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. 

Should have worn a respirator

I took a look at a free-by-the-side-of-the-road upright bagless vacuum that I picked up a while back.

It had very weak suction, and with a little investigation it was easy to see why:  the filters were caked and choked with dust.  Someone decided to buy a new vacuum rather than spend a few minutes dealing with them.

The filters are washable, so I washed them, and they're drying now.  I think the belts are okay.

If it's good to go, this will be the basement vacuum.  My canister vacuum from a German manufacturer is about twelve years old, and still works fine.

I've gotten more interested in free appliances like this since I learned how much metal can be salvaged out of them.  And hardware.

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There's a Popular Science book from the World War II years that I've been leafing through:  the "Second Giant Home Workshop Manual".  It's a frenetic mix of home science demonstrations, home improvement projects, and DIY wartime preparedness, punctuated by instructions on how to electroplate with various metals.

It reminds me in some ways of the early years of the pandemic.

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.

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)

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.

More people are preparing

I have to say that I'm glad I bought toilet paper last week--not in "panic buying", but because we were nearing our normal point of needing to restock. This week the grocery store was completely out.

There were some other noticeably emptied shelves:  flour, dried beans, rice, bread, pasta, frozen vegetables, hot cereals, bottled water, potatoes, ramen noodles.  Plenty of turkeys at 99 cents per pound, and eggs at $2.99 for 2.5 dozen, though.

Cabbage had also been cleaned out, but it was on deep sale for 39 cents per pound, less than half the usual price.

Places die too...

...according to George MacDonald.

A church building that I put in many hours helping to renovate and enlarge, once upon a time, has been sold, and the church has moved. Given its location, the building is certain to be torn down and replaced with something looming and modern, just as it replaced the original house on the site, where the church began.

The good news is that the church sold the building because they have outgrown it again. They have started another round of place-making in a very visible, can't-miss-it location with lots of potential.

Aspirations

When I started this blog, I planned on leaving politics out of it, but it turned out that politics doesn't plan on leaving me alone, and is having serious effects on my household's finances.  In today's example, Minnesota is working hard to transform itself into the California of the Midwest.

It's all kind of intertwined, but at the foundation are a solid belief in climate change*, and a steadfast faith in the power of collective, government-led effort to get things done.  There is a law on Minnesota's books, the 2007 Next Generation Energy Act, which mandates a 30% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels, and a 80% reduction by 2050.  The state is not on track to meet those goals, but by golly, they're trying.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is considering adopting California's ZEV and LEV standards, as several other states have already done. The initial public comment period on this effort closed yesterday; fortunately I was working on some of these things yesterday morning, and I noticed the deadline in time to get my comments prepared and submitted.

The LEV (Low Emissions Vehicle) standard would require that most new vehicles sold in Minnesota meet California emission standards. Apparently, federal law requires that states wanting to set more stringent emissions standards must either use the California standards, or do nothing.  The MPCA may take Colorado's LEV standard (which basically incorporates the California standard by reference) as a model for Minnesota's version.

I don't see how letting another state write your state's laws can end well.  Population of Los Angeles metro area:  4 million.  Population of the entire state of Minnesota:  5.7 million.

The ZEV (Zero Emissions Vehicle) standard would set delivery quotas for electric, hybrid, and hydrogen-fueled vehicles for car manufacturers wishing to sell new cars in Minnesota. From a news report, it appears that people wanting to buy ZEV vehicles in Minnesota at present are having a bit of a hard time finding them, though most of them manage to purchase one in the end.

It turns out that this slight shortage in ZEV supply is because California and several others states have adopted ZEV standards, so the manufacturers are delivering these vehicles first to the states where they are required to deliver them.  In my comments, I pointed out that the economic forces at play will sort this situation out over time, without any government intervention at all. And that if government intervention sets the ZEV quotas above demand, then the manufacturers and dealers may start having to subsidize ZEV sales by charging more for higher-emissions vehicles.

This is another of those "unintended consequences" that keep popping up. They're never in my favor, either.

The MPCA claims that the LEV and ZEV standards would only affect manufacturers and dealers.  That is baloney; new car buyers would also be affected, as well as used car buyers in a few years as these vehicles trickle into the used car market.

Colorado's LEV standard exempts passenger vehicles over twelve passengers; I see a fifteen-passenger high-emissions van in my future.  Our family is large, but not that large. It's not a gain on the climate change front, either.

On the utility front, our utility is proposing to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2030, and to get to zero-carbon electric generation by 2050; not only meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement**, but exceeding them. They are asking for permission from the Public Utilities Commission to retire all of their coal-powered plants ten years early, and to build a lot more wind and solar power generation capacity.

The problems, of course, are that wind and solar electricity generation often don't track with electricity demand, and that it is very hard and expensive to store excess electricity in large quantities for the times when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining--which could be for days or even weeks.

Their solution is *waving the magic Technology wand* to use the power of technology to manage demand rather than supply. That looks to me like it is going to involve some kind of real-time pricing:  very cheap electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, and very expensive electricity when they aren't.

Minnesota does have a nuclear power plant, but from what I've read, it sounds like they are working only on keeping it open, and not on building another one. The environment lobby Force is very strong in Minnesota, and it does not always act coherently.

Buried deep within the bowels of the utility's Carbon Report, I have found an implied wish list:  1.  Substantial tax subsidies for their "de-carbonization".  2.  That Minnesota be converted to a "high-electrification state, requiring that electricity be used for cooking, water heating, space heating, and passenger vehicles.  3.  That private generation of electricity (at least at the level of large businesses, etc.) be banned.

So, their brilliant plan to stop climate change and save the world is to use my tax money to force me to use electricity for everything, and then, when their zero-carbon-emissions electricity proves unreliable, to bar me from making my own electricity.

I just finished reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which makes a strong case that socialism always requires some sort of a common cause, and always ends up using coercion by force. I am also in the middle of a book about the history of the Baptist church in Russia.  Under the Soviet Union the Communists found it politically convenient to set the Church up as the internal enemy of all good Communists--as opposed to creating an external enemy that they might end up having to fight a war with, if passions ran too high.

More and more, I am starting to see climate change as the modern unifying cause of the socialists, the justification that they are using to take over control over more and more of the world's physical economic activity. Climate change cannot be separated from economic activity, because in their view economic activity causes climate change. The climate modelers are having to incorporate manufacturing and land use and so on into their models, and they already are showing a distinct tendency to want to control those activities in order to control climate change. This will not end well; it doesn't even end well when the economists are in charge.


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*The short version of my opinion of climate change is that we are working very hard to solve a problem that may not even exist.

**I read the Paris Agreement. It's only sixteen pages, but it has already spawned a complex of committees busily generating large quantities of documents written in bureaucrat-ese.  The character of the Paris Agreement can be seen clearly in its practice of calling a regular international assessment of progress toward reducing carbon emissions a "global stocktake"--overt Newspeak, in an Orwellian global program. The U.S. is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, but the process will take some time.

Staples

We recently made a trip to Costco to stock up.

Since I had all the packaging handy, I could easily figure the cost per 1000 calories for some of the things we bought:

Oatmeal $0.53/kCal
Flour $0.14/kCal
Sugar $0.26/kCal
Rice $0.21/kCal

This doesn't include the annual membership fee, though, or the cost of driving further than the distance to our usual grocery store.  For the number of times a year that we go to Costco, it probably costs us about $12 each time to get over there and in the door.

Even so, by comparing against the chart I made of typical grocery store prices, Costco comes out fairly well, especially when I consider the quantity of food that we usually buy there.

For just those four items on this trip, we spent $35, and got 141,375 calories. No, these are not the only things that we eat.

The Prudent and Prepared Homemaker

Sallie Borrink has made her Prudent and Prepared Homemaker materials available in her Community Discussion Area. There is a lot of good material there, and I'm in the middle of working my way through reading it and thinking about what I need to do in my own household.

The cost of handmade clothing

I came upon a historian's analysis about how much labor was involved in making clothing before the Industrial Revolution.

She took an example from the Middle Ages:

So, 7 hours for sewing, 72 for weaving, 500 for spinning, or 579 hours total to make one shirt. At minimum wage - $7.25 an hour - that shirt would cost $4,197.25.
And that's just a standard shirt.
And that's not counting the work that goes into raising sheep or growing cotton and then making the fiber fit for weaving. Or making the thread for the sewing.
And you'd still need pants (tights or breeches) or a skirt, a bodice or vest, a jacket or cloak, stockings, and, if at all possible, but a rare luxury, shoes.

I believe linen was one of the major fibers, at least in northern Europe, but processing flax is also very labor-intensive.

Her estimate of a weaving speed of 2 inches per hour is exactly what I had estimated for my own speed making the rug.

In a sock-knitting booklet, I found a short history of socks that claims that before the time of Queen Elizabeth, people wore hose made of woven fabric, sometimes cut on the bias (diagonally), and that the fashion for knitted stockings only began when someone presented the Queen with a pair of knitted silk stockings.

I don't think my sock-knitting speed is as fast as two inches per hour, so I find this somewhat believable, although I also believe that someone, somewhere, must have worn knitted socks before Queen Elizabeth's time.
I've noticed how much emphasis in Proverbs 31 is placed on the manufacture of textiles. Another example would be in Greek myths, where noblewomen are often described as highly-skilled weavers. I have concluded that spinning and weaving are harder skills to master than growing food, and are very necessary skills to keep alive. That is part of why I built my little table loom and started learning to weave rugs.

The textile industry in the U.S. has been almost completely wiped out by cheap imports, with both the labor and the environmental damage being moved overseas. There is production of high-quality, sustainably-made fabric going on the U.S. still, but on a small scale, and it costs about ten times more than an import would.

The other two

Since I've been digging into some of the presidential candidates' campaign promises for health insurance and health care, I decided I might as well look at Buttigieg's and Harris's as well.

According to Buttigieg's campaign site, he is proposing Medicare for All Who Want It, as a public option. Supposedly this will put pressure on private health insurers to improve their products and service. His site says that over time, however, this will propel a transition to Medicare For All.

Having a public health insurance option and forcing private health insurers to compete against it is also a feature of Biden's plan.  However, the playing field is clearly not level in such a scenario, being heavily tilted in favor of the government program, which can draw on tax dollars and practically write its own rules.  I'm really getting tired of counting the avenues through which Democrats have attacked, are attacking, and are saying that they will attack in the future, private health insurance.

Not that I think private health insurance companies are good; but on the whole they can do much less damage than a nationalized bureaucracy can.  The right to vote with your wallet is a very important one.

Another similarity between Buttigieg and Biden is that their plans include expanding automatic enrollments of people in government health programs.  So much for Privacy and Choice.

Kamala Harris, according to her campaign site, is proposing a ten-year transition to Medicare For All, with automatic enrollment of newborns! Under her plan, some of the Medicare plans will be offered by private insurers. She promises to keep them on a very tight leash.

The ability of any of these candidates to reform health insurance coverage is going to be very limited, unless the Democrats can recapture the Senate, since the President does not have the power to legislate. I don't know how many seats will be up for grabs in 2020.

I also found an article on the American Medical Association site that describes some of their resolutions.  Apparently the AMA supports the Affordable Care Act, proposes some changes to it--including fixing the "family glitch", hopes for universal health care coverage, and has concerns about the costs of Medicare For All--up to $32 trillion dollars in increased federal spending over ten years?!? There are some older articles about dealing with the 2017 changes in Medicare payments, and how doctors can navigate the pay-for-performance structure.

The problem with performance incentives for doctors is that they lead to compliance directives for patients...so much for Privacy and Choice...again.

I was looking at the AMA site because I believe that health care costs could be lower if the supply of doctors was larger. Some years ago, I looked at the doctors-to-population ratios of the United States and a couple of other countries. The United States was not that bad, but seemed to be not all that great, either.

'Tis the season...

...for the annual letter from the health insurance company saying, "If you like your plan, too bad, because we're discontinuing it."

Incredibly, last summer Biden stepped very close to repeating Obama's "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan" promise.  From the health care page on his campaign site, I see that Biden is proposing to build on the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare, by increasing subsidies for people buying insurance on the exchanges, and greatly expanding Medicare, and increasing automatic enrollments into Medicaid.

Did you catch that bit? --Increasing subsidies for people buying insurance on the exchanges.  These people are already eligible for subsidies, up to an income limit of 400% of the federal poverty level.  He wants to increase the subsidies, and increase the income limits.

As for the people caught by the "family glitch" that I've already written about, all Biden is offering is a chance to buy into a government health plan.  No, thanks.  And Mr. Biden, don't stand too close to me, or you'll get badly scalded by the steam that is coming out of my ears.

In other health insurance news, I found an older post by The Silicon Graybeard that outlines some of the issues with Obamacare quite well.  The ACA is very long and complex, and much of what it did was to amend several other long and complex pre-existing laws, including the Social Security Act, in an intricate sort of way.  That is part of why it is very difficult to repeal.

His description of the trade-offs between efficiency and responsiveness is by itself well worth reading; it is an issue that I run into all the time as a mother.  

Fix it or lose it

I've been playing a game around the house that I call "Fix It or Lose It". This is for our possessions within the house, not for the house itself.

So far I have repaired a wooden toy and a child's rocking chair, and I have decided not to repair (or re-repair) another wooden toy and another chair, because I couldn't fix them well enough for them to last much longer.

Repairs are not always something that you can just push through on the spot. Sometimes you have to wait for the right time, energy, parts, tools, or ideas. For the rocking chair, that meant not fixing it first thing in the morning yesterday; I didn't have the energy. Later in the day, I went back to it and everything came together without too much trouble.

Still working on the walls

I've been too busy with other things to make progress on the school room, except that I took out one piece of potential wall art:  a handed-down pine cone wreath. It is a bit of a family heirloom, but is a bit lacking in visual appeal, and I am ready for a break from it.

Taking it out of the room definitely made an emotional difference; it had been weighing on me more than I realized.

The cheapest foods in the store

I finally finished my grocery costs calculations; there was one last price that I kept forgetting to gather.  These are based on my local chain grocery store, on either the regular prices or on sale prices that I've frequently seen.  Other grocery options, such as Aldi, will often be cheaper.  We buy a large fraction of our food from Costco and from the local meat market.

I decided to standardize and rank these foods by figuring out the cost per 1000 calories of each. And I don't recommend basing your diet on the cheapest foods alone; that would be very unhealthy! But this list may help you to avoid overpaying for convenience foods that are made mostly of the most inexpensive and least healthful ingredients, and also help you to make the dollars stretch further when money is tight.

Food, Cost Per 1000 Calories

White flour $0.27
White sugar $0.29
Canola oil $0.33
Lard (hydrogenated) $0.46
White rice, 10 lb bag $0.50
Peanuts $0.56
Cornmeal* $0.62
Pasta $0.63
Popcorn (plain unpopped)* $0.90
Oatmeal* $0.83
Peanut butter $0.90
Butter $0.94
Cornstarch $0.95
Pop/Soda, 2 liters $0.97
Milk (whole) $1.16
Dried beans $1.33
Potatoes $1.43
Ice cream $1.62
Banana* $1.64
Tortilla chips $1.79
Olive oil $1.83
Bread, fancy brand $1.87
Chicken nuggets $1.85
Eggs $1.90
Raisins $2.11
Frozen juice concentrate $2.26
Cheese (block) $2.36
Ground beef (80/20) $3.46
Carrots $4.18
Yogurt (local brand, based on whole milk)  $4.59
Chicken breast $5.32
Cocoa powder (the baking kind) $6.64
Canned olives $6.77
Apples $7.46
Onions $9.90
Romaine lettuce $18.43
Green pepper $41.25

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* = For these products I had to guess a bit about price, or calories in a package, or how many it would take to make a pound

A good start

I'm gone back to the practice of writing three pages by hand each morning--the "morning pages" from The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron. It is a very helpful practice, on a number of levels:

Emptying my brain of thoughts that it just wants a chance to say

Capturing the tasks that need to be done, and getting them on my to-do list

Stopping other activities long enough to get the perspective to determine which of those tasks I should actually do, and which I need not do, or really shouldn't

Processing incomplete thinking, and harvesting and recording the conclusions

Loving myself by actually listening to myself; which is a prerequisite to loving others

Connecting to the Spirit of God, and listening to what He has to say



With those things done, it is then easier to focus my efforts on getting things done, both practically and creatively.