Paper bag Christmas stars

We made some paper bag stars like these at a Christmas gathering.  We used glue sticks, not a glue gun, though.  They looked good with brown bags, but I think white bags would be better.

We found that it took at least 8 lunch bags per star, to make it full enough to come around full circle. 

I thought a little about making a similar shape with a big accordion-folding of paper at home, but haven't actually tried it out.

This reminds me that I am also planning to make coffee filter watercolored paper flowers again.

Preparations

I got my Christmas shopping more or less done, and most of it in one round of going into one store after another right before closing time.  I was blessed to be able to find some good things in the limited time that I had.

Last weekend we had 8+ inches of snow, most of which melted as the thunderstorms came through.  No storm damage here, although there was an unusual and oppressive feeling in the air as the storm approached.

I've done a few little experimental projects, aside from gift-making.  One was to flatten a peach can and play around with shaping the metal.  It was easy to cut with tin snips of the giant-scissors style.

Another was to do a quick little crochet snowflake using string, in the same style as this hanging, where the crochet is colored and stiffened afterward with paint.

I am planning to run some more scraps of fabric through the laminator, and perhaps to do some more woodcarving for gifts.

An embroidery I am working on is proceeding, although I've not put much time into it:  a little scene of a shack in the woods.  It will probably turn out well just because I am too busy to overwork it.

One child has ambitiously planned and made the gingerbread for a gingerbread village.  Another is preparing for a cooperative Christmas craft booth effort with friends next year.

Snowy and cold

I'm not sure hot glue is the best material for sealing gaps around a window frame, but I had a small below-zero breeze coming into my bedroom, and it was worth a try.  I expect that it will be easier to remove than caulk.

My most recent hot glue craft project was gluing white cardboard leaves onto a cardboard rectangle.  It turned out okay, but proved a little harder to hang up than the effort I wanted to put into it.

I've also been carving two little wooden goblets for toys, using a well-seasoned section of maple branch.  I've decided to not put a finish on them, or even to sand them.  I used a Swedish slojd (don't know how to do the umlauts; aka sloyd) knife from Rockler that I got for Christmas last year.  It is a bit large for most of the woodcarving that I do, but worked well in this case.  My husband has one too, and somehow managed to break the tip of the blade off.

Around town

Two Twin Cities Best Buy stores looted in organized robberies.  Two stores on almost opposite sides of the metro area, same day and time.  "Police are investigating if these similar crimes were connected in any way."

Biden is expected to visit on Tuesday.

It's as good as it gets here...

 ...in terms of getting the house organized and decluttered in between the busiest seasons.  I washed many of the windows before the weather turned cold, and have been able to conquer most of the messy areas.

I started an embroidery project for a Christmas gift.  I bought an embroidery hoop for it, but already had everything else.

I also have a couple of woodcarving projects in mind.  My husband brought home a woodburner, and we've been trying it out.  From looking at comic series art, I think the way to go with that is to do the shading first, and then add the fine lines and details.

The Twin Cities had some protests following the Rittenhouse verdict, but nothing near us.

We are well-supplied for Thanksgiving, and are thankful for what we have.  

The children have requested six different kinds of pie.

Deployments

Still working on settling our things into place around the house:  putting things on the walls, inserting the largest rug as an underlying layer to the three rugs in the living room, putting re-purposed hooks up in my closet/computer nook so my long skirts can hang on the back wall, covering a panel with fabric so I can place it in front of a window.

I also got some kale and more onions into the freezer.  And I made some kale chips that turned out well.

An apparent package thief made the mistake of dumping empty boxes in our yard while a child was looking out the window.  I don't know if the police will catch up with them, but the Holy Spirit will.

Yes, we have no black walnuts

The squirrels chewed through them all over the summer, and there are absolutely none left.

The kitchen is overflowing, though, with garden harvest:  tomatoes, peppers, and beans.  It was already super-tight on space before.

I built a sleeping loft for one of the children, and there are others in line for lofts of their own.  I ended up using hand tools a lot more than I had planned to, so I am still in recovery mode.  I was many years younger when I made the original loft, which is still in use.  Which reminds me that we bought extra bolts this time to replace the ones in that loft that have broken.

I've also been working on spiffying up our library room, which is my favorite room in the house.  The new rug ended up in there, and I made progress on cleaning the wood blinds that had years of dust on them.

We made an excursion out of town to see the northern lights, but at this latitude it was mostly a glow along the horizon.  Did have a nice view of the stars, and some constellations that I haven't seen for a long time.

Mostly forward progress

I made myself a ruana-style cloak from a tablecloth.  I like it, although I am not as gracefully proportioned as my children are and I look rather clunky in it.  I may add a bit more length to it with a fringe, and I am looking for something better than a clothespin to fasten it with.

I pulled some other items out of storage and found good places in the house for them, such as an old table top that is now leaning against a wall to protect the internet cable, and a little cabinet that fit nicely into the bathroom.

This summer I braided up a few of the corn husks that the children left lying around.  These braids dried and faded in the kitchen.  I then took them, played around a bit, and eventually braided the braids and tied them with a piece of wire to make a mini-wreath for the front door.

I also made a quick visit to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, which has tripled and re-arranged their retail space since the last time I was in there.  I found a flat-woven wool rug for $45, which turned out to still have the tag from the rug cleaners on it.  I've been thinking of getting a rug to unify our three rows of seating around the family computers, and if this rug doesn't work there, there are other places in the house that I can try it in.

The reason I was at the store was to find a new light fixture glass thingy for the ceiling fan in our library, to replace the one that broke just as I was finishing up washing it.

I had another mishap with glass, which involved a glass jar unbalancing the recycling bag and tipping it over.  The jar then rolled out, and down onto the step at the back door.  At that point it took a right turn, and proceeded majestically down the basement stairs, ending with a smash on the rug at the bottom.

Putting the rug (dry) through the dryer on Air Dry to get the little tiny shards out worked well, and got most of the wood shavings out of it as well.  I left the dryer lint from an earlier load in the dryer's lint filter to help capture these bits.

I also found that our reel mower not only needed several missing handle bolts replaced (children are suspected in the loss of two of them), but also needed to be re-aligned and oiled. And of course there was one adjustment screw out of the four that I can barely budge, but most of the adjusting needed to be done on the other side, so I managed.

Draped children

My children were getting cloak ideas from this video (which has a recap of the different styles discussed, in the last three minutes), and requested ruana-style cloaks.

The ruana cloak is a simply a long rectangle, slit up the front to the place where it will sit on the back of the neck.  Some people cut out a neck-sized circle at that point, see here for example.  I prefer the look of a straight edge coming down in front.

In use, the front of the ruana can just hang down, or one side can be thrown over the shoulder.  It looks much more elegant than it ought to.

I found enough large pieces of fabric to outfit all the children who wanted one.  It helped that a relative unloaded a bin of linens on us while we were on vacation.

So far this has been all no-sew, but the children all want hoods on their cloaks, and will also need the ends of the slits reinforced.

 

Rummage sale

I got out to the rummage sale, and found some good finds:  a set of books by John Ruskin, a very daintily-worked handkerchief, and a box of canning jars.

The Ruskin books I am excited about, because Ruskin was a friend of George MacDonald, who have I been doing a unit study of my own on.  Ruskin is more often quoted from than read, and apparently that was true even back in the day, because every volume in this 135-year-old set that I have opened so far has uncut pages.

The handkerchief has not only embroidery, but also needle lace openwork where the threads that were worked are too small for me to see clearly without magnification.

Little rainbows

I had a handful of little plastic prisms with holes for stringing them, from someone's unfinished project.  I decided to use a bead crochet technique to create an evenly-spaced hanging of them that I could hang up.

I took a reel of fine brass wire, and strung the prisms on it in order, without cutting the wire.

Then I used a large crochet hook, and started crocheting.  Where I wanted to place a prism, I slid one up the wire, and then did the next stitch, to lock it into place.

The problem with crocheting or knitting with wire is that it twists something terrible.  Luckily, my piece was short enough that I only had to struggle with twisting wire as I was finishing up.

We bought a drill press

It came with a homemade four-drawer cabinet that fits around the base.

For projects, I used our laminator to laminate some patterned fabric to make shelf liners.  They turned out well, and I would like to make a few more for some drawers.

The friend who gave me the sewing machine found the manual and the attachments for it. There was one I hadn't heard of before, a "scissors guide" that fits onto one blade of a pair of scissors, to help in cutting narrow strips of fabric.  

Chair cushions covers, and a closet office

I re-covered the cushions for our glider rocker, which had fallen victim to a potty-training scissors-wielder.  Because of the curved shapes, I assembled the back closures first, and then sewed the rest by hand, in situ over the cushions. 

I also moved my sewing machine cabinet/desk into my closet.  The lower structure of the cabinet is fragile; after years of being stored in a barn (two owners back), the plywood of the pieces that stabilize the legs is delaminating badly. I wrapped wire around the loosened ends as a short-term solution, but I will have to replace them at some point.

The war of sewing

My sewing machine is currently set up in our basement workshop.  I recently made four skirts:  two from tablecloth fabric, one from a sheet, and one from batik fabric that I was given for Christmas.  I had a lot of problems with breaking threads, and used up several more spools of handed-down thread than I expected to.  I used the same pattern for all four skirts, from a sketch I had in one of the wardrobe booklets that I had made a couple of years ago.  One of the skirts is waiting to be overdyed.

I also sewed a new seat and back for one of our director's chairs, which had been waiting a long time for new canvas.  That process involved more troubleshooting than sewing, because my sewing machine didn't like the weight of thread that I was trying to use.  At one point I had my machine more taken apart for dust removal than I had ever done before; its innards were actually a lot cleaner than I expected.

Back from a working vacation...

 ...in which we scraped and repainted a porch for family, and then went and started the clean-out of a very cluttered rental house owned by other family members.

I came back with ideas about things that need to be done to declutter my own house.

Someone dumped a push mower in our yard while we were away; both my husband and I have been thinking about learning about small engine repair, so we are going to see what we can do with it.

Mini chandelier mobile

Messing around with plastics a little. For the hangy bits of this project, I made hot glue teardrop shapes on a sheet of aluminum foil, and then tore away the foil around the edges when the glue was cool. 

I used an entire long glue stick, so I had many extras and could choose the best ones.

The circular rim of a plastic food container became the structure.  I sewed the teardrops onto it with "invisible" plastic sewing thread, which is annoying to work with--springy and hard to see. I didn't have any trouble pushing the needle through the glue, and none of my needle holes ripped out.

I also used the invisible thread to hang the mobile.  I ran up four threads, got them more or less evenly tensioned, and then spun the rim to twist them together for a length, which I knotted.

It turned out there was already a handy nail for hanging things above the planned kitchen sink location, so installation went quickly, with the addition of some more invisible thread. 

I thought of coating the backs of the teardrops with hot glue as I was sewing them on.  There are color variations as some of the glue I used was old and yellowed.  It was fiddly keeping the sewing tension loose enough for the teardrops to hang straight.

I only did one round, but others could be added.

Abiding

I cut up an old skirt, hemmed the pieces by hand, and made a bunch of washcloths, which have been handy to have around.

I'm eagering awaiting garbage day, since there is a dead squirrel in our trash.  It died of natural causes.

Blackberries are done now, but we still have mulberries.

Fruitfulness

We have ripe mulberries and blackberries, and yesterday I got out into the farther reaches of the blackberry jungle, and picked enough berries to make two pints of jam.

I almost didn't make the jam, but it seemed like a good thing for the children to see where jam comes from.  It turned out very well, and we used some of it to make blackberry lemonade.

Ghost bush

I took the last of the spray paint and primer that I had been using in our previous house to repaint the toilet seat, and used it to paint a dead bush in the yard.

The paint makes the bush look silver, not white.  It's in a very dry part of the yard, so if we replaced it with something living, we would have to water it frequently.

In other news, I added a possible correction to the second post before this one, here.  There is a lot that we still don't know.

Odd ends

 My family is working on a variety of woodworking and other projects.  I've been in a decluttering phase and haven't been making much myself, although I did use a little free time to play around with tatting.

I tried once or twice to learn tatting with a shuttle, but didn't get very far with it.  Then some years ago I heard about needle tatting, but I never actually tried it until now.

I was following my needlework book's instructions for shuttle tatting, though, and didn't know about forming the stitches on the needle itself until I looked up this comparison of the two methods.

One attraction of tatting is that it produces a very sturdy lace, because every stitch is a knot.

The thing that makes it somewhat hard to learn is that the path that the thread needs to take to make a half-stitch is not the same as it takes in the finished stitch (except topologically, if you want to bring mathematics into it), because it needs to be pulled to "flip" the knot to the other thread, as they say in the link.

The truth remains

 

The above is from the "Analysis of the Antrim County, Michigan November 2020 Election Incident" report by J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan with an interest in election security.

He was asked by the Secretary of State to analyze the Antrim County election to explain the errors and discrepancies.  He found over twenty, some of which are still not fully resolved.  The reader is referred to the full report for the amusing details; it is practically a textbook for how to mess with an election without getting prosecuted for election fraud.

The caption and the following text in the image above are, however, inaccurate in and of themselves.  The log file excerpt does not show "several ballots being processed."

It shows a single ballot being processed several times.  

"Ballot 1107" is the ID of a distinct ballot, as Halderman must very well know from digging through the log file.  Notice the error messages that say "Ballot format or id is unrecognizable"; each ballot has a serial number on it that the scanner tries to read in.

The Dominion software is perfectly happy to read and count Ballot 1107 repeatedly, and only complains when it is shoved into the machine crooked.

And when the ballot was reversed here, it was not "returned to the voter", but to an election worker--look at the time stamps.

Halderman even miscounted the lines:  there are 12 lines of errors in 26 lines, for an "error rate" of almost 50%.

It is interesting that he chose this particular section of the log file, which happens to show only one ballot ID number.  Supposedly Central Lake Township had 1222 ballot reverses out of 1491 ballots total, so he could have taken his excerpt from almost anywhere in the log file.

The lawsuit in Antrim County over the retail marijuana initiative that was either won by a single vote or lost with a tied vote, is ongoing.  I continue to assert that this lawsuit has the potential to change the world; it could and should blow the entire election fraud machine wide open.

 

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

 

EDITED TO ADD:  I've been told that the ballot number is actually the ballot design number, as in for a particular precinct, but I haven't seen a source for that.

Quiet

Apparently not much happened around here after the verdicts were announced.  There were preparations made though in case things did start happening:  pictures here.

"White supremacists" strike again

Last night was apparently somewhat lively again, despite a four-county (!) 7 pm (!) curfew, but not near where we are.  

There has been a lot of helicopter activity.

Settling in

The interesting features of this house include handmade doors in the basement, including wooden hinges.  

They look very nice on one side, but quite rough and rustic on the other, because the craftsman used long nails, pounded them in, and then "clinched" (bent over) the projecting points on the back side.

I've seen that technique used before, within the heels of old shoes.  Those doors aren't coming apart anytime soon.

There are other signs that the house was previously inhabited by a woodworker.  There's a room in the basement that has enough outlets for a decent number of power tools and a special vent for a dust collection system.

There are also many jar lids attached overhead, for someone's one-time convenient storage of small hardware items. 

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

As to the size of this house, it is a bit smaller than the previous house, and must be under 2000 square feet.  The previous house had a somewhat ridiculous amount of space devoted to living rooms.  This one is generous in terms of bedroom space, but tight elsewhere, most severely in the entry and eating spaces.

A relative told us that their family's solution to the entry problem growing up was to set up a coatroom in the basement, and to march the entire family straight down to it when they came home.  I've started setting up something along those lines, but so far it isn't much more than a pile of boots that have been thrown to the bottom of the stairs.

Moved

We're at the point in the new house reboot where I am starting to put up some new curtains.

There was a bug in the laundry process, which I eventually worked out:  the RED shutoff handle at the laundry sink is for the COLD water, and the BLUE handle is for the HOT water.  And, the supply lines to the washer are also reversed, so that the temperature selection is always backwards, unless I choose warm water for both wash and rinse.

The other notable issue is the squirrels.  They've now gnawed an entry hole into the new trash bin that is just like the one they had into the old bin.

Sixteen tons

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?

Another day older, and deeper in crap!

Hey liberals don't detain me 'cause I can't go

I can't even shovel my way out the door!

I don't have time for this crap, but someone has to say it...

 ...Knock. It. Off.

By the way, I was in far more physical danger during the Minneapolis/St. Paul riots--with the Twin Cities under curfews, and my midwife at risk of being pulled over on the drive to my house, where I was overdue to go into labor with a Baby of Unusual Size--than any member of Congress ever was during the January 6 "insurrection". 

If that link doesn't work, try my Locals.com Psalm73 community, which you can join for $2, I think (which goes to Locals, not to me). 

The simplest, most basic tests of who the true President is:  Does he like babies?  And do babies like him?

Biden has failed that first one already, starting with his own grandbaby that he wouldn't even acknowledge.  I don't even know if that baby is a boy or a girl! 

Slosh slosh squish slosh

Follow the money. 

 

But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men's matters.  -- I Peter 4:15 (KJV)

My turn, parts 2 - 94

A few years ago, I read a book called Everyday Racism, a thoroughly unscientific although commercially published book about a "study" that a professor did with black college students.  She asked them to tell her what the three most racist things that had ever happened to them were, and then she took their stories and wrote this book around them.

Reading it, I noticed two things:  first of all, the vast majority of these students' three worst victimizing racist incidents were in fact not all that bad.  Not really surprising, since both professor and students are from some college which I haven't bothered to remember the name of, that has a certain amount of Privilege attached to it.

The second thing I noticed is that very similar things have happened to me and my family.  And not just a few times; quite regularly.  And where they don't happen regularly, it's because I've been avoiding returning to the places where they did happen--shopping malls, for example.

I started listing these incidents out, and so far I am at 93 and counting.  Ninety-three little sob stories that would be marketable today, if only I were of some other race.

Well, that's not an insurmountable obstacle.  If the Black Like Me guy could travel around the South and "pass", I should be able (with a little work) to pass well enough for a couple of virtual book tours on Zoom over the next two or three years; everyone knows that COVID-19 is racist, just like everything else is....

The elite method, demonstrated so brilliantly by Christine Blasey-Ford, who didn't even need to resort to blackface, is to specifically blame whoever the Establishment is in need of demonizing at the moment, and to not worry too much about who was really present or not.  As long as the "feels" of the story are told in vivid enough detail that even the fictional elements are "brought to life", the hard facts of the matter can be left so hazy and nebulous that no one can disprove the story for certain.

The only real obstacle to this scheme is that I have a hard time writing in other styles without lapsing into parodying them.  But Sokal and others have blazed the trail there... I think the secret must be in the set of one's eyebrows; a sanctimonious posture must be a necessary precondition for sanctimonious writing.

Oh, and I better run my profile picture through MS Paint and add some Color.

Now what do we have here?

Mike Lindell has a new, long video out:  "Absolute Proof".  The beginning and the end are the most important parts; it is two hours long and far better than anything that's on TV.

Three of the players in the Antrim County Fake Election Saga appear as interviewees.

One question I have, now that I've seen most of the video is:  What else is in those terabytes of cyberattack tracking, if they were switching votes away from Trump by the tens of thousands so many times?  I mean, Trump only had so many votes to lose, for him to still come out with the unprecedented millions of votes that he did.  There must have been additions (and subtractions) for all of the candidates, and there must have been a lot of them.

Lindell didn't get into this in the video, but these operations required having Americans on the ground as election workers, to make sure that the paper ballots and other physical evidence more or less matched the net vote counts.

My other question based on the video:  Was the November 21, 2020 recount in Antrim County a hand recount, a machine recount, or both?  I've heard conflicting evidence there, but that would make sense if both a real election and a fake election happened in Antrim County, in parallel.

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

In coming attractions, besides the impeachment trial and the Trump campaign's upcoming Supreme Court case, and the March 4 Constitutional deadline for sorting out election disputes, and the Antrim County lawsuit being heard in early June, is that the Derek Chauvin trial is scheduled to begin on March 8.  Allow eight or ten weeks for the trial, and that sets up nicely for the George Floyd Memorial Rioting to get going around Memorial Day.  Instead of in the single-digit weather like we have had recently.

Chauvin is very likely to be acquitted of the second-degree murder charge, because I don't see how they can prove that without showing some real connections between Chauvin and Floyd when they both worked at that nightclub--which conveniently burned during the riots, as did the 3rd Precinct police station where evidence might have been kept.  But this is a prediction that I have to hedge; a blogger who is a very thorough researcher said at one point last year that there were aspects of this case that he didn't dare touch even with a ten-foot-pole.  He went on later to go and meet with various members of CONgress and federal agencies in person, so it must be something very big and very bad, to scare him away.

If you can read this, you can do your own taxes.

I have before a prominently-placed advertisement from a local tax service, promising the "best" rates for tax preparation.  Rate for Form 1040 starts at a bit more than $200; Earned Income Credit form in the tens of dollars, $20+ dollars to use their software for e-filing from home, if you prepare your own taxes.  Audit defense services in the hundreds of dollars.

That's ridiculous.  If  my family outsourced our tax preparation to this firm, it would increase our income tax costs by roughly one-third, and only save a few hours of my time.

The worst part of the work in tax preparation is in gathering the information that you need, and in organizing it for easy reference.  I always make a one-page summary of the most important information, and I pull out the previous year's tax return for comparison. Once you've done that, you might as well do the easier part yourself.

Now, let's get back to the ad:  the IRS has e-file options, some of them free.

The Earned Income Credit form is simple, you just have to follow the logic through one step at a time.

Here is Form 1040.  And the Form 1040 Instructions.  Again, the secret is to go Line by Line, following the logic through. When in doubt, take the instructions as literally as a computer would; the first "computers" were people.

I always use paper wherever possible, because the entire process was designed to be done on paper.  Paper also provides greater privacy, which is particularly useful when you are working with intermediate rather than final numbers.

I usually do two full passes through the 1040 and associated forms; the first pass is to "trailblaze" my way through, note any changes compared to the previous year, and make sure that I have all the forms and information that I need.  I do my writing for this on separate sheets of paper, not on the actual forms.

That sets me up for a smooth second pass, where I figure the actual numbers, etc., that I will be entering on the forms.

Finally, I go through and fill out all the forms, make copies, and mail.

If you want to keep your income taxes and life simple, then be conservative in the deductions that you claim, and base them on very solid and ethically sound numbers.  You'll sleep better at night, and if you are audited, you will able to go in with confidence.

As the steward of your income, it is very important that you understand which deductions are available to you, and how to claim them.  That is something that you cannot outsource every single year, because it can affect so many other decisions that you make.  All those convolutions of the tax code were designed to be incentives, in one way or another.

The IRS doesn't care at all if you claim too few deductions or credits, or pay too much in income tax.

And if you make a minor mistake, all they will do is send you a letter and tell you.*

 

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

* Subject to change under the Biden administration.

My turn, part 1

My turn to haul out the sob stories, I mean.  Aren't we all a bit tired of hearing them from the left for the past four years, and also the eight years before that, and the eight before that as well....

There was something in the newspaper from a week ago Sunday that set me off a bit.  A Hmong woman was telling about how when her mother was admitted to the hospital for COVID, for her first meal the nurses ordered a special meal for her that is the first meal that they serve to Hmong women after they give birth.  After that. her family brought in "culturally-appropriate" meals for her every day.

When I transferred to the hospital with my first baby, after giving birth at home, it was in the wee hours of the morning.  The baby needed some medical observation, nothing too worrisome, and I had lost somewhat more than the usual blood loss--but not so seriously as to need to go to the hospital by myself.

I may or may not have been given a breakfast that morning in the obstetric ward, after being up all night, but at lunch time I was given a tray, and I also had a bunch of doctors coming in and out, and I didn't feel comfortable eating in front of them.  When the tray-collector came around, I told her I wasn't finished with it.  Which you can take as meaning that I had had practically no free time for eating at all, because I'm not a slow eater.

When time was coming on for supper, I remember remarking to the nurses about 6:30 pm that I was looking forward to dinner, because by then I was quite hungry.  Two or three hours later, a nurse came in, found me slumped down (with baby safely tucked in at my side) and despondent, and asked, "What's wrong?"

"Starving," I murmured.  Supper had never arrived, and my blood sugar was falling.  My husband had been away dealing with home and things, so I had been alone in the hospital for several hours at least, and not wanting to bother the nurses.

She went away, and came back with a skimpy little sandwich, and an apple.  There may have been a little juice as well.  But that was it--no tray, and no dinner.

I called my husband after I had perked up a little, and told him to BRING REAL FOOD.  He eventually showed up, bringing me a meal from Wendy's--Wendy's, after being up all night and all day giving birth and then being in the hospital.

It may be of interest to some readers to know that my hemoglobin level was 7, and all they did for it was give me some iron pills.

I think we were able to go home the next day, but before that they did a jaundice test on the baby, which led to us returning to the hospital the following day for an even bigger s***show.

This time, the baby was an official patient, as I was not, but they gave me a room to sleep in, and the baby went to the nursery.  We got there in the evening, having had to drive very slowly through crowds from a sporting event who were unsportingly blocking the streets to the hospital, and who may have received some unsporting hand gestures in return. I sat up the whole first night with the baby; apparently one of the effects of higher blood loss while giving birth is that the post-birthing hormones are concentrated within a smaller blood volume, so I felt that this was within my capability, and I wanted to stay with my baby, and bond.  At 6:30 am, however, I was very tired, and went to bed.  At 7 am, while I was still awake, a very loud noise started up outside the window, my boarded-up window.  On a Saturday.  The hospital was building an addition, and just had to have the Giant Jackhammer going right outside what should have been my window, for several hours.  I don't even know when I was able to go to sleep.  I hadn't slept much the night before, either.

As a non-patient, the hospital was not even pretending to feed me, but my husband brought me little meals from the cafeteria, mostly hard-boiled eggs and hot dogs, and at some point my mother-in-law brought in two or three meals' worth of chicken stew, which I was able to refrigerate and microwave.

The baby's medical treatment was an additional s***show, and so was dealing with the rest of the dozen obstacles to breastfeeding that I haven't yet described, but we were able to go home again toward the very end of the third day.

So maybe you can understand now why I am triggered by that newspaper article.  It's no use complaining to the hospital I was at; it closed a couple of years ago.

Interesting

I have a cohort of Minecraft players myself, and there is a lot of realism to the game.  But I understand that Mojang was bought out by Microsoft; I'd advise them to not muck about with changing the game much.  Anyone with the persistence and skill to play through Minecraft on Survival Mode and kill the Ender Dragon is going to be a force to be reckoned with, when they grow up a little more.

A correction...

...has been made to this post (2nd post before this one). 

And I have to say, some of the links that I saw when I was trying to find an answer were rather confusing:  Nitrates in preserved meats are carcinogens, but nitrates in beans and in vegetables of the Brassica family are considered very beneficial, and you should eat them every day, because they have a "vasodilatory" effect?

These are the exact same nitrates chemically, as far as I know.  Or at least, I think they are in terms of what gets released from them into the body.  I could be wrong!

But I think the answer might lie in how these foods are eaten.  Traditionally, a high-nitrate plant food is eaten with a very moderate amount of meat, which was probably preserved by salting, drying, smoking, and/or some other traditional method.  In modern times, the meats have been increasingly preserved using nitrates--even the "low-nitrate" products typically use extracts from high-nitrate plants for preservation.

So if you eat a meal of say, regular bacon, beans, and collard greens, then you're getting a "triple dose" of nitrates.  That must be a shock to the body's systems, although perhaps the bacon fat slows down the nitrate uptake.  If you replace the bacon with something like a bean-based "meat substitute", then you still are in the same place...unless it is low fat!--in that case, you get the full nitrate load all at once.  This may explain much of the physical weakness and ill-health among some of the country's most careful eaters, as well as some of the country's most careless.

This merits further investigation, but before you go off and experiment on yourself, consider the tragic example of Seth Roberts, who I would call one of the greats of self-experimentation; I used to read his blog daily.  He died suddenly of something that was more or less a heart attack, while out hiking (in several ways it was very similar to the death of George Floyd, now that I think of it:  clogged arteries plus enlarged heart plus significant exertion), in the middle of a self-experiment that involved eating a diet that was very high in butter.

The way to do this more safely is to make a small change--such as taking a few small bites of a food--then wait for it to take effect, observe the results, and only then decide whether to take another small step in that direction, or to back off.  We are far too ungentle with our bodies in this culture.

Kevin Roche for Governor!

He puts in another round of slapping Governor Walz and the Department of "Health" around.   And they deserve it, saying things like this (via Power Line) about the youth sports mask requirement:

While some youth may experience shortness of breath, dizziness, or headaches until they acclimate to wearing a mask, these symptoms are not considered harmful. Masks can be safely worn, with the proper coaching and training, by young athletes.

Dizziness isn't harmful?  While they're playing sports??

Just as an experiment, I tried playing my flute while wearing a mask.  The air went everywhere except where I wanted it to go, and I couldn't get a sound out of it at all.  Wearing a mask while under physical exertion likely sends more air around the mask than through it, and at a considerable velocity...which makes this mask requirement a total charade.

Acceleration

The past few weeks have been educational in many ways.  Just yesterday, I learned that 3 tablespoons of the liquid from a can of garbanzo beans (chickpeas) can be used as a substitute for an egg in baking.  I knew about the substitution using soy flour and water, and I guessed that grinding up dried beans and adding a little water would work about the same way, but using canned bean liquid--that was new to me.  It worked just fine in the corn bread, though, and I've been told (but have not yet confirmed myself) that chickpeas have much lower levels of nitrates than other beans, for those who need to avoid them.

[ EDITED TO ADD:  I believe now that I was mistaken above, and that it is black-eyed peas that are low in nitrates, but I have not been able to confirm that yet.]

I've also come across references to chokeberries and aronia, which I hope to look into in more depth later, and a very interesting (and probably out of print) book called Curious Customs, which gives a wry and educated look at many of the traditional American customs that underlie our modern culture. 

I've also uncovered some small modifications to my eating habits which seem to be producing good results, but really, it is basically the same as someone else's "Eat food, but not too much."  I'd add, "And not too quickly,"  especially in respect to fluids and carbs.

Buckle up, friends

For when they nuke the internet, see Markku's update here.

And I'll see some of you at Christian Women Seeking Truth as soon as I can.

Audits

I looked into "risk-limiting audits" and they are a farce.  In the same vein, Larry Correia explains a bit about what real audits look like.

I pity the fools

Apparently the new Narrative is:  CCP Macht Frei.  We saw it in the New Year's Eve pictures of New York City's empty Times Square and Wuhan's very non-empty square.

If only you plebes would have masked up and obeyed like the Chinese do, you would have been free to party, too!

Yeah, right.

And now articles are being written to support the same idea.  There's a good response here. 

It's not just that our betters have been selling us out to China for years, but that they are counting on China to have their backs after the blue helmets that they'll call in first are all collected as trophies. 

The stakes are very high, and the times are perilous.  I'm looking to God, because everyone else is an idiot.  Including me.