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.  
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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