Good heavens! Why am I not hearing any cries of, "Lock him up" from the Trump fans? After the new charges filed yesterday (7/27), it is obvious that the Dumpster committed far more egregious acts than Hillary. Fanatics can claim overreach all they want, but asking low level staffers to remove any video footage showing their chicanery which in turn led to their being included in the charges is far beyond Hillary's arrogant and stupid behavior. Of course the low level staffers are even more loyal to the dumpster fire than any of you folks so they are getting all the attention they deserve right now. I am glad they couldn't disable the camera as we might see the whole two stooges movie plus the dump at some point.

BTW, my son and daughter in-law were here last weekend and we went downtown to the Philadelphia Art Museum. We had given him his quilted jacket when he arrived but found that his assessment of the quilted clothing market was right on target. In the museum gift shops, many items of quilted clothing were on sale for what I considered to be outrageous prices. Very simple kimono style jackets were selling for anywhere from $1200 to $2300. These weren't that well made and the patterns were very simple with poor quality cotton fabric and no batting at all. It looked as though a $5 investment paid off big.

Making the jacket did take me away from my own quilt project but that was okay as my whole plan for construction disappeared in the interim. I intended to make it a center diamond with large triangular corners but when I put the two intended fabrics together, I didn't hear any singing so I decided to go with a much simpler plan.

Now I have to finish the last two corners and then decide if I add anything beyond that to contain all of the exuberance.

And another story about the problems caused by the imbalance in nature due to warming. We have a generator here, one that was installed by the very elderly woman who owned the house before us. Given the age and fragility of the very large trees in the neighborhood and in our yard, we have a maintenance contract on the equipment to assure us it will kick in when needed. An alarm got sent to the maintenance company a couple of days ago and the guy came out yesterday to investigate. It was ants--just regular garden ants, not carpenter ants, nesting in the box.  I didn't see the infestation but my husband did and he described it as incredible and other worldly. The maintenance fellow said that this summer has been notable for ant problems all over southern Pennsylvania, far more nests and far more damage. Since three trees on the street fell down in the last storm, the same storm when we were struck by lightning, having a generator is practically required. I loathe ants but I cannot say I expected this level of damage from them. 

 Edit:  I looked up the chances of a house being struck by lightning and for a single strike it is 1 in 200. If I have done the math correctly, three times in four years is exponentially higher. There is a 1 in 8M chance of that happening. Well I have always been unusually lucky.

The weather is weird everywhere but here in Pennsylvania I have a fairly unique problem. At least I think it must be unique although I have no idea how to research the data. We have been hit by lightning strikes on our house three times in the last four years or three times in the four years we have been here. Each time the strike has been pretty obvious, and each time the strike has taken out some piece of electronics, usually at a cost of around $1K to fix. 

The latest strike happened at 10:22 in the evening on Monday. The thunderstorm had been raging for a while and we could see the lightning strikes coming toward us and hear the rolling thunder. Multiple strikes in rapid succession and then "Bang!" This time it knocked out our air conditioning or at least some of our air conditioning since we have at least three different systems. This strike hit the main unit, the oldest, outside in our backyard. Since the lightning preceded the quick rise in temperature, we knew pretty quickly that our first floor kitchen, living, and dining room system was kaput. Luckily we were able to get a guy to come out to replace the zapped system.

Now I wonder if I have a lightning rod. Last year lightning  hit the phone and television systems and the year before it was a different air conditioning system. I guess we are lucky that our house is stone with a slate roof.