CLEARING THE DECKS

Yesterday Gary drove to Astoria and waited an hour to hand over our two cable boxes. I did not renew Acorn (which is why I watched all of Poirot last week). I stopped our subscriptions to Washington Post and The New York Times. I receive free regular information from Smithsonian and The Guardian and blogs …

STEP 2: cutting

An email this morning showed me a knitting pattern I liked. I never knit from patterns, but I often use patterns to push myself in a new direction. This one has a fancy design on both the body and sleeves. What I found interesting was the raglan sleeve shaping and that it is knit top-down. …

WHAT WE WANT

Headlines in the United States concern politics, specifically disappointment that Mueller testified exactly as he said he would. It's all in his report. The man in the Oval Office is a liar and cheat and does not care what happens to anyone so long as he's at the top of the news. The news in …

SENTENCE

The current cover story of The Atlantic describes the crime most likely to escape prosecution. It's rape. And not for any of the reasons we have assumed for so long. People are no more likely to lie about having been raped than any other crime, but police are far more likely to think a rape …

STEP 1: vision

The first step is staring at colors. This might last for a few days or weeks or even years. I had the defining fabric for my "Rain" quilt waiting for at least twenty years before I figured it out. The patterns of these collected blue fabrics are all over the place: sea shells, blueberries, stripes …

FAIR PLAY/FAIR PAY

"Our science can only benefit the whole of society if it’s done by the whole of society. And that’s not currently the case. —Dr. Jessica Wade, a British physicist who has added 670 profiles of women and people of color in the sciences to Wikipedia since 2017 Women and people of color are underrepresented throughout …

GETTING ON WITH IT

We meant to wait until Monday, though originally we thought we would have most of the furniture back into the kitchen and dining room yesterday. I had to put a second coat of varnish on the new piece of baseboard, the parts of the room that waited for proper cabinets. That's been a twenty-year, thirty-five-year …

TRUTH TO POWER

"Today, I am an inquisitor; I believe hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction …

WINNING OMELAS

“Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, From The Dispossessed The review of a book about mental illness in the Brevity blog this morning reminds me about American obsession with competition and our …

ICE

from Apartment Therapy: "With nationwide raids targeting undocumented residents set to begin on Sunday, many are in fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents appearing at their homes and workplaces. Though the raids are set to target 2,000 people for deportation, there may also be “collateral arrests,” where agents arrest others on site who …