Fun with fabrics

I'm working with a box of handed-down fabric scraps, mostly of medium size, from a neighbor who is downsizing.  So far I have pieced together two different fabrics into a skirt, and have also made a fabric-covered folder and a bag for a set of little wooden toys.  I also see several shirts coming out of this box, eventually.  My long-term plan is to switch to button-down shirts made of woven fabrics; knits are harder to mend.  I have a pattern I made years ago from a thrift-store shirt that fit well.  That shirt had no labels and might have been homemade as well.

I've also experimented with covering small cardboard boxes with these fabrics.  It's not something that I want to spend a lot of time on at this stage in my life, so I was looking for a fast method.  I realized that I could cut wide slits into the sides of the box and just push the fabrics ends through, so they would be held by friction.  If the fabric pieces are wrapped around the outside, and tucked through the slits from the inside, the box can look decent enough.

This reduces the strength of the box, but the advantage besides speed is that the fabric and box can easily be taken apart later and re-used or recycled.   

I've also been deconstructing worn-out clothes into kitchen wipes as usual, and material for patching other clothes, and for other crafts.  I experimented with weaving a side seam cut from a pair of blue jeans in and out of the holes of a small basket I don't like--it came out well. 

I've done some Tightwad-Gazette-style "hourly wage" calculations.  Higher-value pursuits include:  washing Ziploc bags, mending clothes, cutting holey fabrics into wipes that take the place of paper towels, skipping or combining shopping trips, and decluttering to free up floor space. 

The lipstick almost outweighs the pig

A sort-of-nearby house is for sale again, after being sold earlier this year for more than $150k less than the current listing price.  Photos show exterior improvements still very much in progress.

It's been quite a while since I looked at local real estate listings.  Neighborhood houses continue to sell quickly for ridiculous prices.

By ridiculous, I mean 100% higher than ten years ago.  Which makes the property taxes more than 100% higher, thanks to recent school-funding proposals that easily passed.  

At the same time, the public school ratings range from poor to barely-middling.  The student populations are majority-nonwhite now.

About half of the incoming house-debtors immediately set up leftist yard signs in their yards.  

Yesterday I was in St. Paul.  I only saw one family's children outdoors on a drive of a couple miles through residential neighborhoods, but there were dozens of ICE OUT signs.

I recently calculated the cost per square foot of a city building project.  It was more than the cost for the Federal Reserve renovation that Trump roundly and soundly criticized.  

I just now threw together a very optimistic estimate of the building's cost per visit:  building cost divided by number of building users over the lifespan of the building.  It came out to $11 per visit.  The real number will be higher.

Laundry soap again, and a dustpan

I made another batch of laundry soap.  This is the second batch since my last post about it, and one batch makes two gallons, so we use about one gallon every two and a half months.  I use normal laundry detergent for cloth diapers and my husband's work clothes. 

Elder Child and I were out looking for a broom and dustpan.  We both prefer metal dustpans, and ended up going in together on a cookie sheet, which I cut in half with tin snips, and smoothed with files and sandpaper.  I was planning to make wooden handles, but the ends of the cookie sheet are handle-like enough.

Cutting the metal with vintage giant-scissors-type tin snips was difficult, and required bending the metal a little to give the snips room to move along, so I had to straighten the cut edges afterward.  I believe modern tin snips make better use of leverage and are easier to use.

I also found out that a needle with the tip broken off can be re-sharpened.  I used the narrow side of a small sharpening stone of medium coarseness.  The needle was leaving little grooves in it, so this is not something I would want to do on the broad face.  

Numbers

 Minnesota gubernatorial election results by city and township.

I looked at a couple of the first-ring suburbs, and only around 15% of their voting-age population put in a vote for the Republican candidate.  I don't think that was the case in 2018. 

For comparison, Minneapolis was at about 5%.

The incumbent does have a more executive-type temperament--which he used during the pandemic to efficiently be highly troublesome and ineffective.  The challenger has far better principles, and got in some very good hits in the debates, but is much milder-mannered.

The DFL has captured control of the Legislature, and they have big plans.

Biden fixes Affordable Care Act "family glitch" by fiat

This month the Biden Administration finalized an administrative workaround to somehow override the law and counteract the "family glitch" that left many families without access to health insurance subsidies.

"Four out of five Americans can find quality coverage for under $10 a month" the administration said in April, speaking of those receiving subsidies.

That's not what we've been paying all these years. 

There is conservative commentary here.

This move will create pressure for families to drop employer-based health insurance and switch over to the exchanges...particularly since inflation is high and prices are outrunning incomes.  Probably some employers will drop health insurance benefits entirely.  The "family glitch" was not accidental, and these consequences are not accidental either.

Xcel Energy seeking to raise electricity rates...retroactively

They are seeking about a 12% increase for 2022, beginning January 1, 2022, and then additional increases over 4% for both 2023 and 2024.  

Altogether, the increase comes out over 22%.

Hopefully their regulator will yield to good sense and public pressure, and not give them everything they are asking for.  Many people would have made different consumption choices over the past nine and a half months, if they knew they would be paying more for it later on.

We're already paying extra for their supposed transition to carbon-free energy.

In other news, we picked apples at a small orchard, several bushels' worth, and I've been slowly working through them.  Mostly making applesauce and apple pie filling in the oven, plus I've sliced up several batches for the dehydrator.  We've been too wiped out by one thing and another to run any through the juicer yet.

The car registration came due, and for some reason the value basis for our vehicle is more than double the amount that the insurance company was going to give us when they wanted to total it last summer.  I didn't write about that saga at the time. What happened was that the vehicle was sideswiped while parked, and then the insurance company and the body shop postured their way through nearly two months of kabuki theater before finally fixing the dent and the side mirror and giving it back to us.

Too little, too late

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well???

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

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! 

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

Most have tested negative?, and a project

Apparently Minnesota, with a rate of positive tests that has been around ten percent, is also one of the states with the highest rates of positive tests. At the same time, ICU beds have gradually filled beyond the number that were available before the pandemic started.

The Minnesota State Fair, which is a very big deal around here in the weeks going into Labor Day, was cancelled for 2020.

In other news, I have been working on a replacement for a "stuff bowl"--a decorative bowl that serves as a holding place for stray small objects, until they are put away. I had been using one of my husband's large pottery bowls, but he wanted it back.

So I have been trying out a new craft idea:  a sort of papier mache, but with fabric and acrylic or latex paint instead of paper and glue/paste. For a base or form, I used the lower part of an ice cream bucket, cut to the height that I wanted. For fabric, I chose a stretchy textured synthetic that has proven to have poor durability on its own.

A bowl with some kind of a regular visual pattern seemed best for the location, for balance; there are already shiny and organically-textured things there.

I found it helpful to use a smaller plastic container as a stand, so I could work on the bottom, sides, and inside top edge of the bowl all at once. I cut out a largish circle of the fabric, and made regular cuts so that I could closely wrap the form, gluing the fabric in place with paint.

After it dried, I sponged another color of paint on, to help bring out the fabric's textured pattern, and then gave it a coat of Mod Podge, to help the surface feel smoother.

For the inside, I cut a circle of fabric to fit the bottom, painted it in, and then covered a strip of plastic from the remainder of the ice cream bucket with a tube of the fabric, to cover the inner sides. I hot-glued the strip in place, and painted that too.

The next step is to find something to cover the space at the top of the strip.

Next step forward

Last week version 3.0 of coronavirus modeling for Minnesota was finally released, and the governor announced somewhat loosened restrictions.

I skimmed through the technical document for the model, and there are some interesting points, although it seems that the governor’s most recent order—beginning next Monday—was driven mostly by political considerations. One of them being having Wisconsin for a neighbor, where many things have been opened up, thanks to judicial intervention. A large fraction of Minnesotans live within easy driving distance of the Wisconsin border, and many were already accustomed to going to Wisconsin to buy fireworks banned by Minnesota. (Some of those fireworks are also illegal to fire off in Wisconsin, but can still be legally purchased there.)

So the governor is going to allow retail businesses to open, at half capacity and with other restrictions, and is also allowing small gatherings of up to ten people.

The modeling timeline is that they built the latest version of the model in April, took data from March 22 to April 25, did calibration and runs, and then stopped on May 1 to write up results, which were released on May 13. So data from the last two weeks was not included, perhaps for the better in terms of calibration, since recent weeks have been dominated by the spread of the virus in nursing homes, while the model does not yet have the capability of working with “hot spots”. Or co-morbidities. Or most combinations of interventions.

A couple of numbers from the technical document and slides keep appearing out in the media:  a 37.6% reduction in people’s social contacts under social distancing, and a 55.1% reduction in contacts under the stay-at-home order. The media portrays them as a failure of Minnesotans to achieve the government-planned reductions of 50% and 80%, but the numbers above simply did not come out of the real world, not at all. They came from the modelers’ attempts to tweak these and other parameters to make the model’s output match the data that they had.

One surprising thing I found in the technical document is that according to the Department of Health, 65% of the deaths attributed to the virus have happened outside of hospitals; at home or in a nursing home. Even the model predicts nearly 70% for this.

In an earlier post, I guessed a long-term care rate in Minnesota of 1.5%. It is actually under 1%. If I put that together with the dying-out-of-hospital rate, that suggests that over 6,000 Minnesotans are going to die at home over the course of the pandemic.

The one very definite indication from the scenarios that were modeled is that Minnesota should not follow the CDC guidelines for re-opening, which according to the model would delay the peak in coronavirus cases for several months, and then spread it out so widely that half of the 2200 ICU beds with ventilators that the state has arranged for would never be used.

Under more realistic conditions, the virus is expected to peak in Minnesota in late June or early July.

Let's see

According to Power Line, only 83 of the 428 total deaths in Minnesota as of yesterday have been of people living outside of long-term care facilities.

At the same time, the official stance is that there could be 100 cases for every known positive. As of yesterday, that was 7234, with possibly as many as 80% of them outside long-term care. So maybe over 580,000 Minnesotans have already had it...that would almost 11% of the state's population.

But let's be conservative, and say that it is half that; 83 deaths divided by 290,000 cases would be a death rate of 0.03% (outside long-term care).

Some of those cases are people who recovered, but some cases are still in progress, and because the pandemic has still been spreading, the number that will die soon could be much larger than the number that already have died; I will make a guess of 1000 additional people here.  That raises the death rate to 0.4%; about 21,300 (outside long-term care).

The epidemic in the long-term care facilities is basically separate. I guessed above that they were 1.5% of the population, or 81,000, but maybe it is only 1%.  [EDITED TO ADD:  It is under 1%.] Clearly their death rate is much higher than the general population, my guess at present would be 10%*.  So say 8100 additional long-term-care deaths, for a total of 29,400.

The latest I've seen from the state's model, which they are supposedly running again this week, is a projection of about 22,000 deaths. The governor's orders don't exactly match the modeling assumptions, so this is probably too high.

Now, to make a more liberal estimate, 83 deaths divided by 580,000 cases would be a death rate of 0.01%.  If I stay proportional to my earlier guess, and say that there maybe are 2000 additional infected people who will die soon, then the guess overwhelms the number of actual deaths, and I'm back to an estimate of a 0.4% death rate, and the same prediction for the state overall.

If I keep my guess at the same 1000 as before, then it would be a death rate of 0.2%, with total deaths of about 18,800.

These numbers partially confirm what my intuition has been telling me:  some level of shutdown is helpful, but the state has been locked down too much for too long. Put more safeguards around the nursing homes, but most of the restrictions on the general population should be eased. People will still act according to their personal risk tolerance, which will do much to "flatten the curve" without any government action.

A couple of days ago, by the way, the health department representative when questioned revealed that 99.24% of the people who died had underlying health conditions. They're sitting on a lot of data that they're not sharing freely, and they are trying to get even more, legally or not.

That 580,000 is also the last number that I've heard for the number of unemployment applications in the state.

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* I noticed while writing that an estimate of a rate of 10%, for something that must be at least 1%, mathematically cannot be off by more than a factor of 10.

House arrest continues

The governor extended the stay-at-home order until May 18, while allowing retail businesses to open up curbside service and delivery. Earlier this week, many non-retail businesses were allowed back to work.

The problem with opening businesses, is that their customers may or may not come back. And many businesses have other businesses as their customers.

The governor believes that Minnesota’s coronavirus peak has been delayed until late May or early June. I believe that it is likely to come a bit later than that, just because of the time needed for it to spread that widely. Even when things are opened up, people will still be doing a lot of social distancing.

The best analogy here is to the way that a fire spreads, by fits and starts, flaring up under some conditions, while barely smoldering under others. I have been wondering about computer models of fire spread.  They are probably not very accurate either, because of the element of chance that must frequently come into play.

At present, they are doing more tests and finding more positives, but the ICU population is remaining just about flat, reflecting the fact that the worst cases are coming out of the nursing homes, and aren’t hanging on to life very long after hospitalization.

In any case, I finished up a household inventory this week, and we clearly have plenty of things that we can be doing at home. I sewed a baby sling from fabric that I was intending to use for quilt backing. I divided one hosta plant that really needed it, and moved another that was awkwardly situated in relation to the other plants.

I also used the legs of the coffee table as a frame for winding rug warp, for the little rug that is half woven. This time, I have real cotton rug warp yarn from the thrift store; I had a lot of trouble before with the crochet cotton breaking during weaving.

There are a number of little mending, maintenance, and repair jobs on my list. I have been making progress on those.

Finally, I have been looking for something in the house to paint, and noticed that the box holding the children’s paper supply could use some embellishment. My plan is to lay on a design with puff paint, and then to paint over it all.

Hmm

According to Scott Johnson at Power Line, all of Minnesota's coronavirus deaths in people under 70 so far were people who lived in long-term care or similar facilities.

The present shutdown order ends on Monday.