Christmas decorating is always a production at our house and it doesn't matter where that house is. I don't go quite as crazy as I used to when I gave the swim team parties, but it's that time period when I amassed most of my Christmas stuff. But in this time of virus, we certainly aren't planning to host any gatherings even though we do still decorate for Christmas. 

One of my earliest home made decorations is one we still have and use. Family Circle magazine and Woman's Day magazine used to exist and they used to have all manner of tips and ideas. I learned to knit and quilt from those two magazines but I also made this angel from a pattern that had to be from about 1973 or 1974 because my middle son was tiny back then.

Now the angel wears a mask--Be An Angel and Wear a Mask--

The angel has faded dramatically over the years with the calicos becoming more and more fragile, but now we hang it inside rather than out so the sunlight is less direct. Plus that window has film to control UV light on it, one reason it looks a little strange when photographed. We chose to use film on the windows rather than any kind of curtain because they are oddly shaped and, though you can't tell from this photo, there are three in a close row so any curtain would obscure the nice window shape.

The other Christmas themed old friend is my Sawtooth Cat variation. It is still Sawtooth cats but, as I wrote previously, almost 100% of the fabrics in the quilt are Christmas themed. Even the nice sort of cocoa brown background is actually very small stars rather than checks or just plain. I liked that fabric so much that I got some in yellow, some in navy, and this one in brown. It's definitely not the best quality fabric in the world but most of my quilts never see the light of day so fading is less of an issue. Even where it hangs today for Christmas, only has one window, a small leaded and stained glass example, and doesn't even have lights on most of the time. It is in the space on the ground level of this old stable that used to be where the big doors that admitted the carriages were.

I don't know how long this building was a real working stable since it was built in 1901. Even if the original owner no longer kept carriages, he may have kept horses for riding or polo since this is that sort of community. The conversion to a house happened in 1979 so there were decades where it was still configured as a stable but what it was in fact remains a mystery.

 

 

In the foreground is my Christmas goose carousel animal. While I don't think it was supposed to be for Yuletide, the remaining paint is mostly red and green.

 From Associated Press:

'Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who specializes in election law, called the Trump lawsuits dangerous."It is a sideshow, but it’s a harmful sideshow,” Levitt said. “It’s a toxic sideshow. The continuing baseless, evidence-free claims of alternative facts are actually having an effect on a substantial number of Americans. They are creating the conditions for elections not to work in the future.”

 

The entire democratic process is being stalled by crazy men and women who apparently have no regard for electoral systems. Two voters in Pennsylvania sued to delete nearly 7 million votes in Pennsylvania because they said the county they live in did not treat them the same as all other PA voters. It is small wonder that the judge was astonished by their complaint. That wasn't even the craziest suit nor was it the craziest suggestion. Sidney Powell said that a late South American leader was responsible for engineering permutations and algorithms that changed votes in electronic voting systems. Rudy Giuliani had something running down the sides of his face, many people charitably said that it was hair dye.

 

I can't think of any water soluble hair dyes--not that I have any vast personal experience. Laughing at the messengers is usually not a sign that their message is serious. Even Tucker Carlson made fun of Sidney Powell though he was roundly excoriated for it.

At the same time, Trump was supposed to participate in a video conference of the G20. He lasted 13 minutes before he started tweet ranting and then went to play golf, again. Simultaneously  nearly 200,000 Americans were diagnosed with Covid19, while Trump was playing. Does that image supplant Nero fiddling?

 If you have never heard of Chairish or 1stDibs, you owe it to yourself to at least check them out. We haven't gotten a ton of stuff from either, but we have certainly gotten enough that I don't feel weird touting them. I have no financial interest in them so I don't get any sort of compensation but we have gotten a variety of goods from art to furniture and so far everything has been reasonable in price and as described.

 

The four poster beds in our second guest room are a case in point. I have already written about our current house having been a stable in its first life but in 1979 it was converted to two separate residences. Because it wasn't always a house, some of the features are a little odd. Most of the bedroom floor is one long rectangle with the master bedroom taking one end and therefore being bigger and the other three bedrooms arranged alongside a hallway so those rooms are smaller. The ceiling heights vary dramatically as well. One room has 12 foot ceilings, one has 8 foot ceilings, and one on the first floor has 16 foot ceilings. So this guest bedroom where the new beds are is small but it does have room for both beds and some other furniture so it suits its purpose. These beds are from the early 19th century. They have some small areas of wear but are still in very good shape.

The quilt on the right is complete, finished about six or seven years ago. The quilt on the left is the current project and is just a top, a flimsy. I haven't quite finished marking it either but I wanted to show everyone what our cute little room looks like. Given the virus situation and all I am not expecting house guests but I will be ready if any ever come. I still have to hang the art and I will need to get some new sheets too.
 

 Trump lost the election by multiple millions of votes. Believe it or not that is what happened. Believe it or not, that outcome will not change despite Trump filing lawsuit after lawsuit where in most cases the lawyers presenting the suit have to apologize or equivocate about what they are doing. One of my favorites was from here in Pennsylvania where the judge questioned the lawyer who was claiming that Republicans weren't allowed to watch the votes being counted. The judge was shown videos of the procedure and he asked the Trump lawyer if any of the people who were there were Republican observers and the lawyers admitted that the numbers of Republican observers was not zero.

As amusing as that exchange was, the comity in a courtroom is not achievable in public spaces. Trump has carefully taught all of his followers that reality isn't and what matters is how you feel. If you are pissed, it is someone else's fault in the Trump universe. I don't have a clue what the end game is. Trump lost by multiple millions of votes. More importantly he lost by dozens of electoral college votes. There is no lawsuit nor any constitutional relief for that. Ordinarily a concession speech would happen before now because ordinarily anyone who lost a national election would understand the gravity of refusing to accept the results. The gravity goes beyond wounding Trump's apparently fragile ego and moves toward the US suffering lingering and lasting damage from foreign actors and from ongoing crises. While there were many people disgruntled by the outcome in 2016, Hillary Clinton did concede within three hours of the vote being called. Three hours rather than weeks. Trump's minions seem hellbent on destroying the Union.

What happens when all of those angry people continue to fulminate against what should be the normal procedure in a US election is still a mystery. What does Trump expect from the trouble that is brewing?

On a cheerier note, we got delivery of our new mattresses today and my husband will take pictures of the beds, one with a completed Dresden Plate and one with a flimsy, and I will post them tomorrow.

 Although I did not get any responses to my query about ice cream cone border corners (what an awkward assemblage of words), I did figure out something that works to my satisfaction.

The instructions in the very old book I used simply said to sew three of the colored pieces together for the corner but that did not make a good corner. Now it's entirely possible that I was misunderstanding what was needed but this method that I devised made a good corner that actually turned a corner so I am satisfied.

Now the "flimsy" is done and ready to be marked and layered but the batting doesn't come until tomorrow and I haven't marked anything at all so it will still be a couple of days before I am quilting. One thing that being in quarantine has done is increase my production of quilts which is good since I keep chipping away at my stash. Sewing  by hand usually means I am slow but even that is getting faster.

 I have finished making the Dresden Plate blocks for the twin sized bed and I have also finished making the four side borders for the classic ice cream border, but the old book that I am using is more than a little hazy about the corners for the borders. I have not found any how-to instructions online though I have found a variety of photos of ice cream borders. I am reasonably sure I will be able to figure something out but if anyone knows a site online that has clear instructions and information, I will be very grateful. 

Thank you in advance.

 Given the havoc that Trump deliberately thrust on the US,  Biden's win to be the 46th leader of the country is cause for hope but not cause for celebration. It's hard enough to be POTUS without having a pandemic, an economic collapse, and deep divisions facing the new inhabitant of 1600 Pennsylvania. It is unseemly to celebrate when people are still dying daily from Covid19. It is irresponsible to think that all will now be well simply because Trump lost. Trump taught people that lying can be rewarded, that arrogance is a virtue, that just being a jerk is a life skill that all children should learn. I don't expect rainbows in the sky, but I do hope that gears will engage and progress out of our morass will happen.

Good luck to Biden and Harris. Remember how you got here.

 My husband and I moved from Utah for several reasons but chief on the list was that our vote would never matter. Since voting for any office is a core activity in the United States, we wanted to either go somewhere we couldn't vote at all and therefore wouldn't feel the anxiety and strain, or go to a state where our vote might have an impact on the election. When the UK turned out not to be a possibility, we chose Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is a basket case as far as politics. It has two big cities, one on either end of the state, and a broad swath of country in between those two cities that doesn't reflect much of the political concern of the two cities. Cities are drivers of elections and drivers of political decisions but they are not necessarily drivers of cultural norms.

Anyway, Trump's election team is now opening legal action against Pennsylvania because there is a very good chance that Trump won't win Pennsylvania. The votes in question are "mail in" ballots. I put that in quotation marks because I am pretty sure that many of those mail in ballots aren't mailed in at all but placed in drop boxes. Since one of the Trump complaints is that the ballots don't have postmarks on them, I can personally attest to why. My husband and I, both elderly citizens, chose to use a drop box. We filmed ourselves doing so. Now Trump claims that because my ballot doesn't have a postmark on it, it cannot be counted.

I voted. I have voted in every single election since I turned 21 (the voting age changed just after my birthday), including county bond elections and local issue elections.  If the state, the county, and the local election board say that drop boxes are kosher, my vote counts.

MY VOTE COUNTS

 I sort of finished the current project yesterday. I describe it as "sort of" because once we got it on the wall, clipped by the hangers, I realized that it was missing a leaf. Quilters are very good at seeing things up close but at least I am bad at the whole forest for the trees concept. I get so used to seeing each separate stitch, even wearing a magnifier to facilitate threading the needles, that seeing the whole top often doesn't happen until the very end. While it isn't ideal to have to put a leaf on the quilt after it is complete, it is quite doable.

I named it My Funny Valentine.

 On Monday of this week, I went for my annual mammogram. Because we had moved since my last screening, I went to the previous location to get a CD of the images and I took that to the breast center. When I received a phone call from the center telling me that something suspicious had showed up and that I needed to have a diagnostic series because they suspected that I had something wrong, the woman on the phone said that their reading was more difficult because I didn't have any previous films. Because of that confusion, I wasn't totally freaked out by having to go back plus it wasn't the first time that I had been told that something might be amiss. I had two "biopsies" of suspicious lumps previously, one a needle aspiration and one a surgical excision which was one reason I made sure to take my previous films since those procedures did leave some markers. Plus this time I really had no discernible lump at all, not that that alone is any guarantee.

 

Anyway, I went in, got undressed, put on the seriously poor fitting gown and sat. The four days of waiting were tense but just sitting in the small dressing area was more tense as there was nothing to do but brood. When the technician (I am still unclear if she was a doctor or nurse practitioner or what) came back and said, "Good news! We found your films and there haven't been any changes at all over three years so you can get dressed," I was initially confused. The message sure didn't seem to compute with all the phone messages and emails I had gotten over the four days.

 

Anyway, I also felt like the bad accountant who just stops counting when she reaches the number she wants, almost wanting confirmation rather than a blithe response. But in the end I just walked back home relieved but wary. It was surely good news but not confidence building.

I did vote yesterday though. Adding that to my good news it has been a pretty good week. Go blue!

 

 After months of downplaying the dangers of Covid19, Trump and Melania both test positive. Given the frequency of prevarication from the WH even this announcement was received with some skepticism.

 

Thoughts and prayers, right folks?

 There was a televised election event last night. No one could possibly say this was a debate let alone a presidential debate. But Trump's minions were still delighted. "Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh put it this way: 'They're only doing this because their guy got pummeled last night. President Trump was the dominant force and now Joe Biden is trying to work the refs'."

 

The percentage of people who disagree with Murtaugh is probably higher than his IQ. The Proud Boys were happy because they got a shout out from Trump although today he is denying that he even knows who or what they are. I know that I cannot even approximate the mindset of a Trump voter, a fact that actually gives me pause because part of me still wants to believe that Americans can learn, albeit grudgingly, to put up with their neighbors' political views. But the vitriol and venom of Trump voters never allows for discussion, never allows for interaction. Trump is their hero because he does what all of them want to do. That is what is frightening.

 Besides the pretty obvious fact that my husband and I pay more taxes each quarter than Trump has paid in 16 years, the glaringly clear takeaway is that if Trump isn't paying taxes, someone else is. Of course since Trump's total tax payment to the US Treasury for two years was only $1500 it isn't even that hard to pay more taxes than Trump. The average American pays more than $12K per year and even many people on Social Security pay more than Trump. While there have been several people who blame the lax tax laws, especially those around "development", a fair amount of what was reported in the NYT isn't legal, with the previously undisclosed consulting fees paid to Ivanka as a case in point. That doesn't make Trump a smart businessman and it certainly doesn't make Trump a successful businessman. If you make excuses for Trump's behavior, you should probably examine your own ethics and morals.

 

If Trump is innocent of wrong-doing, he can reveal his taxes. I don't recommend holding your breath while you wait for them though.

200,000 Americans are dead from Covid19.  Many more will die in the next three weeks because of misguided information from the White House.  Would you let that man babysit your children?

 

 John Cornyn, the senior senator from Texas, says that Republicans have plenty of time to confirm a new Supreme Court Justice because they have the entire lame duck session (assuming there is one) from 11/4 until mid-January. We have seen multiple state houses use that tactic to rush through state laws before the governorship changes hands so I have no doubt that he is accurate in his statement. That doesn't mean that we have to put up with that nonsense. If you care about the will of the people, you should care about preventing this travesty of governance. If you live in Texas, you can certainly make your feelings known to Cornyn directly, since senators tend not to even read complaints from those who are not constituents.

But all of us have the power of our voices. All of us can contact our state's congressional members, either Senate or Congress or both. It would be best to do this right now rather than waiting so that these men (and the Senate is primarily men) know that they do not know what's best, they aren't autonomous but are subject to voters, that a rushed confirmation will forever tarnish not just the justice so confirmed but the entire faith and respect that anyone still has for the government.

 RIP Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If Trump and McConnell try to install a new justice, hell will break loose. Do not let them get away with any shenanigans.

 It is getting close to our one year anniversary living in this new/old house but we are still working to get everything together to furnish and decorate. Clearly the pandemic put a pause on some stuff but my own frugality has an impact on many decisions. 

 

My husband and I are already old as I have written many times before. We have been married more than fifty years and we have bought and sold many houses during that time while simultaneously amassing rooms full of furniture. We upsized and downsized multiple times depending on the house and the job. We had downsized drastically when we bought our last house in Salt Lake City thinking that it would be our last house to decorate. Our sons took beds, couches, rugs, art, etc. with our blessing. We went from a house that had 11 bedrooms to one that really only had three and one of those was on the first floor not what we thought of as the bedroom floor.

When we moved to Pennsylvania we thought that house was going to be our toes up/body bag house so its small size and the limited space didn't really matter. Then someone poisoned my dog and both my husband and I didn't want to live there any more. So we found our current space which looks much bigger than it is but it is certainly bigger than our body bag house.

Because of all of the serial downsizing, I ended up not having enough furniture for the new/old house but I did still have two couches and several occasional chairs. Once two couches and two chairs were reupholstered, most of the living room was good to go. But we are old folks without any relatives or friends in the area so furnishing the extra bedroom got put to the back burner. We have our bed and we worked very hard to get it here and in the room. We had to utilize the enormous loft door that was originally used for lifting hay bales into the hay mow but we also had to cut into an overhang to get the headboard down to the bedroom. Luckily I honed my plastering skills on a house about three houses back so filling in those holes was relatively easy.

Still there was one bedroom that didn't have furniture. Our previous house had three bedrooms with one of those serving us as the cats' bedroom and our library so it had bookcases and cat beds but not people beds. Given that I am old and given that I am seriously frugal, I didn't want to spend a great deal of money putting furniture in a room that neither my husband nor I would have much reason to go into but neither did I want it to be simply empty. My husband agreed that it just looked empty even though it had some furniture in it.

 

I found some early 19th century twin beds on Chairish.We installed them in this extra bedroom and now I will have a new project once I finish quilting the strange Baltimore Album that I have been working on. About ten years ago I made a Dresden Plate quilt that is twin bed size and now I will make a second, though not identical, Dresden Plate quilt for the second bed. (Edit: It turns out I made the Dresden Plate 7 years ago and there is a photo on July 26, 2013 on this blog. You can search using the date or just by entering Dresden Plate.) The beds are mahogany with carved posts so the quilts will suit the age of the beds and the room.

 

As an addendum--people who don't trust science should not be giving advice to the rest of us who live in the 21st century. Wear a mask, wash your hands, keep a social distance protocol, and vote blue.

 This is the very first quilt top I have ever made for which I had no firm idea when I started. I am not saying that I have never made changes in a project, but that even visualizing this was difficult because the color choices were unusual. Add to that the idea that I didn't pick the blocks or the layout prior to beginning and you get the idea. Then even after beginning this I had misgivings that nearly sank the project, and then my husband accidentally threw away one small piece of thirty year old fabric that I was using for accents. Even though I am definitely not a quitter, you can imagine that I am relieved that this has come so far and that I even like it.

 

I have made quilts I did not like before. Usually these were commissioned pieces whose design and color were the choice of the person paying the price. I find it difficult to work on a project I don't like but sometimes when one is paid to do the job, one puts up with the inconvenience. But this project ended up being very weird yet strangely compelling as well so I am perfectly happy to call it "My Funny Valentine." This is just the top, no quilting, no layering, no batting as yet. The sashing is one of the more unusual choices. The four bird, heart, and rose corner blocks are the only blocks that have much color besides black and pink although some of the black fabrics are very small flower prints and the lyre block has the rust colored lyre and yellow tulips.

 

 

 "The newly renovated White House Rose Garden is under repair less than three weeks after its official unveiling. The garden is experiencing "issues with water drainage" and "some minor complications with updated construction," a source with knowledge of the garden troubles. New sod is also being laid down."

 

That's the latest news from the White House. Now they really need to drain the swamp. Thanks for the laugh, Melania.

 "Trump insists that he, not Biden, is the leader best positioned to keep Americans safe." From a news report after Trump's visit to Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The nation has lost nearly 200,000 people to Covid19 and been engulfed in protests exacerbated by both federal troops and rightwing Trump supporters since March. 27 million people are unemployed with very little relief in sight though Ivanka blithely tells people to choose another path. There is no real end for any of this activity, if anything it seems to be getting more intense. Trump is in charge so is clearly not in any position or frame of mind to keep Americans safe. If anything he is exacerbating all of the current flashpoints on purpose in some bizarre throwback to the late 50s and early 60s to frame Joe Biden as the incendiary spark. This is Trump's America right now. If you don't like what you see, choosing four more years of Trump is obviously a dangerous action.

 

We are not safer with Trump; we are not healthier with Trump; unless you are a 1 percenter you aren't better off economically with Trump. Protect your families, protect your community, get to know your neighbors, do not listen to anyone who is orange.

No Man Is An Island

Decades ago when I was in high school everyone was ordered to read John Donne's No Man Is An Island. Since I went to high school in red state Texas it seems unlikely to me that my teachers were taking a liberal bent but rather the idea that individual citizens are capable of affecting events. Well today two news items caught my eye: Herman Cain, the pizza chain presidential candidate who touted his own 9-9-9 tax plan, died of Covid 19 after attending Trump's Tulsa rally without a mask; and Louie Gohmert, Texas congressman who refused to wear a mask even when ordered to do so was diagnosed with Covid 19.  While any of us may rage and storm about an unjust world, while any of us may quarrel with rules that restrict our personal freedom, while any of us may complain about government, all of us are subject to the unseen and the unknowable.

Did Herman Cain get the virus during the Tulsa rally where he and others were not wearing masks? That's one of the unknowables. Did Louie Gohmert pass the virus to others when he either refused to wear a mask or was casual in its use? That's another unknowable.

I don't mock Cain's passing any more than I mock Gohmert's diagnosis. What both of those events show is that none of us is safe, none of us is immune, all of us have to be responsible for ourselves, but all of us have to be responsible for others as well. We learned this more than 500 years ago during the plague. It isn't a political choice, it's a choice to be a citizen of the world rather than thinking that we have complete freedom. We also need to prod our government to have the same outlook, because no man is an island.

I have been married more than 50 years. I know I don't have complete freedom because I am responsible for that man I married so long ago in addition to being responsible  for myself. I owe my neighbors the same honor that I give to my husband.

What Are They Thinking?

Yesterday Trump and company hosted a group of doctors who made a video mocking any and all effective Covid19 mitigations that the casual citizen can take. On top of that oddness, one of the people being touted as an expert believes that uterine cancer, cervical cancer, etc., are caused by devils having sex with women while they sleep among other demonstrably stupid and false ideas.

Why the WH is still promoting completely bogus ideas in the middle of the biggest health crisis the country has faced in 100 years is beyond me. Trump asked why people like Fauci more than they like him and I have to believe that it is because Trump gives voice and license to so many bad ideas.

Please do not look to the White House for medical advice. Please do not look to the White House for long term plans.We have already failed under Trump. We don't need to make that failure deeper and broader.

Pictures in Pink

As I wrote in my previous post, I am not entirely sure how this will look in the end. For the most part I like it. All of the blocks so far are Elly Sienkiewicz creations, with the center blocks being the impetus for the project. I have always liked those entwined peonies.

I have sewn the entwined peony blocks together but the other two are still loose as is the sashing strip of the strange material I described before. This would not be my normal way of putting a quilt together and I won't guarantee that the outside blocks will remain in that space but this gives a better idea of what the final top will look like.

Album of a Different Color

I have been working on a Baltimore Album style quilt since I finished the Delectable Pathways. Continuing in my quest to not have to buy new fabric, or as little as possible, this top is an entirely new color combination from any BA quilt that I have seen and I have seen hundreds. So far I have completed six blocks and there is no real green fabric, no red fabric, no blue fabric, and very little off white. The main flowers and leaves are black chintzes and pink calicoes. The sashing is a strange brown, pink, burgundy color that I got a long time ago and as odd as it sounds it works well with the other fabrics. At some point soon I will get my husband to take some pictures so that you can judge for yourself. It is sort of weird and sort of eye popping and I haven't even decided if I like it yet.

Delectable Pathways Complete

Well I finished my version of Delectable Pathways yesterday. We are listening to Beethoven's 9th Symphony again which includes the European Union anthem the Ode To Joy.I am always joyful when I finish a quilt even if the quilt has flaws or issues. Everything that goes wrong is another opportunity to improve some aspect of the process.

 When I purchased the pattern back in the late 90s, fabrics were different so waiting to work on this project probably benefited the color choices but then we tend to believe our modern choices are somehow better in most areas even though that isn't always fitting. Mine is way scrappier than the originals yet has similar color choices even given that.

Mystifying

I did finish binding my Delectable Pathways but it is drying now and not ready for pix. Come back tomorrow and there will be some.

On the 3rd of July Trump asked the Supreme Court to completely dismantle the Affordable Care Act. On the 4th of July holiday, Trump railed against terrorists and Marxists, Democrats, and assorted other groups but he did not address the rising Covid19 diagnoses. He promised to build a statue garden, one that he has already promised to defend with ten year sentences against anyone who injures a statue.

No health insurance? A statue? 50,000 Americans in three days have Covid19 and Trump wants to protect statues over people? Even Republican governor Greg Abbott is trying to put the cork back in the bottle because Texas opened up too soon and thousands of Texans are being taken to hospitals with thousands more coming soon, but Trump wants to protect statues. A ten year old in Florida died of the virus but Trump wants to protect statues.

None of us has any idea how this will end nor do we have any idea of how it might have been better managed if Trump had not been in charge. But all of us know that people are more important than statues.

Rounding the Corner and Heading Home

I finished quilting Delectable Pathways yesterday and did all the trimming. Then I made my double bias French binding, the best one I know for straight and true bindings, and prepped that for application today. I made it all the way around on the first go round, and about 1 1/2 sides on the finish go round so I have one corner done. When I first began quilting the instructions used to read something along the lines of "...quilt as desired and then bind as usual" which for someone who was entirely home schooled in quilting didn't provide much information. So initially I took the easiest route described in quilting magazines.

I either made straight binding, which I have to say never was satisfying or desirable, or I made the "quick" bias binding still recommended by multiple sources. That wasn't particularly satisfying or good but what did I know. After about 8 years of simply hating binding, hating what it looked like, hating how it was made, I decided to go to the trouble of cutting separate binding strips on a true bias, hand sewing those, and then hand sewing the binding to the quilt.

Guess what? My quilts hang true, my bias binding looks smooth, the entire process goes more smoothly and the results are significantly better. So tomorrow I will finish the binding and soak the quilt to remove the blue ink. Then I will block it and dry it. Then it will be ready for a photograph.

What won't be ready for a photograph is the current graph of Covid19 cases. 50,000 people in the last three days have been identified in three states as carrying the virus. Jerome Adams said on Friday that this was just the tip of the current iceberg in more ways than one. Not only will identified cases keep rising, but Adams says that the two week lag time between typical diagnosis and death mean that the mortality statistics of those 50K people won't show until mid-month.

Despite what Trump and minions keep saying, we are not only not done with this virus, we aren't even done with the first wave. All those people who were pointing fingers at the northeast US where the virus hit so hard (with the first cases coming from Europe not China), are beginning to understand what the impact is. It will only get worse from here.

Could we have ever contained it? Not with the current situation of people trusting their Twitter feed over their physicians. 

Taking Responsibility

I was one of four children but my mother always told people that she had five children. She said that whenever she asked who had done something, the response was always, "Not me".

Trump leads the Not Me brigade. No longer does "The Buck Stops Here" adhere to the presidency regardless of what Truman showed on his desk. Now it is more along the lines of denial and delay.
One of Trump's supporters in Congress today said that Anthony Fauci should be fired and the corona virus task force should be disbanded because Covid19 information was undermining the administration's economic message. I suppose his underlying message is that more people should die if that means Trump looks good.

That's right America--forget that your grandparents are dying and your children can't go to school because the economy is still gangbusters. That's if your gauge to the health of the economy is the Dow Jones. The Dow Jones numbers alone should alert people about the problem of using those economic numbers to determine the health of an economy. Just because Ivanka got richer certainly doesn't mean that you or your neighbors are doing well either economically or socially.

I expect to finish the quilting on Delectable Pathways tomorrow. Then there will be the trimming, binding, labeling, etc. My next project will be a mixture of Scottish heritage symbols and William Morris motifs. Of course I know that the two are world's apart and I have absolutely no Scottish ancestors at all. Nevertheless, a good design is a good design regardless of its origin.  
.

Thankful

The other day, my husband and I were alerted to a fire in our house by neighbors we haven't met and a passerby that we don't know.

We put our cats in the basement for the night (we both have allergies and the cats also yowl outside the door). We watched the news and then watched a tv show so about 90 minutes had passed. I went to our room to brush my teeth and my husband heard a knock at the door.

Our water heater, fairly new with some other attachments occasioned by our remodel, but oil fired since the stable became a residence in 1979 (the water heater was far newer than that), had set itself on fire. There isn't any other way to describe it. The water heater was not just burning fuel to heat the water but was on fire from that fuel spreading smoke throughout our basement and luckily sending some of that smoke up the chimney flue to which it was attached.

The neighbor, whom we did not know, alerted a passerby who knocked on our door while she went inside to call us. We had not met this neighbor at all and the only reason she had our phone number was that she had sent a note about a week ago welcoming us to the neighborhood to which I replied by phoning her cell and leaving a message.

So happenstance was the remarkable savior of not just our cats who were in the smoke filled basement, and not just our house which would have been destroyed, but the two of us. My husband and I took a bottle of champagne to the neighbor to thank her for her intervention, without which I probably wouldn't be writing this today

Getting Close

I am nearly done with the quilting on the Delectable Pathways quilt. There was no personal inspiration in this project except for my fabric choices but I do like the quilt. I estimate another week of quilting to complete that and then a few days to trim, bind, label, etc.

Another home "project" that is really coming together is the vegetable garden that we put in this year. The soil in our neighborhood is very heavy clay so not that good for vegetable gardening. But we had a fenced in garden made, complete with slate pathways and topsoil from Kennett Square--used to be the mushroom grower for the US before Canadian mushrooms took over and now that the Canada-US border is more or less closed to human traffic and Trump has tariffs on all sorts of Canadian goods, perhaps Kennett Square will emerge as the leader again.

We don't grow our own mushrooms. Some people do but that seems like a waste of time to me. I don't know how different fresh mushrooms from your basement taste compared to fresh mushrooms from five miles away. But we do grow all sorts of other plants. We have been eating a variety of fresh lettuces along with collard greens for a while now. Even though I am sort of from the south, I never had collard greens before moving back to Pennsylvania. Then we went to the library one day and the librarian pointed out small packets of collard seeds put together by another patron. We have been eating collards for several months now and giving away bags full to some or our new neighbors--a good way to meet people, even during a pandemic.

Today we picked our first tomato of the season. Since we were forced to grow our own seedlings this year we didn't have any Early Girls at all which is typically our first tomato. We buy the plants from a local garden store but that business was shut down as non-essential so we started all of our plants from seeds in the basement this year. The new garden is doing great, perhaps even too well since everything has grown so fast that it is like a jungle. I planted potatoes outside of the new garden in three different places, experimenting to see what produces the most. The plants are all thriving but the potato harvest won't happen for a while.

In the meantime we have tiny green beans, two different varieties; tiny Fordhook lima beans, tiny peppers (Anaheims and shishitos).

We also gave away a quart of rendered duck fat to a neighbor today. We have talked with this fellow regularly since we moved here, primarily because he has a lovable dog. We still maintain social distancing but he said that his daughter, who went to culinary school, was visiting and they didn't have any duck fat and I have a ton because I make duck bolognese often so I have to buy a whole duck. Anyway, I end up with bucket loads of rendered duck fat and even though it keeps well, I have way more than I need and I plan to make duck bolognese again this week.

Trump achieved another milestone of the US being first. We lead the world in Covid19 deaths. We are not even close to the world's biggest population but we have 1/4 of the world's deaths. Will he put that on a campaign banner--WE ARE STILL NUMBER ONE--just imitating the don con's habit of all caps. 

Biggest Gap

Where I live most businesses and facilities are closed. Grocery stores are open, liquor stores are now open again, but other services are shut. I can't complain that the local nail salon is closed because I can't even imagine getting a mani-pedi. Hell, I can't imagine even going to a hair salon and I have been cutting my husband's hair myself for way more than 50 years.  Part of my current view is that I have baby hair. I have always had very thin and fine hair. My late sister had very thick hair that even in the hospital where she spent her last few months the nurses and care givers commented on her luxuriant hair. Even her hospice workers who cared for her her last two weeks commented on her wonderful hair.

My hair has never been luxuriant. My mother was embarrassed by my hair to the point that she used to tape bows in my hair. Now that I am a senior citizen, my thin hair is even thinner with baldness encroaching on most of the front of my hairline. Do I care? I never had the crown of glory hair that my sister had so I cannot say I miss hair salons or beauty parlors. My husband was in the military and he was also an old school athlete so he doesn't need a barber to cut his hair. Neither of us has sat in a salon chair for more than 50 years.

What do we miss? Our local library has not been open for months. Sure, books are available online but only if one has the appropriate device. I have a Kindle that I use for reading when I travel and that I used when the library first shut down. But I read more than 1000 words per minute (that's an entire other story) so I was going through books on the Kindle very quickly and lining up other books to read. My husband reads more slowly than I so it took him some time to go through the two books he had from the library. When he finally finished them, I had to give him my Kindle because there wasn't anything else for him to read.

So what am I reading now? We inherited my husband's family library. We have old books of all sorts, most that I think my husband's grandparents thought their children should read. So I am currently reading "Lorna Doone" and I just finished reading three English plays--She Stoops to Conquer, The Rivals, and The School for Scandal. Of course I knew of these plays--my family even called me Mrs. Malaprop when I was younger than six because of my creative word use.

I don't knock the classics, but I will be glad when the library reopens. Free libraries, a Ben Franklin and American invention, are one of our best ideas. 

Yet Life Goes On

If you have followed this blog for any amount of time you already know that one of my avocations arose from one of my vocations. I was a "reader" for a city school district which meant that I read essays assigned by various teachers and gave comments, instructions, and advice. Originally that task only involved reading essays and putting in marginal notes but eventually the teachers came to rely on me for more tasks. Ultimately I offered students the opportunity to be tutored for free if they felt they needed the help and if they thought they could put up with me on a one to one basis.

While you might think that I would be overrun by students who wanted extra tutelage for free, that was never the case. There are a variety of reasons for that including the innate ennui of high school students, but over the years there were many students who availed themselves of my help. Some of those ended up leaving after only a few sessions, some came more often than their schoolwork demanded, some used me as a relief valve for the pressures of their day to day lives. I augmented my free tutelage for those students who stuck with my program, offering free advice about college application essays. I always tell people that I have been admitted to every single top rank college in the nation.

Don't misunderstand--I never wrote a student's essay. I never invented non-existent accolades. But I made suggestions (when one student asked if she could mention her baby blanket in her essay I suggested that she talk about packing for college and considering taking it with her. She ended up writing an amazing essay that didn't even need much editing.), I gave advice about what not to write about, I told them to be honest and lyrical rather than trying for ostentation.

Anyway, the point of all of this is that there are numerous young people who still keep in touch with me, not because I cheated for them but because I showed them how to tell a story about themselves that was honest without braggadocio. This week one of those students, who graduated Yale a few years ago, told me he had just been accepted to Harvard Law School. Of course right now, Harvard Law School will be taught through distance on-line learning so this fellow who has been working for the Fed in DC will be living in his parents' home and taking Harvard Law School classes online.

Congratulations and felicitations to all those who still believe in the dream.

Okay, I Am A Broken Record

Look, I get it that people are tired of being in quarantine, that people are tired of being isolated, but what is the alternative? Right now, today, Texas, Florida, and California posted their highest Covid19 infection numbers since the beginning of the pandemic. Nearly 7000 people in California, nearly 6000 in Texas and only slightly fewer in Florida. I don't live anywhere near any of those states but those numbers drive me crazy as well as make me angry.

We cannot be careless or cavalier about this virus. It is unusually contagious, it is unusually dangerous, and it has multiple devastating after effects even if one survives the first bout. Take care of yourself and then you will be taking care of your neighbor. Don't let any snake oil salesman tell you that all is well because it isn't. We aren't doing enough testing, nor are we being careful about the contact tracing necessary to control the spread.

Please take care not to be a victim, not to be a cause. 

A Republican Speaks Out

Steve Schmidtt, a long time Republican operative, wrote a statement about Trump. It is well worth reading and passing on.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/23/politics/steve-schmidt-donald-trump/index.html

Farce and Spectacle

Tulsa didn't go so well for Trump. Besides having fewer than 7000 attendees in an arena that holds 19,000, Trump didn't even rouse the few that were there. All the jokes were tired, all the exaggerations and lies were repeats, and everyone who reported on the event poked fun at Trump--just the behavior that he reacts badly to. The tweets should start around midnight tonight which seems to be the time that Trump chooses to start Twitter tirades.

A grandmother from Iowa started a TikTok movement that ended up making Trumpkins believe that the event was full to the rafters. Then when people began to realize that no one was showing up, Trump and minions made excuses that no one believed. There were not gangs of "thugs" stopping people from entering the arena, there weren't armed protestors threatening peaceful Trump supporters.

On top of all of that, consider that in the middle of the worst medical and health disaster in decades, in the middle of the ensuing economic disaster, in the middle of massive discrimination demonstrations unseen also for decades, did Trump offer any words of reassurance, did Trump point to any path forward, did Trump exhibit compassion and understanding or was he simply divisive? Everyone knows the answer to that.Trump said that he asked his forces to slow down testing for the virus because all the rising numbers made him look bad. Then his supporters had to claim this was a joke even though he has said pretty much the same thing for the past six months.

We haven't even finished with the first wave of this virus and Trump wants to dismiss it whether he is joking or not. The experts still predict that 70% or more of US residents will get the virus. The experts have changed their forecast upwards as to the number of expected deaths. Now the numbers bruited about are in the 250K to 300K range and that is by October 1. Good joke, Donny Con.

People can ignore all the warnings as much as they want. All of us want to have more normalcy. But we need a leader, not a vindictive child to whom all slights and all events are deliberate acts that are unfair. I am guessing that the true revelatory book won't be John Bolton's but Mary Trump's. 

Banana Republic

"I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position, to which I was appointed by the Judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. I will step down when a presidentially appointed nominee is confirmed by the Senate," Berman said. "Until then, our investigations will move forward without delay or interruption."

That statement from Geoffrey Berman, a lifelong Republican, came after he found out from a news broadcast that he had "resigned". He was never consulted about resigning nor did he agree to resigning. So what happened next is that AG Barr said that he had consulted with Donald Trump and that Berman's refusal to leave gracefully meant that Trump wanted Berman out sooner rather than later and that Berman's second in command would take over the SDNY (Southern District of New York) office forthwith. What investigations were the SDNY looking into--Trump finances, Trump taxes, Trump payments to women to stay silent.

But Trump said that he had nothing to do with any of this.

So--who is the lying liar and who is the freaking sycophant and how can anyone think there is an adult at the helm of this ship of state? If Trump's entire point for running for office was to highlight the inequities and injustices of the legal system in this country, he has succeeded admirably. But if we don't have a functioning legal system, to whom can we turn?

In the meantime Trump is in Tulsa stirring up hatred and Covid in a cauldron of screaming people stuck together. Six of the advance team from Trump's own campaign tested positive for the virus so they were already a contact vector for the virus. May the force of Covid19 be with all of them.

One Step Closer

Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion that protects the employment of LBGTQ people. He joined with John Roberts and the four known liberals on the Supreme Court to guarantee that civil rights are more universal than previous decisions have outlined. No one should mistake Gorsuch's decision or Roberts' agreement to mean that either man has become left wing. Rather the decision aligns with their mutual statements about looking at the language of the law rather than public sentiment. If a law, any law, prohibits exclusion because of sex (and please pay attention to the difference between sex and gender), then any actions taken specifically because of sex that injure the aggrieved party because of sex are expressly forbidden by federal law.

I don't know what that means for states such as Utah that have very free "right to work" laws which can more truthfully be described as "right not to work" laws. In Utah anyone can be terminated for any cause including political activity or pregnancy or whatever. The employer doesn't have to provide cause for termination so it becomes hard to show that it was due to discrimination based on sex.

Nevertheless, this is a step closer to equality under the law. Cheers!

New Photo

I finally got pix of the downed trees on our street. These were taken before the power company came to get the lines and poles back up.

The upper picture shows the bark stripped from the tree like a banana peel. The lower picture, more or less in the center, shows the root ball of an oak that fell across the yard with the house behind it. That house is 2.5 stories above ground so you get an idea of the size of the root ball.

I had never heard of a derecho before though coming from Texas I was quite familiar with tornadoes. Now when my husband I walk we check out the trees around us. There is an ash tree across the street that seems to be half dead, probably from the same green ash borer that killed the ash in our yard. 

Quilting New Project

I have had the Delectable Pathways quilt pattern for years but never made it because it's kind of an odd size. The social isolation of the virus cannot really be named as the impetus for making this quilt since these days I do most of my quilt shopping online anyway. Rather it is part of the ongoing effort to divest myself of stash items.

My stash is vast and includes yards rather than fat quarters. That's usually because when I finally use up a fabric that I really like I miss it. Online stores don't sell small amounts unless they are precuts (at least in my experience) but I am getting to an age where it makes more sense to use up what I have rather than purchase new. There was an article in the most recent AQ magazine about a famous quilter organizing her stash but she has tiny bits in plastic bins and I have some tiny bits and some bigger bits and some really big bits because I know they make good vines--you get the idea.

I don't know any quilters in Pennsylvania. The closest I have come is an elderly neighbor who said she made a quilt badly once. If you wonder why I, a senior citizen, describe this woman as elderly it is because she is 77. Regardless how hard you fight off the aging, each year takes a bigger toll than the one before it. Of course at this point I am thinking I might be more like my grandmother than I ever thought. She lived to be 102 and when doctors ask me if I had any relatives who had suffered broken hips after menopause I always tell them about this grandmother. Yes, she did break her hip when she was 89. But she did it falling off the roof where she had been nailing in new shingles.

Anyway, I got Delectable Pathways put together all with fabric that I already owned. That means that my quilt is a little scrappier than the original which had all of the mountain peaks in the same fabric on a single mountain and a little variety in the mountains themselves. Mine has more variety in the mountains and my peaks are wildly differentiated while still following the same color or design that I saw in my head. The only fabric I had to buy was the backing and Hancock's had a great purple paisley on sale. I already had a batting so I layered it all today and basted.

It is hot and humid here now and my sewing space is right under the eaves so not ideal but we all adjust to discomfort.

Good Joke

Now that AG Bill Barr has contradicted Trump about bunker quaking this joke is making the rounds.

Q: Why did Bill Barr use violence to clear Lafayette Park?
A: To let the chicken cross the road.

Amazing Weather

Yesterday we had seriously bad weather. Thunderstorms were predicted and right around 4 in the afternoon the sky turned black, the wind began to howl, buckets of rain poured out of the sky and the trees began to whip back and forth as if they were doing the limbo.

We lost power very briefly so our generator didn't even kick in but the rain continued for about an hour and we just hunkered down at home. This morning when reading the newspaper I found that we had been hit by something called a derecho rather than a tornado but regardless of the name, three people in the county where  I live were killed by falling trees. Then slightly later in the morning my husband and I took our normal walk. Our street, while having the same name for its entire length takes a very sharp bend two houses past ours and about three houses past that there was police tape and two enormous trees were down, one right across the yard and the other right across the road taking down all of the lines from the telephone poles. So our house and our immediate neighbors have power but the rest of the street does not. These were enormous trees, probably about 100 years old because that's when those houses were built, with root balls about 12 feet in diameter. One of the trees simply split about eight feet above the ground but the more remarkable sight was that the bark was just stripped off completely down to the ground.

I don't know many of my neighbors being so new here but I do know a couple. My husband and I visited and brought hot coffee and some fresh produce from our garden to those we know. The power company says it won't be able to restore power until Saturday.

Cowardly Punk

DJTJr (Don Jr) tweeted:
"This is the guy that the media and left just spent days telling us was a coward hiding in his basement."

That's because that is the guy who was a coward hiding in his basement. He was a bigger coward and a punk when he had Secret Service and others attack peaceful protesters so that he could walk across a street. He was a moron when he held up a Bible (upside down and backward) outside an Episcopal church. He didn't read the Bible which was upside down and backward. He didn't make any meaningful statement, nor did he offer any prayers. He directed armed thugs to attack peaceful protesters and a NBC News crew so that he could show how manly he is.

You can't make stuff like this up. Only DJT and DJTJr would believe that showed any kind of strength or courage.

We Shall Overcome

Donald Trump postured and preened holding a bible while men he controlled shot peaceful protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets. I weep for my country. I mourn the death of democracy. This is what tyranny looks like. It wears a smile and cajoles while the oppression continues. Trump is destructive and dangerous. We can overcome.

Questions Need to Be Asked and Answered

George Floyd's death at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis sparked protests around the country. There is not any doubt at all that some bad actors are involved in those protests, but neither is there doubt that the police are included in those bad actors.

https://apnews.com/6407d8c1bc281101589eee5f584d49c9

Who targets journalists? Video evidence and follow up evidence from those injured is clear. The first violation of the constitution was the arrest of a CNN team in Minneapolis. They weren't harmed but that is immaterial given that the First Amendment guarantees a free press. But the police weren't done. It is not just the Minneapolis police but they are the ones who are on video targeting journalists. A correspondent from Canadian Broadcast was blinded by a rubber bullet. The video of that event showed the journalist distant from the protesters but still fired on by the police. When will those people be charged with crimes?

Who gives those orders? Where is the police chief? Where is the mayor? Who is responsible for attacks on the news? Who gave the orders and what were they?


The First Amendment guarantees a number of ideas including a free press. They are all equal as far as the Constitution considers them. So if you want your religion to be free from government intervention, you should fight just as fervently for your press to be free from government intervention. I don't think the Founding Fathers ever considered that people would be shooting journalists. Far from being the enemy of the people, the press exposes harm to the people. That applies even to weird sites that promote conspiracies, or sites that join with the deranged to point fingers at the press as long as they identify as journalists rather than private citizens or companies

I lived through the riots of the 60s and the brutality of the Chicago convention. This is demonstrably worse and we are in deep trouble as a country; as a culture; as a democracy; or even as so many conservatives insist is the correct nomenclature, a democratic republic.Trump sits in the White House tweeting racist and incendiary ideas, quoting some of the worst actors from the 60s, pretending that he didn't mean what he clearly meant. Please give him grace and understanding so that he can help the country heal.

George Floyd Matters

Anyone who has seen the video of George Floyd being killed by police should be appalled. But what will happen next is the defenders of the brutality will blame George Floyd for his own death. They will defend the police because George Floyd's entire life will be examined. I am not defending Floyd for any wrongs that he committed. I have never even had a traffic ticket so committing any kind of illegal activity is foreign to me. The police murdered George Floyd. The police murdered George Floyd because they can.

George Floyd's life matters and George Floyd's death matters more. It is immaterial that George Floyd may have committed a crime that day leading to the police at the scene. It is immaterial because George Floyd did not have his constitutional right to a day in court; George Floyd did not have his constitutional right to a trial; George Floyd, not resisting in any way, did not have his constitutional right to defend himself in court against the accusation against him.

When can we all agree that our legal system, including our police, need to pay attention to the curbs and balances that are supposed to support our system? George Floyd was murdered. The video is readily available. It isn't a matter of opinion. We should not and must not condone lynching and that is what happened to George Floyd, complete with an audience and a video.That this lynching was done by the police should cause everyone to rise up in protest.

Minnesota Nice? Not bloody likely.

Always Remember

This is the weekend that we dedicate to honoring our dead. It  started in the US after the Civil War principally in the Confederate states as a way to honor their fallen soldiers. Many people soon realized that giving the honor only to Confederate soldiers was a problem for reasons that should be obvious so it changed from Decoration Day and then changed again to Memorial Day and then changed again when federal holidays changed so that people could have longer weekends. If I seem to be a little disengaged it's because the holidays shouldn't simply be holidays or the start of summer or any of the frivolous sales that may have now fallen by the wayside.

Decoration Day wasn't initially just for Confederate dead but was a pretty common practice in the South to go to cemeteries and clean up the graves of their ancestors and decorate with the new spring flowers, etc. The whole military purpose was a later usurpation of the original but there were obviously plenty of dead soldiers on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line and as they got older and died off the whole veneration part of the ritual became a bigger deal, politically and socially.

I really don't want to get down in the weeds here about how it started and how it evolved. I am definitely not of the bumper sticker crowd or the flag waving crowd. Is everyone who died a hero? That is unlikely and improbable but all military dead whether they were heroes or not, were someone's sons or daughters and deserve remembrance all the time, not just on one day. My mother, who has been dead herself for 30 years, always mourned her first boyfriend, Henry, who left Flushing, NY, to join the RAF and ended up dying of pneumonia in the early days of WWII because his plane was shot down and he ended up in the English Channel from which he was rescued but then died in hospital. Was Henry a hero? I guess that depends on the definition but Henry certainly deserves respect. My mother left the comfort of a reasonably good life to go to the south Pacific and serve in the Red Cross. Back in those days no one thought of those women as heroes though they certainly risked their lives in multiple ways helping the men who fought. Were they heroes?
 
Trump decided to play golf this weekend. I understand that he intends to go to Baltimore on Memorial Day even though the mayor of Baltimore has asked him not to. I am pretty sure that the golf is the more important part of Trump's weekend just as I am sure that Trump has gone to Camp David two weekends in a row to tune up his golf game. And yes, there is no golf "course" at Camp David, but there is a delightful hole designed by Bobby Jones that includes four tee locations, perfect for Trump to tune up before hitting his own course, once again at taxpayers' expense as the Secret Service must travel with him. No one in Trump's family, past or present and probably future, has ever served in any country's military let alone the country he lives in now.

Remember your own family members.Think of the sacrifices they made and then think of Trump playing golf on your dime.

100,000 Americans dead of Covid19 on Trump's watch. Please remember.

Inside Scoop

Okay, I have nothing against Michael Jordan or the film, The Last Dance, that so many people are talking about that is about him but I guarantee I have inside information about how he got so sick when he came to Utah to play the Jazz and it had nothing to do with pizza. At the time my youngest son was dating the mayor of Park City's daughter. Despite being from different worlds in more ways than one, they were a hot item for quite a while. My son went up to Park City to see the young woman despite being as sick as a dog. It was an unusually nice day for that time of year in Park City and the young woman asked my son if he wanted to go play some golf.

So they were playing golf in PC when whom should they run into at the course but Jordan. As everyone knows, Jordan is a total golf nut so the nice weather was an incentive for him as well. The two groups met on one of the fairways and my son, though he was very definitely sick with a very nasty virus, shook Jordan's hand enthusiastically, no doubt spreading all of his nasty germs all over. When it was reported that Jordan had gotten sick, everyone in my family sort of laughed because our son had come home to tell us of his encounter and to say that he hoped Jordan caught what he had since he wanted the Jazz to win.

Oddly enough, my husband went to the game, the guest of one of SLC's bankers, so he was able to watch in person one of the more dramatic performances of anyone's athletic careers. There was no pizza involved.   

Having Fun

I have been making the Delectable Pathways quilt from many decades ago. I used the applique strips' designs as the basis for a quilt I made also years ago but mine were borders with corners rather than strips (Go to Quilt Gallery 2 on the Pages section of the blog and scroll down and you will find that quilt). I finished the mountains last week and sewed those strips together and today I finished the applique on one of those strips but that still leaves a bunch of handwork because there are embroidery accents up and down the strip plus your own incentive to add more--more birds, bugs, embroidery, etc. It has been fun since I haven't been working in more earth tones for a while now. I find the designers' method of changing the strips interesting because it reminds me of half-drop knitting.

What has Trump been doing? He's been praising himself, firing people, and accusing Obama of crimes. He's been calling people names and taking hydroxychloroquine. We have more than 92,000 deaths in the US and Trump wants to take a victory lap, claiming that his actions alone saved many more lives. Any thinking person knows that is utter nonsense but unfortunately, as Adlai Stevenson noted in the 50s, the number of thinking persons is much smaller than the number of reactive persons.

Enjoy Memorial Day but do so with caution and care for others. My father is buried in Ft. Sam Houston cemetery in San Antonio so I know he will get a flag. He wasn't much in to flag waving, found it jingo behavior but he will still get a flag. My brother-in-law whose name is on the Viet Nam wall will get a flag as well though he is buried in a churchyard in Massachusetts. He was big in to jingo behavior so that's okay.

And by the way, humans have never developed "herd immunity" to any corona virus; not to common colds, not to flu, not to any of the corona viruses. This one seems to be even more pernicious in that having antibodies to the virus being tested for does not seem to grant all people relief from acquiring the virus again. That indicates that this virus mutates faster than previous corona viruses which is not good news for anyone. That also means that even developing a vaccine will only provide a brief window of relief after which a new vaccine will be needed. Welcome to the brave new world.  

When Does A Death Count?

All sorts of conservative voices are claiming that the death count for the Covid19 is inflated because so many of the dead had underlying issues. Having reached a certain age I can promise everyone that underlying issues follow you from your earliest years and many will plague you as you age. But does that mean that dying from Covid19 while also having "underlying" issues doesn't count as a viral death?

My husband and I are both senior citizens and we both have underlying issues. He has recently recovered from treatment for prostate cancer, previously had cardiac ablations for atrial fibrillation, had spinal surgery more than a decade ago but regardless he is still vigorous and healthy, neither obese nor out of shape. If he caught the virus and died, it would be the virus that killed him. He never smoked and never drank and was still rock climbing in Yosemite two years ago. He was a tennis player in his youth and continues to stay active.

I was a competitive swimmer for most of my life until I had surgery on my cervical spine. The neurosurgeon cautioned me about continuing competition because as he put it, I don't have a governor on my engine. But I have hypertension and asthma even though I, like my husband, am neither obese nor sedentary. If I catch the virus and die it will be the virus that kills me.

Everyone dies eventually. Given that fact, the twisted reasoning of the conservative voices means that there are no virus deaths at all since everyone would die anyway. But Alex Azar blames comorbidity for the vast number of deaths in the US. Comorbidity is if you have two or more serious health issues such as asthma and hypertension in addition to the virus. Azar says that if Americans simply took better care of themselves they would be all right. While I agree that too many Americans have poor diets and too many Americans have poor habits, it is also true that too many Americans cannot afford medical care and too many Americans live in food deserts. Absent the virus they might die younger than they should but the pandemic means the virus can still be the cause.

And on the subject of comorbidity, Azar needs to look closer at the White House. Trump is obese, becoming morbidly so; Trump takes statins for high cholesterol. Mike Pompeo is obese but his other underlying conditions are not disclosed as are Trump's. Bill Barr is obese. Trump is older than the other two men which is another factor involved in the death rates.

The whole notion of blaming people for dying because it affects Trump's re-election prospects is disgusting.    

Do You Get It Yet?

“And don’t forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world,” (Trump) added. “But why? Because we do more testing. When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.”

Trump said the news media had refused to report his “common sense” explanation for the country’s high case numbers.

 Starting with the fact that as a percentage of population the US is 26th in the world in testing,  Trump outdid himself with those comments. Just follow that logic and you see that if you never have a pregnancy test you can't possible be pregnant. If you don't test for lead paint or asbestos in your house you will never have health issues from those substances. What he calls common sense the rest of us call sheer stupidity.

Scientific Illiteracy II

"...to me it's not an acceptable answer, especially when it comes to schools," Trump said.

Okey dokey, Trump thinks it's all right for you to send your children out into the world; into school buses; crowded classrooms; filled with sneezing, coughing, spitting children in contradiction to what the nation's top epidemiologist recommends. Now a new poll released today showed that 86% of Republican voters trust Trump over Fauci, trust even his understanding of science over Fauci's.

Does that trust hold when Trump puts your children at risk? Keep in mind that children don't go to school without adults. Keep in mind that the virus travels wherever people travel. Keep in mind that children do die from this. Keep in mind that the children's parents die at higher rates.

Do you have your will in order? Who is going to take care of your children if you are hospitalized or die? Do you have all your ducks in a row to send your children out with the complete understanding that going back to school could risk your entire family dying?

Trump finds Fauci's response unacceptable but it is the response of a trained scientist, a physician who knows the facts and isn't looking for your vote.

Will you sacrifice your children to Trump's grandiose view of himself?

Scientific Illiteracy

There is a word for being bad with math, innumeracy, but to the best of my knowledge there is not a word for being bad with science. But watching the PBS newshour tonight and listening to politicians from both sides of the aisle scream about testing made me reflect on all the misinformation and hysteria that happens when people don't think logically about any situation.

Yes, we need more testing for the virus but testing alone is not the answer to any question let alone the question of whether businesses can open. Oddly enough, it was Stephen Colbert's diss of Trump that brought that home to me. Colbert made fun of Trump for his riff on Katie Miller's positive diagnosis of Covid-19, a riff that Colbert said was the stupidest remark by a public official in history. Yes, Trump's statement was convoluted and irrational when he said that Miller was negative and then all of a sudden she was positive and that's why testing was silly.

But in an equally odd and convoluted way, Trump was right. His complaint, if I understand the gist of it, was that the tests can only show a moment in time when a person goes from being not infected to being infected. That is clearly true. So what needs to change?

The point of the testing has never been to identify who is positive for the virus even though that is what most people believe. Yes, it is important to identify those who have been exposed, but more important is to slow the spread. The way you do that is through contact tracing. The game plan needs to move toward who has been in contact with an infected person and where that exposure occurred. Unfortunately most health systems have been so overwhelmed with cases that they haven't been diligent in the contact tracing.

The US actually has a pretty good system for contact tracing because of venereal diseases and HIV/AIDS. We need to put that network into high gear if we want to open our economy and our schools.

So Trump was right that there is a problem with the tests if they go from negative to positive overnight. If that's all you are looking for then you are doing less than half of the job necessary. It isn't that Katie Miller is positive; it's that she was in the WH and in the residence and who did she acquire the virus from, and to whom could she have spread it.

All the best projections say that 70% of the US population will get the virus. Given our pre-existing conditions including simply being old, my husband and I will probably die from Covid-19 despite our faithful adherence to social distancing and masks. If Katie Miller doesn't know how she got it, all of us are at risk.

Happy Mother's Day

I live thousands of miles away from my sons now which is totally fine. I mean my youngest is over 40 now so it isn't as though they need their mother except when they forget a recipe or something. That's what email is for. I have a friend who still has a child at home, in high school if high school were open, who left town for the weekend with her husband so she could leave her brood including her two Australian shepherds at home because being quarantined when everyone came home for quarantine has gotten old.

If you are a mother you understand that feeling. I never abused a child or a pet but I certainly screamed at some plants that they needed to just die because I had too much to deal with that did make noise. Besides my husband being in the military when we first had children, he also left us when he pursued job opportunities, often leaving me to handle simple things such as selling the house or handling three teenaged boys.

I am not complaining but I know I am describing lots of peoples lives. Now that everyone is cooped up together it's like having a house full of toddlers again. Not for me although my husband has been known to be childish.

So I hope everyone has a good Mother's Day with appropriate attention and care given by all. Rarely do we reach that perfect family moment, but those times when we do are very nice.

If you and yours are healthy, just smile. 

So Much Has Changed

I taught myself how to quilt decades go. I never took a quilting class but I am one of those weird people who think that if you can learn how to do something, it's probably in a book somewhere. I already knew how to sew. By the time I started quilting I had been making my own clothes and my boys' clothes and even some of my husband's clothes. My mother in law sent me some Ultra Suede when it first came out because she wanted me to make my husband an Ultra Suede blazer. This is funny on multiple different levels because my husband was definitely not Dapper Dan. He didn't care what he looked like and he certainly didn't care if what he wore was the current style. My father in law was the Dapper Dan who had a closet full of expensive clothes and followed style trends even into his dotage. He was the only person I ever knew who owned his own morning suit and he had several sets of formal clothes complete with all of the cufflinks and other accoutrements. Our youngest son even had one of his grandfather's tuxedos altered and restyled for his wedding a year ago and it still looked great. I think he had to purchase a dress shirt though because his neck and his arms are not the same size as his grandfather's. I didn't make my father in law an Ultra Suede sportcoat but I did make him a Norfolk jacket in a nice tweed and I did knit him some very nice sweaters.

Anyway, I resurrected  an old pattern for my current project now that Fuss 'N Feathers is done (see What?). This pattern was published in 1998 and the instructions begin with, "Trace around the patterns below..." Not only is that not how anyone does this anymore (although there are probably some who do), but there weren't even numbers to make anything easier. There were no indications of what finished size was intended or how to quick piece or how to cut to avoid bias on edges. So I measured everything that was given in the pattern and figured out how to quick piece the half-square triangle pieces integral to the Delectable Mountains and did some experimenting to make sure my measurements were correct.

But those initial issues are done and I am nearly done with the piecing part of the pattern and will be able to move on to the applique part. I am still trying to use fabric I already own as much as possible so this one has a variety of old fabrics in primarily blues and browns but the applique will be a wider variety of colors though still delving into the stash.

The changes in instructions made me wonder how I ever learned how to make a quilt in the first place. Did we really mark everything with a pencil and measure before cutting with regular scissors? That's seems so labor intensive now that I can't believe I did that with young boys in the house.

Think About This

The Trump administration announced today that the Covid19 task force will be disbanded by Memorial Day, just short of the end of the month.  The thrust of that announcement is that election season is beginning and Trump misses his rallies, not that he thinks the danger is past. Even the new press secretary touted the audience share numbers rather than death numbers or infection numbers so there certainly is no doubt as to where this administration puts its focus.

But, all of the reopening in various states certainly doesn't mean that any danger of infection for you, for me, for your children, for your grandchildren is over. As infectious disease expert Dr. Carlos del Rio, a professor of medicine and global health at Emory University, described it, it's like having a "peeing section in the swimming pool". No one expects the pee to stay in the peeing section, nor should you expect Covid19 to stay in Florida, Georgia, or any of the other benighted states or municipalities that have loosened restrictions.

Sure, eventually the virus will have swept completely through the world picking off the low hanging fruit as it goes. But there is no reliable way to determine which person is the lowest hanging fruit. A reasonably young Broadway star is still in a coma after having his leg amputated due to Covid19 but Tom Hanks is fine. Boris Johnson, PM of Great Britain, survived with massive intervention but a five year old died. All of those examples happened when there were already some heavy-duty restrictions on movement and activity so just imagine what happens when Trump says that his re-election is more important than your health. The Trump administration is not noted for its focus but neither is it noted for its compassion.

Can I pee in your pool?

What?

A Trump advisor named Bryan Lanza said that the economy, "... was sidelined by a bunch of unelected scientists." Yeah, that makes sense since so many of the elected officials are experts on health or the economy or, well, anything.A pork processor in Missouri took precautions before going back to business as usual by testing nearly 1500 of the workers there, all of whom were asymptomatic at the time of the tests. Of that 1500 or so workers, 372 tested positive for Covid-19. Of course Trump has already declared that meat packers are essential businesses and that the federal government will shield them from lawsuits and liability in the event that their workers spread the virus throughout the plants and get sick or even die. So it's those pesky scientists who weren't elected to anything who are the problem, not the virus that doesn't care if you understand the economy or the science. Can't fault that impeccable logic.

On a much brighter note in more ways than one, I finished Fuss 'N Feathers yesterday. It's 48 inches square, with quilting every half inch. So I am following my tradition of listening to Beethoven's 9th Symphony that finishes with Beethoven's nod to Schiller's An die Freude (Ode to Joy). Nice way to finish any project and particularly fitting on this beautiful spring day.

Funny

We are newcomers to our neighborhood having moved in the middle of last November. We have met our adjacent neighbors and two other couples very briefly on the street, primarily because those two couples have dogs and we really like dogs so we always pet the friendly ones. Or we did before the virus and the social distancing. In any case we certainly don't know everyone and between the virus and inclement weather folks weren't really out and about much before the last couple of weeks so there are clearly people we don't know.

But you can still imagine our surprise when this afternoon while my husband was doing some weeding in our new vegetable garden and I was chatting with him when we heard a noise. We turned around and there was this elderly Chinese couple standing in our front yard about 15 feet from where we were snapping photographs of our large weathered iron sculpture that we had mounted on a very large tree stump with bolts a couple of weeks ago. While we like the sculpture a lot it is simply rusted iron. It's lovely and a friend of ours made it and we are very proud of it but it doesn't have much value except to us. Other neighbors have complimented us on it and even passers-by have praised it, but this was definitely different.

I waved, said hello, but all the old couple did was turn around and walk the forty feet or so back to the street all the while snapping photos of the sculpture, the house, and the new vegetable garden--another feature that lots of folks have commented on positively. I suppose people like what we have done with the place but it isn't a public space. As the old saying goes, "There's none so queer as folks."

New Verse, Same as the First

Kayleigh McEnany gave a press briefing today, her first official briefing as the new White House press secretary during which  McEnany promised that she'd "never lie". This is the same woman who said multiple times that Trump never lies. Her reasoning behind that astonishing claim is that Trump does not have an intent to deceive when he speaks. This is sort of camouflaged lawyer speak (depends on what your definition of "is" is) for mens rea--an intention of wrongdoing when committing a crime. It doesn't matter how McEnany represents Trump, he does lie and he does so not just on a daily basis but practically on an hourly basis. So pull my other leg, ma'am. I am not buying what you are selling.

On a different note, I did finish the quilting on Fuss 'N Feathers, got it trimmed and made enough French double bias binding to go around the sides. I have some gardening to get to tomorrow but I will certainly get some of the sewing done tomorrow as well. That means that I should be done with the quilt by Sunday afternoon. It didn't really start off as a Christmas quilt and the various bits and pieces aren't necessarily Christmas but all of the fabrics except the bright red are Christmas themed from a long time ago. I honestly don't know why but for some reason the quilt makes me think of Heidi. Once the photos get posted you can make up your own mind.

Addendum: The Trump administration is blocking Anthony Fauci from testifying to Congress. Neither you nor I know the full story behind this, regardless of the spin, but each of us has an idea.

Donny One Note is singing again tonight.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow is May Day. That has numerous connotations around the world. At my college it was a day of weird rituals and play including Maypole dancing and flowers along with strawberries and cream for breakfast. It is traditionally a day to celebrate workers around the world both in public displays and in political speeches.

In 2020, May Day will be a day when people will be asked to listen to demagogues rather than doctors, to pay attention to pseudo-science rather than to serious science. Don't get me wrong. I want the economy to restart but I don't want lives to be lost because we didn't do enough. My husband and I are senior citizens and plan to wear masks in public places for the time being and stretching into the future because we cannot know if others are carriers. Masks really only prevent me from infecting you so can I ask you to protect me? Without testing, and testing that is available and reliable, we don't know how safe any public space is. Do you? If you don't, just whose child or whose parent are you willing to sacrifice? Is it my son whose restaurant will end up killing him because someone else is sick?

On a lighter, happier, and more positive note, tomorrow there is a good chance that I will finish the quilting on the star quilt that I am calling Fuss 'N Feathers. Quilting every half inch throughout the quilt by hand means that every six inches is about four hours. I have enjoyed the process as I always do but even I recognize the difference between my previous skills and my current ones. Right now my husband has my recreation of an antique top hanging in a room in our house. He is the one more likely than I to display the quilts but I admit that I am bowled over by some of what I did years ago.

On another more positive note, spring is sort of coming to life here with the viburnum and the azaleas blooming. We planted out some more tomato starts and we have eaten some collard greens. We have birds nesting in our trees and feeding their young. We even found a young garter snake inside our house with no idea how it got there but we put it out in the garden so it could grow and thrive if it is lucky.

Happy May Day! Life goes on.