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! 

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.

Fall

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

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

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

I made something

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

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

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

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

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

A signal for the sickroom

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

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

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

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

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

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

Groceries delivered, and on the mend

With my husband and I both having Symptoms, we had to depend on others to grocery shop for us. They were able to get everything on our list, except for non-microwave popcorn.

I am slowly recovering, still low energy but that is to be expected anyway, being in the third trimester. I'm in the in-between phase where I can see everything that needs to be done, but I can't yet do much more than the basics.

So I am taking on a quick sewing project, that I can mostly do sitting down:  using a tie-dyed sheet that was in the fabric my mother-in-law gave us to make a skirt.

I have two simple A-line skirt patterns that I have been using for the past few years:  one with only front and back pieces, and one with four pieces (sometimes called "gores"). To reduce the amount of cutting and sewing, I chose the two-piece pattern.

I referred to my prior wardrobe planning booklets for the length, took a measurement from one of my existing skirts to get the width at the hemline, and used my present waist measurement.  (All of these measurements need some extra added for seam allowances, and for ease of movement.)

I cut out the pieces in one go with the measuring and planning, and will start on the sewing later. I am going to overdye the skirt with some dye that I want to use up.

We haven't needed face masks at all yet, since we haven't gone out, but I am thinking of trying out this pattern. The video there is helpful in understanding how the elastic loops go inside the mask during sewing, so that they will be on the outside when you turn it right-side-out; sewing topology can be tricky.

I have enough elastic on hand to make two or three masks, I'm guessing. I think it would be possible to make up to one-half or maybe even two-thirds of each ear loop from non-stretchy material, to conserve elastic. Or there could be longer ties that tie at the back of the head.

I've been following this blog on the reaction to coronavirus in the Manila area (population 30 million).

I'm beginning to wonder what coronavirus is going to do to other chains of supply and manufacturing in the medium term, especially in regard to textiles, which is yet another domestic industry that moved overseas decades ago.

From before

Last weekend, I did several quick little decorating projects.

The first was to take the painted string that I salvaged from my temporary wall decoration a while back (string wetted with paint and coiled onto a big sheet of graph paper in a large oval) and make a wreath out of it. I decided what size I was aiming for, and then found a book of corresponding size to wrap the string around, to keep the length of each turn consistent. When I was nearing the end of the string, I slipped the wreath off the book, and then used the rest of the string to wrap and hold the coils together.

The string had some entrenched tangles in it, from when I was wrestling with it while the paint was still wet. I arranged those as best I could, and painted them pink and green to simulate flower accents. The finished wreath went on the front door as spring decor.

The next project was to cover a cardboard box with fabric, for prettier storage of toddler clothes. Last weekend, my mother-in-law dropped off a considerable load of toys, books, art supplies, and fabric from her house. My initial idea was to cover the box with paint and fabric, but then I found a piece of fabric that I liked. It was large enough that I didn’t want to cut it, but to allow for it to be re-used for something else later, so I decided to skip the paint and gather the fabric up around the box instead, securing it at the top edge by sewing it directly to the cardboard by hand. The tradeoff is that the box’s lines are softened, and lose some visual tidiness.

Before I sewed it, I decided that I might as well line the inside of the box with fabric as well, and found a piece from my stash. It was tricky to drape and pin it so that it followed the inside contours of the box, with the raw edges gathered and tucked in at the top, and the grain of the fabric more or less aligned with the box. I whipstitched the outer and inner fabric together at the top edge, and it was done.

The third project was to repaint a wooden tray that I use to hold baby blankets. I still had a little of the white string paint left from back when, and I wanted to use it up. I mixed in a little craft paint to tint it, and gave the tray a coat.

These painting projects turn out much more nicely if you unload the excess paint from the brush each time you fill it, and put the paint on in thin coats. I only did one coat, and called it good, although I do have enough paint left to do another layer; the original color of the tray shows through a little more than I would like.

A further tip would be to do some surface preparation beforehand, and give it a light sanding, and possibly even prime it. In this case, the piece was old enough to have been pre-roughened, so it’s not a big deal that I didn’t remember to think of that.

Links

Sallie Borrink has an excellent post on Letting Go of Who You Were to Find Out Who You Are Now.  Pruning for the sake of focusing and encouraging new growth is very much a Christian idea.  And I have certainly been guilty of hoarding potential crafting supplies all out of proportion to my ability to actually use them.

Like Mother Like Daughter had a link back to an older, but very good post on caring for your sick child at home.  Very timely, as the stomach flu has come to our house again.

In the process of working in one of my fields, I came across the blog of Futurist Guy, who has extensive writings on social systems, some of which have been very helpful to me.

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.

Recycled child's bog jacket

A year ago, I made a lap blanket. But since then, we were given a number of quilts and other blankets, and it ended up in the closet.

Meanwhile, one of our smaller children began to need another winter sweater. I thought of using the lap blanket to make a little "bog jacket" or "bog coat", which is a simple and ancient jacket pattern that can be made from a single square of fabric, using the entire square. It is best known to weavers, but is called a "bog jacket" because one of those bodies found years ago very well-preserved in a peat bog was wearing one made of leather.

Knitter Elizabeth Zimmermann adapted the design for knitting, and put it in her book Knitting Around. At one point I knitted a baby-sized version, which has worked out well and was not quickly outgrown.  I might as well add here that I accidentally mixed in a little wool yarn with the acrylics in this project; the wool felted and shrank, while the acrylics didn't, but I was able to give the shrunken areas a good pull and restore some of the lost width. The lost length didn't matter, because the design runs long on the baby.

There's an example photo here, without the extra fullness in the lower part that Zimmermann added to make room for a thick diaper.

Anyway, in her design the vertical slit that needs to be made is accomplished by dividing the knitting onto separate needles and balls of yarn at that point, while the horizontal slits are made by knitting in a strand of contrasting yarn, which is removed later, with the loose stitches being grafted elsewhere to make the seams for the sleeves and across the chest.

Since I was working with a finished piece of knitting, and I was in a hurry, I decided not to unravel and graft, but to sew and cut, and then sew again.

Knitters really hate cutting into their knitting, because they have a great fear of unraveling stitches, but if you sew in a line of short stitches along every edge that you want to preserve, before you cut, then it is safe to do.  Some of my washcloths are portions of sweaters that I have sewn and cut in this way. I've had no problems with them unraveling. I've also altered sweaters.

In this case, because I wanted to keep the edges a little stretchy, I chose to use a short zigzag stitch. Be warned that this tends to make a curly "lettuce" edge, especially if you stretch it out while sewing, which is sometimes a desirable effect. After sewing around each cut I was going to make, I carefully did the cutting.

The final sewing was a little tricky, in making the right parts go to the right places, but it also went quickly.

To finish it, I found two old coat buttons, and crocheted yarn chains long enough to loop around them. I sewed on the buttons and loops, and it was finished--except for picking off a number of little bits of yarn, the loops that were severed when I did the cutting.

It came out a nice size for the child, with lots of room to grow.

An interesting take

Dorothy Sayers, in an address titled "Are Women Human?", which she gave to a Women's Society in 1938, gave an answer to the chauvinist objection that women were "taking men's jobs" by listing a number of female occupations in medieval times that had since then been taken over by men:

It is a formidable list of jobs:  the whole of the spinning industry, the whole of the dyeing industry, the whole of the weaving industry.  The whole catering industry and...the whole of the nation's brewing and distilling.  All the preserving, pickling and bottling industry, all the bacon-curing.  And (since in those days a man was often absent from home for months together on war or business) a very large share in the management of landed estates.... Even the dairy-maid in her simple bonnet has gone....

Sayers believed that work should be done by those who are best fitted for it, whether male or female, and that the work should be not only well done, but also worth doing well. Since industrialization had taken over much of women's traditional work, then women should be allowed to take on other kinds of work.

The more modern book Radical Homemakers, by Shannon Hayes, similarly chronicles the shift of industry out of and away from the home, and suggests ways to bring some of it back in. It has been a number of years since I read this book, but it is safe to say that she wasn't a conservative Christian when she wrote it. More like an anti-capitalist feminist.

Neither of these authors concerned themselves much, if I remember rightly, with the idea of home being the place for the production of new people. That is another thing has largely been outsourced, over the last few decades, in this case to other countries. In her speech, Sayers did mention the impossibility of housing a family with a dozen children in "a small flat", but she was perhaps forgetting the small size of many medieval peasant dwellings. Even my father-in-law grew up in a house that was under 450 square feet, and they weren't so far from having a dozen children.

There is a book that I used to own, The Structures of Everyday Life:  The Limits of the Possible, that goes deeply into the economics of European life, a few centuries after the Medieval period. Most families owned only a few pieces of furniture. France at one point instituted a prize for families that reached twelve children, although it was not able to feed the population that it already had; the book said that there were many French families at that time with twenty children or more.

Almost a routine

I found this post at Laine's Letters...Revisited! a few months ago, and it has been very helpful.

In particular, I took the advice about setting down my daily routine on four index cards. Nothing is scheduled by time, it is just a sequence of tasks to go through. Start at the top, and work my way down, and when there are interruptions, that's okay.  When one card's tasks are finished, flip to the next one. I do try to make sure that our meals land at regular times, though.

It very nicely solves the perennial daily problem of Too Many Things To Do And No Idea Where To Start.

Adjustments

I had some free time and was at loose ends, so I picked up my copy of Myquillyn Smith's Cozy Minimalist Home and started reading.

It helped me open my eyes and see that the room I was in, our school room which I had Cozy-Minimalized before, was getting cluttered up again and was short on breathing room. The chalkboard easel was back in there, and the dollhouse-that-never-gets-used-for-dolls had wandered in, homeless. There were also a number of smaller things that just needed to be put away.

It didn't take long to deal with most of them, and as I was moving around the house doing so, I did some more tweaking here and there. The dollhouse found a new home in the family room, the paper pumpkins the children made are arranged on top of a kitchen cabinet, and I made some headway on the general mess in the family room.

Warren makes me tired

She doesn't just want to go in for another round of screwing up health insurance, she also wants to completely overhaul the energy and housing sectors.  As in M4A, this would involve massive amounts of taxpayers' dollars and incredibly complex tangles of laws, regulations, and brand-new government programs...for a sustainability score of 0, right off the bat.

Our local electric and gas utility is already proposing changes to radically reduce carbon emissions, including early retirement of all their coal-powered plants. The state Public Utilities Commission is asking for public comments, and I certainly have some to give them.

For housing, Warren is promising to "lower rents by 10%".  While at the same time promising under her 100% Clean Energy proposal to refurbish 4% of existing buildings and houses each year to make them "green". Supposedly this will be done through the magic of federal funding.

If I do a quick estimate, guessing that there are 150 million buildings that would be affected, with an average cost of $50,000 to upgrade each building, that would be $300 billion per year, or $0.3 trillion; $7.5 trillion over 25 years. Plus a few gazillion dollars to "decarbonize" electricity generation, and a few gazillion more to take away most of our fossil-fueled vehicles. This makes it a modest proposal, actually, compared to the multi-trillion-dollar annual cost of her Medicare for All plan.

I found this laughable:

I’ll also invest in electric vehicle charging infrastructure, including ensuring that every federal interstate highway rest stop hosts a fast-charging station by the end of my first term in office, and ensuring that charging stations are as widespread and accessible tomorrow as gas stations are today.

Given the difference in time between filling a gas tank and charging an electric vehicle (currently in the tens of minutes with Teslas, for a partial supercharge), I don't think that is going to look exactly like she thinks it will. The charging stations would have to be much more widely accessible than gas stations are today, and the sensible thing to do would be to place them mostly at peoples' destinations.

Her affordable housing plan will do little to improve my family's housing affordability or security. It would help if we weren't paying out the equivalent of another place's rent every month for health insurance, thanks in part to Senator Warren's Yes vote on the Affordable Care Act. There was, a few years back, someone who did the math and compared their monthly health insurance cost to the mortgage payment on a $400,000 house; they weren't wrong.

Happily, even if Warren were to win the Presidency, she wouldn't be able to get any of this legislated without the Democrats retaking a majority in the Senate.

Warren's Medicare for All

I'm reading Elizabeth Warren's proposal for Medicare for All and how to pay for it now. I have not forgotten that she was in the Senate in 2010 and voted to pass the Affordable Care Act health care reform that was supposed to make health care affordable for all.  [Unladylike snort]

Warren believes that removing the risk of bankruptcy from medical bills and the risk of death from unaffordable health care is worth a massive expansion of government bureaucracy, and also an expansion of IRS power to go after "the rich" to get money to pay for Medicare for All, along with an expansion of immigration and a large reduction in combat and counter-terrorism spending.

She claims that she can eliminate health insurance premiums for the middle class while not raising their taxes. Buried in the details, though, she mentions that the income that the middle class would no longer be using to pay health insurance premiums would be subject to the Medicare tax--substantially increasing the amounts that households are paying toward Medicare, even if the tax rate stays the same. This income would also be subject to Social Security and income taxes.

She claims that no one would have to save for medical expenses any more...something that I do not believe will be possible until Revelation 22:2 comes to pass. No earthly plan can cover everything.

She claims that her plan will cover "every single person in the U.S.".  That's one heck of an incentive for the illegal immigration of sick people, some of whom will die painfully on the journey.

She plans to limit growth in health care spending so that it tracks growth in GDP, thus attempting to repeal by fiat the "cost disease" that has caused health care costs to grow far more rapidly than the quantity or quality of health care services. I was at one point working on a post on cost disease, but I got stuck. In some cases, it is clear that the perceived "good" of the service makes people inclined to purchase it even at an unreasonably high or opaque cost, and it seems that sometimes these social perceptions can bubble up to absolutely unsustainable levels. Warren is all the way up at "Health care is a human right!" in social mood, but she plans to sustain it by beating the costs down and the revenue up in any way that she can.

The cornerstone of Warren's Medicare for All plan is to turn employer contributions to health insurance premiums into employer contributions to Medicare. Supposedly she will scale them down a little and save employers a bit of money, but her plan is to make employers pay Medicare contributions based on the average health care costs of their employees. Since Medicare for All will offer more generous coverage than many employers do now, this is likely to increase costs for some employers, and it does nothing to reduce job discrimination against older and sicker people. There is also no guarantee that employers will pass any cost savings on to their employees, except that under collective bargaining agreements, employers can reduce their Medicare contributions by doing so. Which creates an incentive on both sides for increased unionization--and helps the Democrats win back union votes.

An aside:  I believe that unions are only really sustainable when they create enough value for the consumer to justify the costs of the union benefits.  In the old triangle of Better, Faster, Cheaper (where you pick two at most), unions won't be cheaper, and won't really be faster either, so they had better be Better.

Over time, Warren wants to transition the employers' Medicare contributions to a per-employee rate based on a national average cost of health care. This would be quite nasty for employers in lower-income areas, especially when compared against the promises that she is making to adjust some health care providers' pay rates based on regional differences.

Besides workers and employers, her other sources of revenue for Medicare for All are:  tax evaders, the financial sector, big banks, large corporations, multinational corporations, ultra-millionaires and billionaires, legal immigrants, naturalized illegal immigrants, and defense spending. Altogether, her revenue estimates for these only add up to $20.498 trillion, not even half of the nearly $52 trillion that she estimates Medicare for All will cost over ten years. Much of the rest seems to be expected to come from redirected state and federal spending on health care, including the health care benefits paid to government employees, but I can't see how she expects to get to $30 trillion.

Interestingly, she doesn't say anything specific about the money from the premium subsidies currently being given to people buying health insurance on the exchanges. It took some digging to find a national number for this, but from this article it appears that it was $55 billion in 2018, which over ten years would be $0.55 trillion.  Only about 10 million people receive these subsidies, according to this page.

Warren's plan only looks forward ten years, which I believe is too short a time frame, especially when it is based so much on soaking the mega-rich, who tend to not sit still for that kind of treatment. And there are only so many of them.

She has no plan for the thousands and thousands of workers in the health insurance industry who would lose their jobs thanks to Medicare for All.

If you take that number of $52 trillion, and divide by 10 to get the annual number, and then divide again by the approximate population of the United States, 330 million, you get a per capita cost of Medicare for All of $15,757.58.  Unsustainable, in every way.

In the second-to-last paragraph, she says that Obama supports Medicare for All. They'll get it right this time, for sure!

Punch needles

I've had the book Hooking Rugs:  New materials, new techniques, by Gloria E. Crouse for a while. It is an older book,  and it is interesting not only for the punch needle techniques that she used, but also for the ways that she used adhesives and other materials to make mixed-media rugs and wall hangings--she's tried everything--and for her tips on how to design, start, and finish a project.

There are basically two ways to make a hooked rug.  One is to use some sort of a hook to pull yarn or fabric strips up through the backing material.  The other is to use a tool to push the yarn or fabric strips down through the backing (from the back to the front)...usually this tool is a punch needle.  This needle is a slit tube with a hole near the pointy end, set in a handle. The speed needle version is mounted on a set-up like a non-electric egg beater, which moves the needle up and down as the handle is turned.

I went to an estate sale recently, and I found a little box of punch needles for $3. When I got it home, I found that it contained three:

First, an inexpensive basic needle, non-adjustable. I had one of these once, but it didn't last long before it broke, because of how the needle and handle were joined.

Second, a similar needle with several depth-of-loop adjustment notches. The needle is mounted inside the handle instead of outside, which makes it much sturdier.

Third, a Columbia Minerva needle just like the one in the book (besides her trusty speed needle), with two sizes of needle tip. It has ten depth settings and a little slide to keep the needle where it has been set. In the book, she tells how she modified hers to get three more possible settings out of it.

I've been playing with it a bit--with something like one hundred hours of work left to do on my other rug projects, I'm not starting another right now--and it is indeed fun to stab through the fabric over and over to lay down lines of loops. The needle is a little tricky to thread, but there are some hints in the book. I used a small embroidery hoop to hold the fabric taut; for a rug, I'd want to build a frame.

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 health insurance post

For years, I avoided comparing our current health insurance premiums with those from the years before the Affordable Care Act went into effect.  I knew I wasn't going to be happy with what I found.

Finally, I dug out some numbers, and indeed I am not very happy with them.  Our premiums in 2018 were double those of 2012.  Our income rose during that time, but it certainly did not double.

Remember, the ACA was passed in early 2010, with most of it not going into effect until 2014--after the 2012 election.  Plus, my husband's employer did what they could with the renewal dates to delay adoption of ACA-compliant plans for their employees until very late in 2014.

This doubling of premiums was not for the same plan or coverage.  In 2012, we had a high-deductible plan (HDHP), which had the nice feature of a very high level of coverage once the high deductible was met, up to the lifetime limit.  There was a health savings account (HSA) offered, which we signed on for and used, and it worked out well for us to have that money saved, because we did meet the deductible that year.

Our plan in 2018 had somewhat lower deductibles, much higher premiums (doubled), along with much higher co-pays and co-insurance.  We had the option of a moderate reduction in premiums by going with a much smaller network of providers, but we ended up not doing that; snafu story omitted. We were a few years older, which added a bit to the cost.  Because of the ACA, there is no lifetime limit, but that requires that at least one of us can stay healthy enough to work and keep paying the premiums through an expensive and possibly medical scenario.

That has left us with theoretically "better" health insurance, but in a much worse position financially for actually using it and getting health care. Let alone all the other things that our very frugal family could be doing with an additional several thousand dollars a year; the ACA carries an enormous opportunity cost for our family.

Of the current crop of presidential candidates, Senators Warren and Gillibrand were in office when the ACA was up for vote, and both of them voted for it.  Neither of them is saying anything about the affordability of health insurance on their campaign website now. I find this a disappointment in the case of Warren, who co-authored The Two-Income Trap, and who knows a bit about the strained finances of American families.  She has chosen to focus her presidential campaign more toward other demographics.

As I have written before, my response to the passage of the ACA was to stop buying paper towels.  I figured that the passage of the ACA had cut ten years from my expected lifespan.  A couple of years ago, from a newspaper article I learned that the number of people buying insurance on the exchanges was about half the number of people who were going without insurance and paying the penalty instead.  (The individual mandate penalty has since been reduced to zero.) With a bit of mental extrapolating, I guessed that you could extend this 1:2 ratio to a 1:2:10 ratio:  for every person benefitted by buying health insurance on an exchange, there were about ten people who wanted to see Obamacare nuked from orbit.

That the Republicans, once they regained Congress, failed to repeal Obamacare was quite stunning to me, and is probably the primary reason for their losses of House seats in 2018.

In my research for this post, I learned that there is a phrase for our situation:  the "family glitch".  My husband's premiums with his employer-based coverage are "affordable" by ACA definitions, therefore we as a family are not eligible for subsidies in the exchange, even though our total cost is well above the "affordable" threshold.  Supposedly there are 2-6 million families in the same situation. That number looks a bit low to me, and probably there are millions of couples also affected.

I no longer bother complaining about these sorts of things, because I'm fairly sure that They are Doing Them On Purpose. If you remember, the ACA was shoved through to President Obama's signature quite rapidly, leaving little time for public comment or in-depth analysis. A law that long and complex is almost certainly bad somehow. It has been my opinion all along that the Democrats' intention with the Affordable Care Act was for it to pave the way for universal government-based health care. Their plan seemed to be that people with unaffordable health insurance would beg their employers to discontinue coverage, so they could then get affordable subsidized insurance on the exchanges. Edited to add:  Another piece of the plan was that the ACA mandated that people applying to buy insurance through an exchange would be funneled into a government health program if they qualified. Also, under the ACA, some hospitals can determine likely eligibility for government health programs, and sign uninsured patients up on the spot. From there, it would be a short step to universal health care.

What actually happened is that many people just tightened their belts elsewhere and made do, and then went out and voted Republican. Democrats have since proposed fixing the family glitch, but the fact is, that they have lost too many elections and no longer have the ability to do so. The Republicans in Congress certainly aren't going to help them; the ACA gave them back control of Congress...gift-wrapped.

I see in my analysis here further reason to doubt the long strings of stories in the media from 2016 to 2019 about how the election of Donald Trump to President definitely, for sure, had to be because of "Russian interference!".  After the Mueller report was released, the preferred explanation became "Racism!", now pivoting into "White Supremacy!". The idea that making millions of voters' health insurance even more unaffordable was a large factor in the Democrats losing the presidency is completely verboten.

Our other options for health insurance coverage are also unattractive. Buying insurance on the exchange without subsidies would cost more than we are paying with the employer's plan.  Medical sharing ministries are another possibility, but I have always felt hindered in my spirit from them; I don't know why, but possibly cheats and scammers are working their way into that field. We have avoided government insurance programs, for reasons that people who support the Right to Privacy and Right to Choose should understand. Also, in some cases some of these programs (Medicare, notably) can claim a share of a person's estate after they die, so they are not necessarily free money, but function more as an extended, no-interest loan for life.

I don't want government health care. I don't even want government subsidies for health insurance. What I want is to be able to buy the level of insurance that we can afford, and that best meets our family's needs. The government's job is to make sure that the insurance companies and health care providers play fair.

A much faster way to declutter

From Leila of Like Mother, Like Daughter, an outstanding post on how to quickly declutter and clean a surface:  clear it off completely, wipe it down, and then put back only the things that go there.  After that's done, then you can sort out and deal with the rest.