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.

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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.

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* 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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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