It's not spring, yet

Each morning I put on my light weight spring fleece and proceed with the morning. When breakfast is done, a couple of hours later, I still am not warm, and change into my heavy duty winter fleece for the rest of the day. It really isn't spring, yet.

Our governor and his team are staggering reopening of the state. This poor fellow is a Republican to the end of his toenails, yet his plan to have us up and running again has his fellow Republicans beating on the statehouse door in frustration. A couple are suing for the "right" to throw everyone back in the arena, say on Friday. 

I went outside to admire my "garden", all of one plus pots. I didn't try for pictures, but the zinnia pot is littered with little green double leaves. The ranunculus  pot has little specs of greenery here and there. If saying anything to me, it is "Don't forget Friday is mandevillas! Don't forget!"

And I spent the rest of the day hemming the black and cream towels. They seemed iffy to me as I wove them, but the rest of the process melded the weave together. Charming, right out of a twenties kitchen.

Because I put the last full bobbin in the bobbin case when I started, I concluded my day filling all my bobbins again.

Good to go for quite some time. I cannot remember when I last had twelve bobbins full.
  

It's raining on Sunday

There is no sunshine for the cat to sleep the day away, basking in a pool of heat and light. I am finishing towels. Every time I stand, he is literally underfoot, foiling every move. I should have a step counter; I am taking countless more today not to trip or stumble, even to literally walk through a door.

This is a picture of a mizerble day. It's rain falling, relentlessly. I hope it plays for you.

Except for watching my feet and ignoring outdoors, I'm in a reasonable frame of mind. I'm within ten pages of finishing Sapiens, Yuval Harari, a brief history of human kind. It will be a while before I open the next volume, Homo Deus. It's as thick as Sapiens, which five hundred pages were a "brief" history of our world.

That said, I have read all the pages over the last month and not tossed it aside for anther read. It is fascinating. In the beginning, there were all of us. Homo erectus, habilis, Neanderthal, Denisovan,and so on through nine identified Homo species, plus dinosaurs, Dodos, saber toothed cats, extinct trees, fish, insects. We outlasted them all, and not by war or forced marches.

I think next I will move on to another Alexandra Fuller. I first read Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, the story of her childhood as the daughter of eccentric post revolutionary parents in Africa. It was interesting and sympathetic and compelling. I could have recommended it, but my own life kept interfering. I decided to read another, and got Travel Light, Move Fast. 

It was the same sort of good reading, recommended book, until right  there at the end. It was a clap to the head. There in the stack you can see how many more Alexandra Fuller's there now are to read.

And Keith Richardson is upside down in there. His bare chest is too much to look at at breakfast. There's one called Maphead, an alternate name for my sister. That sounded interesting, and probably will break up some other reading.

So that's Sunday in a rainy Ohio lock down. I am interested to see if that rain is raining.

No rain. Some white streaks must inflame your imagination. I should learn how to do videos, but it's 4:30, and I'm ready to make supper. Have a good week. Our sun will shine on Tuesday.

A lot of day for one day

Days have drifted slowly, somnambulant, looney, like sleepwalking these couple of months. Since our governor shut down my state, the only touchstone of reality is trash pickup. I do a little or a bit, or nothing. I talk to my neighbor, my sister, my daughter. I go to the mailbox, for the weekly collection of junk mail.

I did hope the crisis would end junk mail. There is a perceptible lessening, but alas, it remains with us.

Today I took the black and cream off the loom, to begin the end process.

First it goes to the serger to secure the cut ends. I put the end under the presser foot and began sewing--without lowering the presser foot. Decent words will not describe the mess I had. With tweezers I commenced removing the threads jammed solidly in the throat plate and around the presser foot.

The I began rethreading the machine, leaving to the end the one needle I swore I never would unthread, the one inside, behind and threaded from back to front. I got to it and could not get it threaded. I called my sister. No answer. I tried for another hour, and then my memory shouted, you need a bridge cleaner!

I called my sister again; she has the same serger and surely would have a pack of bridge cleaners. No answer.

I checked Amazon. I would pay expedited delivery to get them tomorrow! I'm not kidding you, bridge cleaners are not a priority for Amazon, which proclaims to have rearranged shipping priorities to get what is needed the most out the soonest. No bridge cleaners before June.

I called my drug store. Try to make a twenty something understand! Finally I moaned "You certainly aren't even old enough to have a bridge!" I refined my description as I delt with several more drug stores. It's a mono filament line with a loop on one end to guide under a tooth bridge for cleaning.

My doorbell rang. My gentleman neighbor across the way told me someone he did not recognize was driving through the park, hoping to find me. He offered to stay, in case it was an unsavory character and I might need rescuing. But I said I was fine and went to the street, and met someone who introduced herself as an old customer.

She knew I lived in the park because I'd mentioned it, and she knew if she asked enough people she would find me. She wanted to buy towels for gifts for an upcoming wedding. Lovely. I brought her into the studio and she left with four yellow towels for the bride and a kiwi towel for her kitchen.

My sister called and yes, she only yesterday found an old box of bridge cleaners in the drawer of one of the old studio sewing machines. She would bring it over after supper.

At the end of my day that had flipped from nothing to overflowing, Jan knocked on my door and yoo-hooed. "It's me and here are the bridge cleaners."

And I immediately responded, "since you're here, will you rethread that last needle. You know, the one threaded back to front!" And she sat down to do it. Bridge cleaner in hand, she turned it this way and that, trying to see how we used to do it. Then she said,"We have the same machines. Why doesn't this have a slot in it?"

Mechanical whiz that she is, she pressed this and pushed that, trying to make something move to get at the needle. And then she found the tiny switch that opened the top of the threading space in that needle so the thread could just be dropped in. Flip the switch, close the hole, job done.

She played with the cat for a bit, and went home. I secured the ends of the fabric and sent it through the washer and dryer. Towels tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be a little more busy than most days.

An answer at last?

We had snow late last week. I waited for the sunshine to take care of it, and went out grocery shopping.

I think this is a sparrow or some small bird hopping on by. This picture is just a small indication of filling boredom.

I have been tracking these little fellows. Every day it's "Come on! Come on!"

The same with these big fellows, too. There actually are three fat buds there, and I think they will be some sort of fancy, feathered tulips.

Today is just too lovely.  High in the mid sixties, light film of overcast, bright sunshine. And I've been rewarded. I believe these are ten petal anemone. And it seems today was the end of spring. The rest of the week if forecast forties and rain.

Some of you may remember I signed on with 23andMe  several years ago. I frequently get notices, "you have new relatives!", and I don't react to them because the generations aren't near enough to me to be excited. 

I am intrigued how further down they are drilling on all of us, me included. I now am incredibly Neanderthal, for instance. I have 293 Neanderthal "Variants", more than 83 percent of all the rest of their clients.

Recently I had an email from a young, new 23andMe client, asking me about her relatives. She probably didn't understand that 3rd or 4th cousins and pretty far down the ladder. I explained what I know about how it works and told her worst of all, she probably is part of my great-great grandmother Cox's family, maiden name Smith, and all my research dead ended with her. She is the grandmother who succumbed to the 1918 flu epidemic.

23andMe also tweaked me with a new clue, I have three close relatives. Of course, I must upgrade for more information. Or I could sort on the oceans of data they give me and see what I find. And by golly, I found several new relatives sharing my paternal grandmother's maiden name in their genealogy. One still lives in this state.

His info said he's 47 years old, and new to this game. A new generation looking back. I sent an email and had an answer in hours. We are related; his maternal great-grandmother was a younger sister of my grandmother!

I asked if he could throw out my question, why did my grandfather marry my grandmother, a teenager fifteen years younger. He answered  he would do that; "some of them are still alive and "Jay, who's ninety, is a real talker!"

So, another cousin has answered and I will ask him to go stir up his old aunts and uncles, too. I would love to know. And it won't hurt them to learn some ancestors were scoundrels.

Locked down for the greater good

I make notes on my desk pad of topics that could make a decent post. I make a lot of notes on the pad, and line through them when done. Eventually the sight of the desk pad could make me crazy, and I tear it off and start with a shiny new sheet of paper. 

For the first time ever, somewhere in the six or eight weeks of the top sheet of paper, I’d lifted that sheet and wrote a note on the next sheet, that I’m using now. It says “nothing that’s wrong with me will kill me, but it all slows me down.” Apparently I thought that a fine topic sentence.

And now I thought, that’s some gruesome homily to throw out at Covid-19.  But it’s not, as long as I don’t actually have the virus. On the other hand, avoiding the virus is slowing me down. 

Interesting,  the drastic measure of shutting down the country has held the death rate of the virus to a very few percentage points above the annual death rate of flu, or heart disease. The flaw in this thinking being, we have a vaccination for flu and we know how to prevent heart disease.

Human nature being human nature, we spit at heart disease. We smoke, we drink, we are obese, and we rely on modern medicine to save us. We fill up entire hospital wards with our heart problems, and bring up new generations of heart specialists to save us.  

Enough of us are vaccinated against the flu viruses to hold down our hospital bed occupation to the same as the heart patients. And the hospitals are nearly full, and the health care professionals are all occupied, and here comes Covid-19.

We’ve been warned before. We had a flu epidemic in 1918 that killed more millions that are truly known. But that was a century ago, you know. Four generations. We didn’t invest in better education, more health care professionals, more research labs, more hospitals. They cost, and the money flowed elsewhere. It could even have flowed into great funds available to slam into a problem the instant it’s recognized.

But you know me, the tree hugging liberal—all the money has gone to make a pitiful few grossly rich, and an even more pitifully few of them willing to put their money to the solution. Not the way it should be, in my opinion.

Back to the present, here we are, locked down for the greater good. And suddenly we have rebellion, fomented by the leader of the country, to end lock down, back to normal, now, overnight, with no plan. There is a price for this, of course, and some of us know what the science professionals are telling us, the price is the lives of the children and their grandparents. 

Collateral damage, as it’s called. But it allows the generation in the middle to make money, keep up the house payments, go to the beach, send the children to college.

I don’t know an answer. Just a few could be, send tax dollars to research. Earmark some to fund emergencies from the bottom up, from household income to hospital expansion. Use common sense. Make your employees help in a plan of six foot distancing, hand washing, face masks, going home if sick. Agree to emergency measures for the short term; off site schooling, and work.

This is my grandmother, at age sixteen. Already her mother had died in the flu epidemic of 1918. The previous recession had so restricted he father’s income that her mother made their home a boarding home. My grandmother still did all the laundry, cooked the meals, and cleaned up. There at home she was working as hard as the health care professionals of her time. 

My mother was raised with the same work ethic. Even though she has retired from a regular job, she walked into our studio and said “teach me to weave.”  When she passed, we found we had to hire two weavers to replace her.

I grew up knowing I was ultimately responsible for my upkeep. My daughters hopefully learned the same.

I think the solution to pandemics is meeting them with a plan. Not my plan, but one worked out by our leaders, for the greater good, and with our agreement. 

Another interesting fact, there have been no cases of Covid-19 in my zip code, or some abutting zip codes. The official reason cited is “The National Park”, and lack of people. How about a lot more parks! 44264, that's me.