Putting things together again

No curfew in Minneapolis or St. Paul last night, only continuing violent crimes.

Coronavirus numbers in tests, hospitalizations, and deaths in Minnesota have held quite steady since mid-June. I suppose an uptick should be expected in early fall, once school and other fall activities get going a bit. Summer is very much the off season for most organized social activities around here, because the people who do the organizing go out of town to their families' cabins.

I made progress on many things last week.  I mended more clothing, and some knitted dishcloths, and a mitten. I aligned the reel mower. I moved two bags of toys out of the living room, back down to the basement where they belong. I established a better workflow for a refinishing project that I am working on, and am finally making progress on it. I found my what-to-do-next cards, which I had completely forgotten about, and am getting back into a routine. I am also easing into exercising with hand weights again.

I've been gradually moving some pieces of decor around, trying things in different places.

Minneapolis again

Riots and looting in Minneapolis yesterday, seems to have been mostly in the Nicollet Mall area, right in the middle of downtown.

Governor Walz was more on the ball this time; a curfew for Minneapolis was declared, and dozens of people were arrested--one account said 132.

Tonight both Minneapolis and St. Paul have curfews.  From TCCrimeWatch on Twitter, it seems like things are lively in Minneapolis tonight, in terms of more scattered criminal activity than usual. There are National Guardsmen posted downtown.

Third Precinct cleanup

We haven't been down there ourselves, but there is a short video here.

Leverage

How Denmark used what they had to build up their agriculture:

The soil was embarrassingly poor for a country with agricultural pretensions--thin and sandy in most places, boggy or overgrown with heath. But by using imagination, they turned a handicap into an asset. While other countries of Europe were clamping down tariffs on imports of cheap American grain, the Danes let it flood in. Their idea was to feed it to livestock and then export meat, poultry and dairy products to Great Britain and other nearby markets. This helped free them of the burden of growing grain themselves, and they devoted the land they otherwise would have needed for grain to raising high-output crops. As their agricultural productivity soared and the numbers of their animals increased, they found in stable manure an unexpected bonus--the means by which to increase the fertility of their soil.    -- Dale Brown, The Cooking of Scandinavia

Boom

We had a crabapple tree come down in last weekend's big storm.  It had started falling down a few days before that, with one branch resting on the roof. Now when I see media images of storm damage, I look for the rotten places in the trees.

We also lost power, which put some of our preparations to the test. We did well on lighting, having lots of little LED lights.  My husband the electronics tinkerer has many LED bulbs (random internet image); these can be powered simply by putting a button battery between the two wires.

[If you add a magnet to that, you have a "throwie".  Much more about throwies here, including discussion about whether or not it is really safe to power LEDs that way, and how to add a resistor to improve battery life.]

One LED will put out enough light to read by, at close range, but LEDs also put out some ultraviolet light, which isn't good for eyes, so I limit my LED reading time, and I don't shine them directly into my eyes.

Our power was restored the next morning, saving us the trouble of canning up the contents of our refrigerator. We have the Jackie Clay canning book, which includes instructions for canning dairy products, with a caveat that this goes against modern canning recommendations.

What went not so well for us was not being able to whisk the car into the garage, because of an overpopulation of bicycles. A branch came down right next to the car.

Punching up plain carpeting

I've been reading a series of magazines from a nearby sidewalk library, and I noticed that many of the rugs pictured were two-color designs, with one color predominating.

That got me thinking about how to take a solid-color rug, and add yarn to it to make a design. Eventually, I remembered that I have a punch needle (which pushes loops of yarn through a fabric from the back), and I wondered if it could be used on commercially-made carpet.

I tried it on two different carpet remnants. I found with the first one that the carpet backing was too strong to push the needle through; I would need to pre-punch each hole with an awl.

With the second, the needle went through more easily, and I was able to punch in a line of loops all the way down the length in only a few minutes. My hand was tired at the end.

I found that I had to set the needle at almost the longest loop length setting to get the loops to show in the carpet pile. (Longer loops than that would require pulling by hand, and it would probably be better to work from the front with a rug hook.) Putting a loop through every other square of the backing mesh made a line that looks just like a line of paint drips. For a more solid color, I would have to punch every square, and more than one row, and even then the original pile would still be mixed in.

More mending

This time, patching a cushion cover.

From previous posts, I see that I made it two years ago.  After some months of use, it developed a small hole on one side, so I flipped the cushion over and used the other side.  Recently it started getting another hole.  I thought about patching it, but the whole side was getting threadbare. Not long after, the hole turned into two long rips.

So I've patched both of the rips, and the first hole, and put the cover back on the cushion, least-worn-side-up.

The fabric is a decent wool plaid, but not an upholstery fabric, so the heavy wear under local conditions is to be expected.