to quarantines.  Many nurses are being asked to return to work before their 14 days are up.  Only about a third of those quarantined because of heavy exposure became sick.

-----------------------------------

A quote I found interesting, about peasant life in 16th century Russia around the time of Ivan the Terrible:

In order to make their estates profitable and to fulfill their obligations to Moscow, both the boyars and the service gentry needed a constant supply of peasant labor.  This was assured only when the peasants were immobilized, attached firmly to the land.  The traditional means of binding them in this way was through debt; a landlord would advance money to a peasant and the peasant would remain on the land until his debt had been paid.  Legally, peasants could pay their debts after the fall harvest and move, taking service with another landlord who offered better terms or better land.  But in fact, peasants almost never earned enough to do that; most found themselves barely able to meet the interest payments on their debts, and they thus remained, year after year, in a condition little different from bondage.  -- Robert Wallace, Rise of Russia

Blame game

Kevin Roche:

Not only is masking not working, but the battle plan for the long-term care sector has failed and the defenses completely collapsed.  But never fear, it isn’t the administration’s fault, no, not at all, they had a great strategy and associated tactical plan, but, as we heard several times in the briefing, Minnesotans aren’t following the rules; we aren’t complying with the mitigation measures, so it is all our fault that cases are rising.  Aside from the complete subversion of democratic norms, this is most deplorable of the IB’s tactics–blaming the population for his completely incompetent handling of the epidemic.  But I expect we will hear a lot more along those lines over the next few days.  None of it is true; Minnesotans have been all too compliant with the terrorization campaign.

I also want to observe that our IB Governor is strangely mostly silent these days and is doing less threatening, notwithstanding the “alarming” rise in cases.  I strongly suspect that is due to Minnesota partaking in the rural uprising present throughout most of the country, an uprising which threatens his party’s hold on politics in the state.  And I also very strongly suspect, without being too paranoid, that if his party remains in some legislative control, he has some very nasty actions in store, probably to be unleashed as early as next week.  He has too much to lose by not continuing to pretend that this was and is a massively devastating epidemic that required and requires his thoughtless and irrational responses to protect the people.  His actions and the actions of like-minded petty dictators throughout the country are the source of the vast bulk of the economic, educational, health, and social damage perpetrated on the citizenry.

 

 IB is short for "Incompetent Blowhard", Governor Walz.

A crate

I turned some of our lumber pile into a crate about two feet long, with a lid, to be used for storage.  Most of the wood was pine in 2x6, 1x6, and 2x3 sizes, but I also used some of the oak frame pieces from the child's upholstered chair that I disassembled a while back. 

Even with using power tools until I had to move operations into the kitchen, it took me most of the day. I used screws instead of nails, and drilled a pilot hole for each one.

A tray

I try to keep the bathroom free of clutter, but we have a large family's worth of toothbrushes and toothpastes in there now. I was looking for a small, decorative, nonbreakable tray to corral all these items, and thought of a cute plastic plate that we have.

In place, the plate is a good size and shape, but the design is so busy that I actually have a hard time visually distinguishing the objects that I have set on it. So I'm on the right track, but not quite there yet.

Boxes

I thought of various alternatives for making storage boxes for the shelf, and ended up with paper-covered boxes as a medium-term solution.

I happened to have a larger box on hand that I was able to cut apart and reconstruct as two smaller boxes of the size that I wanted.

For the paper, we did another round of shaving cream marbling. This time I tried mixing a base color all through the shaving cream, and then swirling in a second color. It turned out all right, but I think this technique works better if some of the shaving cream is left white, to help the gaps where it doesn't touch the paper harmonize with the marbling.

------------------------------------------

A journalist finally got the percentage of Minnesota coronavirus deaths with a serious underlying health condition out of the Department of Health:  94%, with an additional 4% "unknown".

A timely lesson...

 ...from the book of Jeremiah, chapter 28, where the false prophet Hananiah not only made a false prophecy that the Babylonian captivity would end and not extend, and said that this message came from God, but he also claimed that it would happen within two years.

That seemed, and was, a very stupid thing to do*, but now I understand that Hananiah was trying to make it happen, through his words.

I can see the same sort of thing going on in at least four different places in politics today.

 

*God spoke back through the prophet Jeremiah, said no way, and predicted that Hananiah would die within one year, which he did.

------------------------------------

The truck driver who ended up right in the middle of a protest on the highway in Minneapolis in June, was arrested and then released without charges, has now been charged for not wanting to park in the middle of hundreds of protesters--some of whom were climbing on his truck and pulling the door open--and for being the nearest thing to a white supremacist that the authorities could find in or around the riots. The action happens starting at about 13 minutes, 30 seconds in the article's second video.

Not mentioned in the article is that the driver himself received minor injuries, when the protesters pulled him from his truck.

Apples!

We've been blessed this year by a couple of families who have shared the fruits of their apple trees with us.  And then some, because their trees are very tasty varieties.

Earlier in the fall, they gave us more than a five-gallon bucket full, and then last week my husband went out with a crew of helpers, and came back with something like five bushels more.

So we've been making applesauce, and dehydrated apples, and apple pie filling, and apple juice, and apple crunch, and filling up all our freezer containers. 

---------------------------

The other thing I've been working on is making a little more storage space in our living room, for everyone's little odds and ends. I was thinking of building some sort of shelf for this, but decided that it would be better just to make better use of the tall, narrow, mostly empty bookshelf that is in there. So I made a new shelf to replace one that I originally left out, because of an awkwardly placed knot in the wood, and I am thinking about how to make baskets.

 

It's almost time...

 ...to find out how much next year's health insurance is going to cost.  Last year, the cost went up 15% while the services covered went down a bit.

Biden still has that bit that made steam come out of my ears last year on his campaign website, where he promises to increase Affordable Care Act subsidies for the families that already receive subsidies.

Trump's campaign site lists his administration's accomplishments in health care, but not his plans.

 

Old stuff

I've been bashing away at a long-term refinishing project that has been dragging on for about a year too long, and have been making progress on it, despite the very irksome setback of having one of the pieces fall to the floor and crack just enough to need repair, but not widely enough that I can easily get the glue in.

------------------------------------

I started saving birch twigs for a besom-style broom; these are best gathered when the leaves are off the tree.  I decided to use the ones I have so far in my next foraged fall floral arrangement.  I just added a few sumac branches with red leaves, and a coneflower stalk.

Birch twig brooms are said to work quite well on sidewalks; I gave our driveway a swipe with a handful of the twigs, and I think they're right.

------------------------------------

I've been reading a book that is a reprint of early 20th century make-it-yourself projects for children. In one section on tie-dyeing, it mentions boiling sumac bark, roots, and berries, plus a piece of "old iron" to make black dye. This may be chemically similar to a recipe I tried once which used steel wool and vinegar to make a gray wood stain.  

The projects in the book run all the way up to a small summerhouse and a "garden cave" made of concrete over a bent steel framework.

First time back in St. Paul...

...after the rioting that took place in June.

I saw very shiny and clean new glass in many storefront windows, a few buildings that still have sheets of plywood up, and a hole in the ground behind a sign pointing people to the new location of the independent pharmacy that used to be there.

Upgrades

 The lining of a sleeping bag was worn out, and I found two pieces of fabric in my stash that I could piece together for a new lining.

It would have been better to stitch it in by hand, as slippery layers of fabric around a bulky core are certain to slide around and bunch up while going through the sewing machine, but I elected not to, even though I know very well that doing things by hand is a viable option when working on a human scale.  

Also, it would have been better to trim only one edge of the fabric, sew it on, and then go on to the next edge, instead of trimming all four edges at once. The fabric mysteriously lost some width during the sewing, and one corner is a little short.

----------------------------------

I also made a cushion cover. This one I did mostly hand sew, because of the curved shape of the cushion. I salvaged the zipper and its surrounding fabric from the old cover, sewed it between the new top and bottom pieces of fabric, and then whip stitched the rest of the way around. 

The fabric is too bright for the room, and I am thinking of dyeing it with coffee.

-----------------------------------

I've found two or three little ways to make my everyday activities more efficient. One is to use the curved corner of the sink as I'm draining uneaten ramen noodle soup out of bowl after bowl; if I hold the bowl right, I can pour the liquid down the corner without losing any noodles down the sink.

Fall

 Following the advice of The Nester, I foraged in the yard for branches and flowers to make into a fall flower arrangement.  I'd say my efforts were moderately successful; I had to go out and get a few more branches to fill out a skimpy place, and one of the flowers that I am using is 97% dead already.

-------------------------------

While hunting in the depths of a closet, I found a pine cone wreath that I had forgotten about, and hung it up. It has had a remarkable effect in making the decor around it visible again. Sometimes you just need a bit of a change.

-------------------------------

I've been re-reading a book by Deborah Burnett from twenty years ago. I don't know much about her, but I am finding her advice on intense and thorough visualization and creative problem-solving helpful, along with her emphasis on timeless design principles.  It turns out that she still has a website with lots of good ideas, plus a few not-so-good ones.

Bits

I watched the debate last night. To me, the most notable point was Biden lamenting the profiteering of the largest companies during the pandemic, doing an I-feel-your-pain with small businesses, and at the same time promising more shutdowns.

--------------------------------------- 

Local bloggers brought up a change in how the Minnesota Department of Health reports coronavirus hospitalizations. It's a subtle but infuriating change. Up until September 24, they were reporting both cumulative hospital and ICU coronavirus admissions, and daily populations of each. They've changed the latter to report not populations, but new admissions only.

In the old version, you could see where the state stood with respect to hospital capacity. That was the whole reason for the Governor's lockdowns in the first place:  to slow down the spread and not overwhelm the medical system. The graph became more and more embarrassing to him over time, as the ICU numbers stayed flat in the 200s.  (In the spring, the state worked to expand ICU capacity from 200-odd beds to nearly 3,000). He has locked things down too hard and too long.

Neither version tells how long people are staying in the hospital and/or ICU.

---------------------------------------

One thing I left out of yesterday's van carpet post was that we also had to replace some hardboard panels between the van's carpet and padding. These are to support the carpet over some depressions in the van floor. My husband took a sample of the old hardboard to the store, and found that the closest approximation in thickness and stiffness was super-cheap panelling.

Cleaning van carpet

We were finally able to buy a van, but some assembly was required, as the seats, carpet, and plastic panelling had been removed from the back and stored in a garage, where they got musty and mildewed.

We also had time constraints, as our planned road trip was coming up, so we didn't have time to order new carpet, have it shipped, and install it. My husband found a guy who cleans auto carpets, but he was too busy to take on ours.

He did advise my husband to use a solution of Pine Sol to clean the carpet, and to use a scrub brush, with lots and lots of scrubbing. He also sold him some automotive carpet padding.

The new padding is very nice stuff, more substantial than the original, and very pleasing to walk on. It cost $12 per yard, and we needed seven yards. There are enough scraps left over for some kind of rug project for the house, and I would consider buying more of it.

With supplies on hand, the next step was to remove the old padding. Most of it pulled off, but there was a lot of glue and fibrous lint left over.

I found that the best way to get that off was to lay the carpet upside down out in the sun, which warmed and softened the glue, and then use my fingertips to drag the lint and glue off. Scrapers didn't work as well, probably because they weren't as warm, and they tended to dig into the rubber backing of the carpet. I had a number of helpers, and they did a lot of the work, but even so, it took a long time and raised blisters. When we ran out of sunlight, I tried our steam cleaner. This worked, but the steam tended to make the backing crack, when used in the quantities needed.

For cleaning the top of the carpet, I used the Pine Sol and scrub brush, which worked fairly well, but didn't take out the rust stains. Pine Sol also doesn't rinse out very well, I found. We also learned that it now contains pine oil only for fragrance, as pine oil has become scarcer. I don't normally use it.

Drying the carpet went all right. I hung it over the deck railing overnight, and the next day my husband set it up in the garage with a dehumidifier.

Putting the new padding on required some cutting and piecing, but was straightforward. My husband found some spray adhesive from 3M that was appropriate for the materials. It was nice stuff, but we really needed a second can of it. Wood glue did not make a good substitute, probably because the rubber and padding didn't absorb water from the glue the way that wood would.

In the van, the quality of the padding isn't really noticeable. But I am planning to reuse it, once we replace the carpet.

EDITED TO ADD:  There were also some hardboard panels that we had to replace.

A chair, among other things

We've been working very hard on a major project, which is just beginning to come together now.

In other projects, my husband brought home a chair from somewhere. It is held together by a system of bolts and screws, and about a quarter of them were either not original, or missing entirely.  All of the other ones were loose.

I found replacements in our hardware hoard, but had to enlarge one of the holes a bit.

To avoid walking all the way out to the garage to get a drill bit, I ended up carving the hole larger, using a gouge from a set of little chisels that I have.

Then I had trouble getting one of the bolts to go in; a problem that I solved mostly by persistence.

 

Blogger design team, please beat yourselves over the head with Donald Norman books

I've been using the new Blogger interface for two minutes, and while I had previously promised not to like it, now I have several definite reasons to not like it.  It's very nice to have that little "Revert to legacy Blogger" button there, but since I've had some education in human factors, I will take a look around first.

What they need to remember from Norman is the concept of Affordances, usable ones.  An affordance is something that the user can interact with, usually a control. A user interface for ordinary people needs to make the user's controls visible and understandable and usable, not hidden and obscure within the user interface.

Overall it seems their intention was to make a more mobile-friendly interface, cleaner-looking and less dense. Not simpler, because the set of user controls hasn't changed much. Some of the cleanliness has come at the cost of moving controls to sub-menus...such as Blockquote and Save.

They've changed the text boxes to only show a thin line at the bottom. Typing a post title feels viscerally precarious, like standing on the ridge of a roof, compared to the enclosed feeling of a fully outlined text box. Just what a writer needs when they're trying to put words together.

I'm also not a fan of the post thumbnails; which for an image-less post is an image of the first letter in the title, only in a different font, gray, and MUCH LARGER.

In the listing of Posts, the controls are all icons except for Edit, which you get to now by clicking on the title, and which I found only by guessing.

For the Labels chooser, they have hidden the full list of labels and have put in a search-based suggestion functionality, which updates with each new character typed. So if I type in the letter "s", it gives me a list of all of the labels that contain "s", starting with "accept and transcend". Typing "se" gets me a list that starts with "exercise" and ends with "serendipity" and "sewing". So I will often have to half-type the label I want, to get it far enough up the list that I can select it without having to scroll down to it. Or I can just ignore the suggestions, and type the whole thing myself.

Previously the listing was compactly given in a box, separated by commas. It was very difficult to accurately select them on a mobile device, for sure, but at least I could see them all, with a little scrolling.

On further use, observation, and investigation, I found that I could get the whole list of labels.  All I have to do is put in two or more labels, then a comma to indicate the end of the last one, then it will throw up the whole list, apparently believing that I am now getting serious about attaching labels to this particular post. In the scroll box, I can see seven labels at a time. I have one hundred and two.

It is also sometimes putting a recently removed label at the top of the list, since I've been experimenting with putting on and taking off labels. What else is it trying to think about for itself when I'm not looking?

More secure seat covers

The chintzy dining chair finally met its end when one of the screw holes ripped out, which got me back to thinking about how to mend the vinyl seats of two steel chairs. The damage was too large for a patch, but I didn't want to completely redo them yet, either,

That left me with making covers for the seats. I found that I had just enough of the waterproof canvas left over from the chair and table projects to cover both seats.

I decided to take the seats off and staple the fabric to the underside, right over the vinyl. The fabric was thin enough for me to get away with this; something thicker would make it hard to get the screws back in far enough.

I did have to piece the fabric together, so there is a seam running across each seat. Since this is a temporary solution, I wasn't very fussy about gathering in the corners, so the whole process went quickly.

Slices

The "Quick bar cookies" recipe on this post, which is actually a recipe for chocolate chip blondies, is very forgiving. I've recently tried substituting vegetable oil for the butter. This works all right, but comes out a little drier, as butter contains some water that the oil doesn't. I also tried adding cocoa powder and peppermint extract to make something more like a brownie. The family liked the result, and didn't realize that it was almost exactly the same recipe. Rolled oats were not in the original recipe, but I almost always add them, for nutrition.

--------------------------------------

We've been very busy, and I was looking for a quick and fun project, and decided to paint one of our stump tables. The stump is a chunk of a large pine tree that my husband brought home from the county yard waste site last year. The wood was very green, and quite wet, so I kept it in the garage for months to dry it out, turning it occasionally. It picked up some dirt during that time, and lost over twenty pounds of weight, maybe as many as forty--I weighed it early on, and then later, but I don't remember the exact numbers.

Eventually I brought it in, and debarked it in the kitchen. There was some mold growing under the bark, so it had to come off.

The stump found a home in our living room/indoor parkour course. I counted the rings; the tree was sixty years old when it was cut down, and more than two feet in diameter.

Anyway, I mixed some paint to approximate a color that would fit into the decor, and painted the sides, just wiping the paint on with scrap fabric. I very soon had several eager helpers.

The color came out a bit bright for the room, so I plan on wiping on another coat at some point.

---------------------------------------

A child wanted to learn to make angel food cake, after a lady from church brought us one. I had never made a foam cake, but our efforts were successful.

---------------------------------------

Our resident papier-mache artist is thinking ahead to Halloween, and has made a good start on armatures (support structures for the papier mache) for upper and lower skeleton jaws, made out of milk jugs and tape.

Putting things together again

No curfew in Minneapolis or St. Paul last night, only continuing violent crimes.

Coronavirus numbers in tests, hospitalizations, and deaths in Minnesota have held quite steady since mid-June. I suppose an uptick should be expected in early fall, once school and other fall activities get going a bit. Summer is very much the off season for most organized social activities around here, because the people who do the organizing go out of town to their families' cabins.

I made progress on many things last week.  I mended more clothing, and some knitted dishcloths, and a mitten. I aligned the reel mower. I moved two bags of toys out of the living room, back down to the basement where they belong. I established a better workflow for a refinishing project that I am working on, and am finally making progress on it. I found my what-to-do-next cards, which I had completely forgotten about, and am getting back into a routine. I am also easing into exercising with hand weights again.

I've been gradually moving some pieces of decor around, trying things in different places.

Minneapolis again

Riots and looting in Minneapolis yesterday, seems to have been mostly in the Nicollet Mall area, right in the middle of downtown.

Governor Walz was more on the ball this time; a curfew for Minneapolis was declared, and dozens of people were arrested--one account said 132.

Tonight both Minneapolis and St. Paul have curfews.  From TCCrimeWatch on Twitter, it seems like things are lively in Minneapolis tonight, in terms of more scattered criminal activity than usual. There are National Guardsmen posted downtown.

Third Precinct cleanup

We haven't been down there ourselves, but there is a short video here.

Leverage

How Denmark used what they had to build up their agriculture:

The soil was embarrassingly poor for a country with agricultural pretensions--thin and sandy in most places, boggy or overgrown with heath. But by using imagination, they turned a handicap into an asset. While other countries of Europe were clamping down tariffs on imports of cheap American grain, the Danes let it flood in. Their idea was to feed it to livestock and then export meat, poultry and dairy products to Great Britain and other nearby markets. This helped free them of the burden of growing grain themselves, and they devoted the land they otherwise would have needed for grain to raising high-output crops. As their agricultural productivity soared and the numbers of their animals increased, they found in stable manure an unexpected bonus--the means by which to increase the fertility of their soil.    -- Dale Brown, The Cooking of Scandinavia

Boom

We had a crabapple tree come down in last weekend's big storm.  It had started falling down a few days before that, with one branch resting on the roof. Now when I see media images of storm damage, I look for the rotten places in the trees.

We also lost power, which put some of our preparations to the test. We did well on lighting, having lots of little LED lights.  My husband the electronics tinkerer has many LED bulbs (random internet image); these can be powered simply by putting a button battery between the two wires.

[If you add a magnet to that, you have a "throwie".  Much more about throwies here, including discussion about whether or not it is really safe to power LEDs that way, and how to add a resistor to improve battery life.]

One LED will put out enough light to read by, at close range, but LEDs also put out some ultraviolet light, which isn't good for eyes, so I limit my LED reading time, and I don't shine them directly into my eyes.

Our power was restored the next morning, saving us the trouble of canning up the contents of our refrigerator. We have the Jackie Clay canning book, which includes instructions for canning dairy products, with a caveat that this goes against modern canning recommendations.

What went not so well for us was not being able to whisk the car into the garage, because of an overpopulation of bicycles. A branch came down right next to the car.

Punching up plain carpeting

I've been reading a series of magazines from a nearby sidewalk library, and I noticed that many of the rugs pictured were two-color designs, with one color predominating.

That got me thinking about how to take a solid-color rug, and add yarn to it to make a design. Eventually, I remembered that I have a punch needle (which pushes loops of yarn through a fabric from the back), and I wondered if it could be used on commercially-made carpet.

I tried it on two different carpet remnants. I found with the first one that the carpet backing was too strong to push the needle through; I would need to pre-punch each hole with an awl.

With the second, the needle went through more easily, and I was able to punch in a line of loops all the way down the length in only a few minutes. My hand was tired at the end.

I found that I had to set the needle at almost the longest loop length setting to get the loops to show in the carpet pile. (Longer loops than that would require pulling by hand, and it would probably be better to work from the front with a rug hook.) Putting a loop through every other square of the backing mesh made a line that looks just like a line of paint drips. For a more solid color, I would have to punch every square, and more than one row, and even then the original pile would still be mixed in.

More mending

This time, patching a cushion cover.

From previous posts, I see that I made it two years ago.  After some months of use, it developed a small hole on one side, so I flipped the cushion over and used the other side.  Recently it started getting another hole.  I thought about patching it, but the whole side was getting threadbare. Not long after, the hole turned into two long rips.

So I've patched both of the rips, and the first hole, and put the cover back on the cushion, least-worn-side-up.

The fabric is a decent wool plaid, but not an upholstery fabric, so the heavy wear under local conditions is to be expected.

Mending, and screwdriver work

I patched the fabric arm of one of our camp chairs, and the seat of a director's chair.  I ripped out a seam in a pair of boys' pants, where an extra fold of fabric had been drawn in when I was trying to mend them last year. Then I finished mending the original tear.

I also tightened the director chair's screws, and the screws on some of the cabinet hinges in the kitchen.

I did some "re-knitting" to fix an unravelled hole in one of my homemade dish cloths.

I dug through our screw bin and found longer screws for a fixture where the screws had pulled out.

None of these took very much time, and I felt very productive, getting so many things fixed and back into use.

Some traditions don't go back very far

The potato was originally a New World food. This quote is about the late 18th Century Denmark:

But then those were strange days and ways. That new American delicacy, the potato, had not yet done heavy duty as a staple and was being served as a dessert, hot and salted in a napkin.  -- Dale Brown, The Cooking of Scandinavia

Increments

I mended several pairs of boys' pants, and my husband canned up a batch of tomatoes.

A while back when I was sorting kids' clothes, I found a pair of khaki pants that were clearly too slim to ever fit any of my children. I set them aside in the to-be-dealt-with pile, and then completely forgot about them.  They turned up again just when I was wondering what fabric to use to mend two newly-ripped pairs of khaki pants.... Suspiciously Providential.

Worth reading

After finishing Thomas Sowell's Race and Culture, I went on to Migrations and Cultures. Now I see there's a new article out about his life and work and ideas; I highly recommend it.

Sowell is 90 now, and much of what we're seeing in the news today is a direct consequence of people failing to listen to him in past decades.

Book recommendation: The Complete Guide to Sharpening...

...by Leonard Lee. The copy I've been reading has gone back to the library, but it has been put on our to-buy list.

It takes on the topic of sharpening from first principles, with numerous electron microscope photographs of edges, and pages of discussion about what is happening on a microscopic level when a woodworking tool is used on wood, or when a tool is sharpened and honed.

Next comes information on tools and techniques for sharpening, including commercial and homemade jigs (guides/supports). Lee is mindful of the low-budget reader, and gives lower-cost options and recommendations on what to buy first.

In the following chapters, he gives specific and extensive instructions on sharpening every bladed woodworking tool I'd ever heard of, and some that I hadn't. Saws and bits are included.  Common household tools like hammers, kitchen knives, pocket knives, scissors, and tweezers are also covered.

Not included:  reel mowers--which are really a special case under the Scissors category, and usually need only re-alignment, rather than sharpening--and scythes.

Lee is or was a tool manufacturer, and gives a lot of hints about to recognize, care for, and skillfully use well-made tools, including how to fine-tune their sharpening for the intended purpose.

I'd consider this book for homeschooling curriculum, mainly for high school students who are strong and careful readers. The prose and pacing aren't dumbed down or drawn out. But even the photographs and diagrams are highly educational in themselves.

I found it interesting that much of the book was basically an introduction to metalworking for woodworkers.

A maker family

I took two pieces of fabric left over from making skirts and cut and hemmed them to make handkerchiefs. Someday I am going to take the time to learn how to use a narrow hemmer attachment on a sewing machine, but for now I just fold, pin, and sew.

I also altered the collar on the blouse I just finished, by the most expedient method:  I cut off most of the excess fabric, ripped open the seams at the front edges a little, folded the raw edges in, and then topstitched them closed. It turned out well.

Then I took the blouse and a skirt I finished last year, and dyed them purple with the last of my dye.  (I don't like using dye because of its toxicity, and because most of it goes down the drain.) The two fabrics, both originally cotton sheets, took the dye slightly differently--one is a little more reddish than the other.

My mother-in-law was brainstorming about how to make a easel that she could spin a canvas on, vertically. My husband found a caster to use as a bearing, minus the wheel, and got it started for her.

She mentioned a sort of papier mache-like clay that is made of drywall mud and toilet paper. We may try that someime. 

Some of the children have been making stop-motion animations for a church activity, and they have been working like elves. Another child made a little wooden table, and painted it. I usually avoid painting furniture, because paint isn't durable enough, but the table's color (blue) is quite striking.

Gov. Walz adds more dials

After directing all school districts to construct plans for scenarios of in-person, distance, and hybrid (a mix of both to reduce student density to 50% school capacity) schooling, Governor Walz finally unveiled his executive order for how schools can re-open in the fall.

It is based on the 14-day number of new cases per 10,000 in population, by county--which is very much a moving target.  It separates the older and younger students, so that the lower grades shift to hybrid or distance learning a step behind the higher grades, thus helping somewhat with the issue of parents needing school-provided child care.

There has already been a lot of confusion among adults about that 14-day number:  is it the total number of new cases over the 14 days, or the daily average?  The low numbers of the thresholds (in the few tens of cases per 10,000) imply that it's the daily average, but in the Safe Learning Plan, it is clear that they mean the total number. This article has a graphic showing where the counties currently fall in this scheme.

The devil is in the details, as usual.  The executive order allows school districts some discretion, but really only in the direction of being more restrictive, as it threatens intervention by state officials in schools that stay open where the numbers of new cases are too high. State officials may graciously allow schools to continue in-person instruction if a local outbreak happens but is concentrated outside the school.

Parents are allowed to choose distance learning for the entire school year, and teachers may request to work from home.

According to a FAQ, if a student tests positive, then they will contact trace, and request that all close contacts found stay home for 14 days.  Their definition of close contacts:

Close contact is when someone is within 6 feet of the ill person for at least 15 minutes.

From the Safe Learning Plan:

Close contacts are defined as someone who was within 6 feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes starting from 48 hours before illness onset until the time the patient is isolated

More than fifty close contacts from one individual may trigger a Testing Event, which is apparently a gathering for mass testing, with help from the state. Universal testing within a school community is also mentioned, if there's a big outbreak.

In the Safe Learning Plan, it is clear that they are thinking of sending the entire classroom home for distance learning if exposed. 

Minneapolis has already decided to go to all-distance learning for the year.  St. Paul is likely to follow.  The suburbs seem to be leaning toward trying the hybrid model.

Walz is a former teacher, by the way.

So, well, and Sowell

Minnesota's mask mandate began Saturday, by governor's fiat, but is being challenged by Republicans with a lawsuit. Also, it appears to directly contradict Minnesota law which bans masks and other disguises--unless the "medical treatment" exemption in the law is read as including infection prevention.

Cases and deaths are embarrassingly far below model predictions; deaths have not yet reached the level predicted for the end of May.

One of the Republican legislators remarked that the mandate should be at least be paired with further opening up the state.

-------------------

We've been getting cucumbers. tomatoes, peppers, and a few peas out of the garden.

-------------------

A few Thomas Sowell quotes, from Race and Culture:
 

Throughout history, one of the great sources of cultural achievement, both for groups and for nations and even civilizations, has been a borrowing of cultural features from others who happened to be more advanced in given fields at a given time....Exaggerated group "identity" makes copying others akin to treason.

If all differences between the earnings, occupations, and employment rates of different groups are simply defined as "discrimination," then it is circular reasoning to say that discrimination causes these differences, and compounded meaninglessness to quantify these "effects" of discrimination.

Government may use its power to forbid, coerce, confiscate, punish, or expel.  Goals achievable by these means are well within the effective control of government.  Goals which depend upon the creativity, skills, thrift, work habits, organizational abilities, and technological knowledge in the population at large are much less within the power of incumbent officials to achieve within a politically relevant time period.

Easel to frame

My husband decided to let one of his easels go. It was missing a part or two, and wasn't very sturdy.

I salvaged the bolts and wing nuts from it, and decided to save the wood from the legs.

One of the children had asked for a small frame for their artwork, so I used some of the wood for that. Last year we bought a very nice old Craftsman miter box from a friend trying to dispose of a dead relative's estate, and I wanted to get better at using it.

This miter box has a guide for the saw that lets you suspend the saw above the work while you fiddle with things. I figured out the release for the angle adjustment, and after that had no trouble cutting accurately.

Assembling the pieces was a bit of a challenge, though. My husband has some right-angle clamps that I thought would help, but I couldn't find them. I had trouble finding the nails, too, thanks to certain children who have been working on projects of their own. The nails are also from some old guy's estate.

I ended up nailing the pieces together freehand, which was not fun, but it came out well enough. It could use a coat of paint.

Musical chairs

Recent months have been hard on our mixed collection of dining room chairs.  My favorites are the vintage chairs with welded metal frames, which are mostly monkey-proof. One needs its vinyl seat repaired, after getting new vinyl in 2016, and the others soon will need repair, too.  Of the wooden chairs, one has a cracked back, another has a cracked back and a broken back post/stile, and yet another had also had a broken back for a long time, but it was such a chintzy chair to begin with that I just wound rope around it and kept using it. Now its joints are beginning to loosen up.

So I've begun to "shop the house" for replacement chairs. One of the wooden chairs traded places with a chair in my bedroom. There are two so-so chairs in the basement that I might bring upstairs. There is also the enire back from a free-at-the-side-of-the-road oak chair, which perhaps could replace the back on the super-chintzy chair.

For buying chairs, my first place to look at around here would be the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, which sometimes prices things very low.

Finished...maybe

I finished the blouse, but discovered a new way to make the collar come out goofy. A look at my pattern drawing textbook helped me to draw up a better collar pattern, but in my haste somewhere along the way, it ended up a couple of inches too long...and I decided to deal with that by putting in a couple of tucks to see how it would turn out, instead of just seam-ripping it out and starting over.

I placed the tucks at the shoulder seams, which made squarish corners in the collar. That in itself came out tolerably well, but the collar height is too high, and visually there is just way too much of it.

For that reason, I am going to take it off and start over.

The interfacing worked out fairly well, although I need to plan out more carefully where it should go, and where it shouldn’t.

A handy tool

Somewhere along the way, we inherited a long-handled weeding fork. I am finding it useful these days not only for weeding without bending, but also for clearing the little round cottonwood pods out of the spaces between the deck boards.  Two more things that I can do while carrying the baby!

Onward

Sewing progress:  I sewed the buttonholes, which went well, aside from making the two edges too close together, which made them harder to cut open. Then I went on and sewed the shoulder seams, the side seams, and the hem, and got the sleeves ready to put in.

Garden and yard:  My husband has been bringing home some cucumbers and pea pods from his garden plot. This year I finally have coneflowers/echinacea growing out front, after several years of unsuccessful attempts. The flax seeds did not come up at all.

Other:   I’ve reactivated my to-do list, and have been knocking off a number of little tasks.

Baby steps

I made some progress on sewing the blouse:  I did the hems and underarm seams on the sleeves, and also I laid out and sewed on the buttons, and got everything ready to sew the buttonholes—including looking up the instructions in my reference book again.

The rest of the week was super-hot, and/or over-scheduled, but I did weed the cracks in the driveway, and sweep the front sidewalk. I’m at the stage of recovery where I’m sorting my activities into the ones I can do with a baby in a sling, and the ones I can’t. It turns out that I can push our reel mower one-handed, and mow the yard a little at a time, if needed.

Book review: Rework

I’ve been reading a library book called Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanson. They are founders of a software company, 37signals, and in 2010 published this business book for entrepreneurs.

It is a fast read, consisting of a large number of pithy mini-chapters. They back up many of their points with examples of successful businesses that use those principles, giving an interesting look at how those companies operate.

I noticed that much of their contrarian business advice would translate well to the home environment, so I went back through it with that in mind and ended up with a couple of pages of notes.

Most of the ideas in the book were things that I am already doing:  keeping things simple and flexible and mindful, creatively using and re-using what you have, doing quick prototypes and testing, taking adequate time for rest and recreation, doing things just “good enough” to reach the goal, doing work that is meaningful, looking beyond current fads, and so on.

What is helpful for me now is the idea of using big markers to sketch out ideas, to prevent being pulled down into the details too soon. Also, their assertion that in business you will learn more from successes than from failures.

Some quotes from the book:  “Culture is the byproduct of consistent behavior.”  “The environment has a lot more to do with great work than most people realize.”  “Inspiration is perishable.”

The book’s copyright page is at the end; I found that unhelpful as I was trying to find the year of publication.

Overall, I found the book worth reading.

Ready to sew

I had a little time, and pulled out some fabric from a sheet and a homemade pattern, and cut out pieces for a blouse.

The pattern is drawn from a thrift store blouse that I had, which was probably home-sewn, since it had no tag. It fit me well, and I eventually wore it out. This will be the fifth blouse that I have made from the pattern.  I’ve gotten better at sewing buttonholes, but still am working on getting the collars to turn out well.

While I was looking for the pattern, I found some interfacing that I had forgotten about; that will probably help.

The other things I’ve been doing lately are mending, and slowly catching up on yard work.

So far Minnesota is not seeing an explosion of coronavirus cases, from the protests or from any other form of opening back up. There have been smaller protests every weekend so far.

Maybe someday

By way of Come and Make It, I have been reading about micarta, which is paper or fabric laminated in a resin. It is often used for knife handles.

Those links above mention fiberglass resin; these guys used a much more expensive epoxy, and their micarta did quite well under stress testing.

How the Democrats will lose in 2020

Or at least, how they richly deserve to lose:  through the continuing slow-motion failure of the Affordable Care Act.  Democrats keep talking about health care and how it needs to be reformed, hoping that no one will remember that they were the ones who shoved that 1000+ page law through in 2009.  People who especially are being screwed by it:  young adults (subsidizing costs of older adults), parents of younger adults (having children staying on their plans until age 26), people getting health insurance through their employers (being ineligible for subsidies), single-income families (paying way more than Obama’s “affordable” 9.5% of income), and lower-income people nearing retirement age (paying far more than they can afford).

Out of curiosity, I looked into health insurance options in the high-unemployment coronavirus economy.  COBRA still exists, and now sucks worse than ever, because the ACA requirements generally raised premiums.  Thanks to Trump, there are now short-term plans available, but they may not count as having had “minimum essential coverage” when you try to get on a better plan later. Christian cost-sharing plans have not yet developed adequate fraud protections, I believe—without any evidence, just based on intuition. Going on Medicaid leaves the possibility open that the program could seek to recover the money it spent on you from your estate after you die, although at present they usually don’t bother to.

That leaves buying insurance yourself, either on or off the exchanges, or self-insuring.  My question was how a change in income would be reflected in a change in premium subsidy, for an exchange plan. It appears from this article that most of the time, an income change earns you a 60-day Special Enrollment Period, with subsidy re-calculation, aside from perhaps being required to report changes in income anyway. But with exceptions and changing rules and state-to-state variations, it just looks like a giant headache...one that could continue into next year with tax return preparation for tax year 2020, since the amounts of subsidies received versus subsidies qualified for have to be reconciled and squared up.

I’m tempted to think that the options presented there would be more understandable if they were presented in flowchart form, but there are too many unknowns. As I have said before, this system was designed to fail. It is simply too complex.

One minor point from near the end of the piece:  changing insurance plans will usually reset your out-of-pocket costs counter to zero. That’s a cost to factor in.

A surprise, yet not entirely a surprise

Christian History magazine* has a new issue out on the role of the Church in the development of science and technology.  One of the articles interviews several scientists on how their faith and research connect...and one of them is physicist and 1997 Nobel Prize winner William Phillips!

He was the keynote speaker at a physics conference that I went to as a graduate student.  Apparently, once you have won a Nobel Prize in physics, you can have conversations like the following:

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS:  We would like you to speak at our conference.

PHILLIPS:  Okay, I'd be happy to...but I'm going to need some liquid nitrogen.

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS:  No problem, how much do you want?

Phillips spent most of his speech (in front of an audience of hundreds of physicists) playing with liquid nitrogen and having a great time.  The joy he showed then makes it less of a surprise for me to see him interviewed in Christian History now.

-------------------------------------
*Christian History has subscriptions, but financially it runs on the basis of donations:  they print and mail out the next issue when they have the money to do so.  They also sell back issues and reprints, which can be helpful for research, as each issue is centered on a historical person or topic.

Pondering

Remembering all the sewing machine needles that have broken while in use, right in front of my face, I am thinking that I should be wearing better eye protection while I’m running it.

Usually a needle will break into two pieces:  one end still held in the clamp, and the other still held by the thread running through the eye, but there have been times when pieces went flying.

I made something

I’m not the first woman to have felt a lower level of creative energy during gestation. I am starting to remember now some of the things that I wanted to make.

One of those things was a toddler dress, using fabric from an old skirt that was among the fabrics that my mother-in-law gave us.

I had a little time, and sat down to figure it out. I decided to use the waistband of the skirt as the neckline, and keep the lower edge with its hem the same. That left the sides and armholes, which I marked with chalk and then sewed, along with joining the necklines at each shoulder.

To finish it, I added a long piece of bias tape around the front waist, leaving the ends loose to be tied at the back. There was a setback at this point, as I was distracted by people running in and out, and caught some of the back of the dress in the seam I was sewing. It took a minute to pick out those stitches and get going again.

The finished dress is loosely draped, and very similar to a “pillowcase dress”, which is traditionally made from a pillowcase.

Joel Rosenberg and the MPD

This was almost a decade ago:  the story of his arrest, and the sad ending before he got his day in court. 

A signal for the sickroom

Sickroom isn’t quite the right word for the bedroom where the newest Baby of Unusual Size and I have been hanging out since his home birth last week. It is at the far end of the house, and can go without attention from the rest of the family for hours at a time...which is sometimes too long.

A couple of weeks ago, my husband looked into why the doorbell, an older wireless model with a button and a chime that communicate by radio, wasn’t working. We had a similar one, new in the box, that had been handed down to us at some point. I’m not sure exactly what he ended up doing, something like replacing the original button with the new one we had, I think. They can work on the same frequency.

Later on, I got the idea of taking one of the buttons and using it to ring the doorbell and summon assistance when needed. He must have given me the only one that worked. Anyway, it works fine from the bedroom, and it has been very helpful more than once.

In other topics, I am finding this pantry/craft space inspiring; it has been a while since I have been able to have a little crafting space of my own.

Kevin Roche looks at Minnesota coronavirus trends. The case numbers have remained fairly flat to slightly declining. The number of long-term care facilities with cases is over 200 now, I read somewhere last week, out of something like 1700 total in the state. While the state has been working to contain this epidemic-within-a-pandemic, I still see a high potential for these facilities to be infected. It will just be spread out over several years, and considering the turnover of residents that can happen over such a time period, it is likely that places that had been cleared before will see fresh outbreaks later on.

So I still expect to see cumulative Minnesota deaths run up into five digits, eventually. They are at about 1300 now. At the same time, I think it is time for Governor Walz to stop twiddling the dials. There is an effort being made now to recall him, but apparently the law requires trying him in the state Supreme Court, and only if that is successful can there be a special election held to try to vote him out.

Left as an exercise to the reader

In the early days of the pandemic, there were videos coming out of China showing people collapsing in the streets. Why hasn’t that happened here?

Waiting

The weather has been very hot and humid the past few days; we are ready for a break from the heat. There were several protests over the weekend.  The Minneapolis City Council promising to eliminate the Minneapolis Police Department probably is going to do more damage to the city’s tax base than the rioting and looting did. It was surreal to see them saying this with violent protests still going on all over the country, but for what’s going on here at this point, it is getting near the end of the psychological opportunity to shove through such a radical change. It bears repeating that relations between the MPD and various city factions have long been strained and hostile.  Also, the characters of the different neighborhoods can vary quite widely, and having “community policing” that presumably would include more neighborhood-level input and oversight seems appealing to many.  I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if some neighborhoods have begun to look into the feasibility of legally separating themselves from the city.

The 3rd Precinct building that was abandoned, looted, and burned had been designed and built as an imposing fortress, overlooking a commercial area that is more on the scale of a village crossroads.  That exaggerates the difference in physical scale, but not the emotional impressions. I always felt unsettled when we drove past it. It seemed to belong to an occupying force. The rioters, most of them from outside the neighborhood, certainly treated it that way. Not many people are going to miss it.

Agenda revealed

Some on the left have been using the law enforcement responses to the protesting and rioting to propel calls to Abolish the Police, saying that the cops are violent thugs, and that the social problems like mental illness and homelessness and drug addictions that we have been leaving for the police to handle should be addressed through nonviolent social interventions. Minneapolis City Council members have been talking about this, and about the new programs that they want to create.

But addressing social problems top-down through government intervention maximizes the resources needed, while minimizing the effectiveness of their utilization. The Bible very strongly says that this should happen from the bottom up:  personal responsibility, then family members caring for each other, on up through neighbors, extended family, local worshiping community, city, clan, tribe, nation. The main job at the higher levels is to protect the lower levels from predation and to strongly discourage behavior that is obviously dysfunctional. At the lower levels, close connections between people motivate them to cooperate and help each other, which minimizes the need to draw from the resources of the broader community, and so maintains overall stability and sustainability.

That’s not what the Abolish the Police people are proposing to do. Instead of a police state, they want to create a Nanny State on Steroids. Neglecting to mention that there would still be a big helping of Police State on the side.

It makes more sense if you realize that the primary goal of the people in back of it all is to gain power, not to have a healthy society. Instead of restricting freedom only through the use of physical force, they want to also use therapeutic force...”It’s for your own good, you know.”  Which is terrifying, because while a police beating will end at some point, therapy can go on indefinitely.  It’s basically the same thing as in that famous C. S. Lewis quote about do-gooders, and as he portrayed it all playing out in That Hideous Strength. It has already been partially accomplished.

One of their steps that preceded Abolish the Police was to Abolish the Family. That’s not yet complete, but they have been working hard at it for generations. It was probably Abolish the Faith before that. They work to create social problems, and then “solve” them, and when the solutions don’t work, they take it up a notch and “solve” them some more.

So when I look at the videos of police brutality that they have harvested from the protests and riots, I am getting quite angry about how callous they are about using peaceful protestors as pawns in this campaign to seize and extend power. The protestors serve both as cover for rioters to escalate the level of violence, and as photogenic victims of the police retaliation...the more blood, the better for the Cause.

Looking back at coronavirus, and how it ties in

It’s now long enough since the state started opening back up that the predicted eruption of cases toward a late June or early July peak should have begun. I’m not seeing it yet in the graphs; new positive tests per day, hospital beds, and ICU beds are all basically flat.

I think that the protests may not have much of a net effect on the spread of the virus locally.  Thousands of people were out protesting and rioting, but hundreds of thousands were sitting at home under curfew. Less shopping went on overall because of stores being closed or destroyed, but there was possibly a higher concentration of people in the fewer open grocery stores; some stores were having whole shelves emptied out as people bought food to donate.

Floyd’s April 3 positive test was interesting, because at that time tests were scarce, and commoners were only tested if symptoms were present. From my post from just before Minnesota shut down, I’m reminded that he may have needed to have been exhibiting “severe symptoms“ to have been tested.

I was also sick around that time, but not tested, and my breathing isn’t great even now, although in my case mild seasonal allergies and extreme pregnancy are factors.

I just watched the New York Times’ compilation of videos around the arrest and restraint, until it froze up on me. What the video shows well is the sequence of main events from multiple perspectives. What it shows poorly are the real-time length of each event, and the flow from one thing to the next. The video is about half as long as the whole thing actually took to play out.

Steps further

The county released the autopsy report.   Points of interest: no physical injuries to neck; COVID-19 test positive, but not necessarily from an active case because he had also tested positive in early April (when the number of positive tests per day in Minnesota was approaching but not quite at 100); numerous bruises, none on neck; traces of multiple drugs found, and some of the results seem to indicate use on the day of his death, if I am reading right.

More locally, police said there were reports of threatening letters being left in some people’s yards, in reaction to the politics expressed on their yard signs.

Haven’t heard of anything else around here, besides Chauvin being charged with second-degree murder, and the other officers being given lesser charges. Charges for all of the officers was one of the loudest demands of the protestors. Tomorrow is the funeral, or at least the first funeral, closed to the public, which is likely to be a focus of further protests.

The beginning of the end?

Last night the biggest happenings as far as I know were a group of protestors who lingered at the Capitol after curfew to be arrested, and a beat-up old van with red tape crosses on the windows that a reporter had previously pointed out as a makeshift ambulance turned out to be a supply vehicle for organized rioters. They seem to be using them in other cities, too.

Police allowed a peaceful protest at the site of Floyd’s death to continue well past curfew.

People have been donating enormous quantities of food to the area worst hit by the rioting.

The gas tanker driver was released with no charges; investigation ongoing. The story is that he was the only driver at his company willing to deliver to a black-owned gas station in Minneapolis during the unrest, and that the owner stood up in support for him after the arrest.

Today, we had afternoon thunderstorms, and the news is more focused on the charges that are beginning to be filed on the rioters. And also returning to doling out scoldings about coronavirus risks. The governor is having the state Department of Human Rights do a civil rights investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department, going back ten years.

This post by a Ferguson resident has riot preparation tips, but the one I want to highlight is #9.  The media coverage of the violence in Ferguson died down long before the actual violence did. Most everyone who was doing the rioting is probably still in town. There are reports that a number of vehicles have been fleeing police tonight. Other than that, the crime watch/scanner monitoring Twitter accounts are reporting only a few normal-sounding incidents. Curfews continue.

Not over

Only the gas tanker driver was arrested on the bridge last night; today it is reported that somehow the highway shutdown missed him, and he came right into the bridge area full of protestors at speed, and panicked. The protestors had been peaceful up until then, but they perceived it as an attack, some responding by swarming the truck. He was pulled out of it, and received minor injuries only, thanks to intervention by more peaceful protesters.

A couple of hours later, after curfew began, police surrounded and arrested a group of 100+ protesters, peacefully.  Altogether 276 arrests in Minneapolis.  Evidence found of pre-placed incendiary supplies, and use of stolen cars and stolen or missing license plates. Federal charges for an  Illinois man who helpfully posted evidence of his various crimes on Facebook. No evidence that confirms reports made of guys in KKK robes, however.

Tonight there are two large protests going on—one at the governor’s mansion in St. Paul—some other groups beginning to gather, and a number of isolated instances of lawlessness. I don’t know how the last compares to “normal” crime levels, probably still on the high side, even with the increased police and National Guard presence and level of resident vigilance. Curfew starts later, at 10 pm, and ends earlier, and highways are open for now, but will be closed if needed.

A couple of other takes on the past few days:  by Mitch Berg, acquaintance and former neighbor, and by James Lileks, Star Tribune columnist we’ve spoken to in person a couple of times.

“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.

———————-

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.