Change the things you can. So we did.

Here's the lowdown on 2013:

We lost both my in-laws in 2012, my father-in-law 2 weeks before Christmas.  Christmas 2012 involved fresh grief, and was harder because of an unpleasant houseguest who simply could not comprehend that we had just had a life-changing loss, dammit. This unbalanced person became a problem through several months.

In January we were hit with a legal and personal attack (unrelated to the houseguest).  The legal is nothing, a nuisance that will go away, but the personal was so unexpected, we felt punched.

While we tried to stay emotionally balanced over this, elder daughter got sicker than she has ever been.  She nearly died twice.  We had endless trips to doctors and hospitals, we were up all night for multiple nights, and it took about 5 months to get her back on her feet.

I went to the ER six times March through November, for 4 family members including myself, in support roles 5 times, only once as the patient (It was time to give in and go back on antidepressants, and the first one gave me a supernova migraine).  We lost Dad, as you know.  The rest of us are fine.

In the middle of all this, the hurricane season loomed.  Yall have heard me stress out about the goddam things to a tedious degree.

My grandparents' 1930's laundry hamper

There was naturally a list of things we cherished.

There was also getting Dad through a storm.  Even an evacuation of a couple of days would be hard, since he needed a place without stairs, and I didn't want to load all of us and 3 fighting cats onto any dear people who would offer to house us.  If a storm damaged Dad's house, he'd need to be comfortable somewhere for...weeks?  Months?

We could do nothing about the other problems of the year except wait them out and steer into the wind.  But we had to do something to solve the one problem we could solve.

We went to our bank.  It was amenable to giving us a mortgage.  We bought a house.  Inland.

The above-mentioned personal attack made us want to keep this location a secret, so we did.  Basically, we've had the house since May.  Things are quiet, I'm tired of sitting on this, so.  There it is.

We've been in a slow moving process since summer, taking stuff we didn't want to lose to disaster, and setting up a room for Dad.  We didn't spent a night there until Christmas - the place was a heap of boxes, and a couple beds and chairs, but we realized that Christmas at Dad's house would be too painful, so we scrambled to take what we'd need to stay in the new house for a few days.  Changing the setup of Dad's room was sad.  Making it Daughter's room for the holiday was happy.

The house is still a heap of boxes.

We are in love with it.  It's quiet, it has a whole room JUST for a library, it has a walled garden for Scooter, a big train room for Larry, I will have a real room for an office.  We are both so ready to leave here.

We're all OK, including our daughter who is back living her life again, blessing of blessings.  Younger daughter was in a total car smashup - her boyfriend had to be cut out of the car - but they had only minor injuries, and that qualifies as miracle.  Blessing again.

So, 2013.  Blessed, horrible, ground us up in a meat grinder, then let us all get put back together, and at least for me, I'm not who I was. I never expected any year to worse than 1994, and you can laugh or generally be disgusted at my childishness over that.

So help me, I thought there was such a thing as "enough" for fate/Higher Power/whatever, to put us through.  Any fool could read the news and know better.  I could, in fact, read the blogs of some of my friends and know better.  We're still luckier than a lot of people.  But I've lost something that I undoubtedly needed to lose.  I don't know what exactly it is.  Stupid trust in a benevolent power?  Trust in a tendency of the universe to balance things?

One of the main reasons that we were anxious to have a place inland left us on the 29th of November when Dad passed.  There were other reasons we needed the house, but I also think about how we never expected to spend Christmas away from the coast, yet, how crucial it was to our sanity to have that house as a sanctuary for a holiday that I dreaded. Is that the Benevolent Power letting the storm play out but giving us a boat?

Maybe I will be an adult someday, and have a faith that's more like, "you can't always get what you want.  But you get what you need."  I'm sure closer than I was.

Frankenstorm and Frankenthrow

I've spent the day watching a slow, drippy, blessedly boring rain and trying to finish my first big crochet project.  We're far enough south that the so-called "Frankenstorm" is very wimpy here, but I dearly hope all my northern friends and loved ones are ready.

I also hope that, like most impending disasters that I've prepared for in the past - such as the 3 hurricanes aiming for us in 2008, or the Y2K global crash - this turns out to be nothing.

The Frankenthrow is another matter.

I call it that because I did not crochet one huge piece.  I crocheted 63 squares, finished the last one yesterday, and now have to stitch them together, patchwork-style. It qualifies as a monster, big enough to be more like a twin bedspread.  I really did not intend that.  Let's call it an Opportunity For Growth.  I learned something about patterns and planning.

So it's at the assembly stage.  I'm starting with the center row, with its unique diamond-in-a-square design.  That light blue yarn forming the corners is only used in that one square.   That's because it comes from a special skein of yarn.

My maternal grandmother left a basket full of yarns, which came to me back in the 1980's, since the needlework thing skipped a generation.  My mother's aversion to needles and thread was kind of a family joke.

But I lacked the patience for it too, and gave away the yarn.  It's (almost) all gone.  URGH blast crap, what was I thinking?!

But it made sense at the time.  I'd started at least THREE afghans/throws, and found the process endlessly tedious, and abandoned them all.  I thought I'd never do it again - and I didn't, for most of 3 decades.

When I resumed, it was gonna be small projects or none.  But now I'm tired of making mufflers.  I decided to rethink the afghan idea.

Only, I need to adapt the project to my psychology.  I have to feel I've completed something.  I'm not good at deferred gratification, and especially when it's deferred by monotonous handwork.

 Voilà!  The answer!  Don't make one big square, make a bunch of little ones.  Say "Cool, I finished that!" 63 times.  Watch the pile grow.

 And incorporate into it just a little of the one skein of Gran's yarn that somehow escaped my purge.

Much smaller squares, and to be a much smaller throw

See that skein of blue, next to the little pile of squares that will start the next one?   This is all that's left of that big workbasketful.  It's 40-50 years old.  I don't even know what it's made of, but before I started, I crocheted a little piece with it, washed and machine dried it and it did not shrink, so I guess it must be synthetic.

I use only a little of it in each project.  A single square in this, a couple rows in that.  I put a row of it in a muffler I made for myself.

So in the last photo posed with Graymatter, you see the one patch of Gran's yarn that I'm using in the next throw.  The rest of the throw will be other colors.  Oh, and smaller.  A LOT smaller.

Talent optional

Since my needlecrafting skills are limited to basic stitches and simple squares or rectangles, it was kind of nice to realize we had a real need which called for exactly that skill set.

We have 3 stations in the kitchen at which we deal with making protein shakes, handmixing various things, or making tea. That in turn causes an annoying series of clacking/clanging sounds as measuring cups and big mugs move from step A (ingredients) to step B in the case of shakes and pancake mix (blender). I could get cheap potholders at the Dollar Store, but something wider and thinner than a potholder was called for, to cushion sound but lie flat and accommodate multiple mugs or bigger bowls.

Crocheting this took about 2 hours. Nice, since we'll need 6 in order to have a set to use and a set in the laundry. The yarn is variegated, so no skill was needed to create the color palette. One down, five to go.

Gardening with allergies

Still haven't caught the gastro-intestinal virus (Thank You, thank You, thank You!!) but my close-up work in the dirt to finish the new raised bed garden did give me an allergy attack of epic proportions. I browsed online for safety masks, but my eyeglasses won't stay on when I wear those stiff ones. I looked at surgical masks, but all the options I saw tie around the head and neck and I hate ties or rubber bands pulling my hair and slipping down. I knew I'd never put 'em on.

Meanwhile Larry had a dental appointment and came home with the best solution ever. These masks that dentists and hygienists wear loop over my ears, and are wonderfully comfortable. The dentist was nice enough to give Larry a half-full box for me! Highly recommended for work that you love but that brings you in contact with allergens.

So - I got my seeds started, in JiffyPots [TM]. Next was how to keep the wildlife from digging in them.



We'd bought a cheap window at Home Depot, to use for a cold frame. Oddly, it's an exact fit for the raised bed, so Larry also came up with this idea for protecting the pots. We used one of the toppers and another broken one to block the uncovered end of the window and thwart our little woodland friends.

Possibly more than you want to know about how my weekend is going

....so I will not say a lot about it, but make it a brief Public Service Announcement. I bought this thing a year ago and couldn't muster the courage to try it, so it occurs to me that others may have the same misgivings.

I was sure that it would cause a burning sensation like the ones I got as a kid, when swimming pool water went up my nose. I hate that a lot but, much worse, I thought it would resemble the sensation of drowning. No way. Pass.

I had to be miserable enough to give in and try it, and o! I found out I'd been wrong. So wrong. Using a neti pot feels wonderful. It needs repeating at intervals over the day, but it feels so good that I don't mind. Maybe it will shorten this cold/allergy/whatever is attacking me.

Happy weekend.

Got cats? Got box springs?

Whose fur this is, I think I know.

We had two problems. One was that Very Hairy Cat, otherwise known as Downyflake, tore open the underside of the box spring (a misnomer - they rarely, if ever, put springs in them anymore) to crawl up into. After living over the years with several cats who discovered this, I'm pretty sure that it's a favorite cat-thing to do. We tried to block access with a messy and dust-collecting little village of boxes which, obviously, didn't even work.

The other, more superficial problem was that the ugly bare box spring showed. (Last photo, inset.) We gave up the bed skirts, for both access and cat-related reasons, long ago. Neither our light summer blanket nor the heavier winter comforter dangles down far enough to cover it.

I honestly don't know whether I read this idea someplace, or made it up myself. But it occurred to me that:

nice sheets over the box springs would disguise their upholstery, and ...

putting those nice sheets over the undersides of the box springs -- i.e., sheeting them upside down -- would block Downy from his little cave.

So we did, after as much fur removal by hand and vacuum-cleaner as we could manage. This should work on any size bed. I individually sheeted each of the 2 twin beds we have pushed together to make a king-size, and used plain ones of a generic color to blend with the linens and the room, but there are plenty of ways to use the idea with anything, from K-mart's cheapest to designer patterns. Here, there's not much point in trying to make it look all HGTV-y since the stored items under the bed are still exposed. It looks good to me. This is a hard-working living space.

With cats.

More book repair stuff

Since I was fixing these 2 books anyway, it occurred to me (after I'd gotten started, of course) to document and post another book repair entry, this time showing what I do when a book has completely split apart.

For anyone who happens by -- I talked about the basic materials in my first post on repairing books -- so I won't repeat that here, I'll just refer any interested readers to that post, but I will repeat one thing which is too important to skip:

NEVER repair a book unless you are willing to destroy its value. Repair pretty much does exactly that. If you want to sell it, collectors would rather have it in disrepair. Really. Repair only no-value books that need to be used and handled.

OK. You'll see 2 books here, but i'll show the repair steps for the more complicated one.
It's complicated mostly by my choice. I want to keep the original bookplate and to keep all of the original paper of that ripped endpage.

You may not want to. It would be simpler and would, in fact, look neater to discard the torn paper and make a big, neat, new pastedown. But I like the plate. I like the personal history in an old book. And I also tend to keep as much of a book's original material as possible ... just ... because!

The general idea is to secure the text block to the cover.

The first step requires a decision. There's paper backing against the bound page edges.

The bookbinding guide calls this the "hollow back." It is NOT hollow, it's thoroughly glued to the bound edges, but they call it that.

Is that backing secure? Or is it shredding, or peeling off?

If it needs fixing or replacing, this is the time to do either one, by gluing it down, or peeling it away and replacing it, the same way I have placed new paper on this one.

Two views, one from each angle:

But in this case, the old backing was very securely glued down already and needed no attention, so I just placed the new piece on top of it.

Now -- BEFORE gluing the book together, it's a very very good idea to close the book on the new piece.

This shows me exactly how the piece will conform to the cover. AND when I DO put glue on the pieces, they will already be shaped to each other and will fit together in their natural position, without pulling against each other.

All I need to do now is glue the new piece onto the cover.


IMPORTANT : NOTE that I have put NO GLUE ON THE SPINE. The cloth spine is not supposed to stick to the back of the pages. The text block, as it's called, just kind of hangs into the spine like a hammock, attached ONLY at the hinges.

Press it together. Since glue always oozes out around the edges, lay wax paper between the repair and its facing page, till the glue dries.

If I were discarding the old torn edges, I'd pretty much be finished, but I chose to trim the new piece to fit around the plate ... and to glue the torn paper back onto the pastedown. It looks kind of yucky, since it's been crumpled down into the spine, probably for decades, and darkened. But I wanted to put it back where it belonged!

And here are both books. In the other one you can see that this technique makes a pretty neat repair, especially if you sort-of color match new paper to the old paper.

This is another book I should sell. I'm not sure that a real booklover should even be in this business. I should sell collectible thimbles or something.

Marvels of Insect Life, by Edward Step. NY:Robert M. McBride, 1916.



Loads of amazing photos. as well as the spectacular color plates. This photo close-up of a honeybee's tongue is amazing. Maybe I'll sell it ... um ... later.

Book mending

Odd, for this time of year -- instead of the typical now-it's-here, now-it's-gone afternoon thunderstorm, we had a relatively cool, quiet day of steady rain. Good day to spend mending a few of the world's tatters by repairing books.

This is more a How I spent My Day post than an advice essay, but here's what I did, for what it's worth.

1. I repair a book only when I'm willing to destroy its value. Honest - if you even think it may have value, repair will most likely destroy that value. When in doubt, don't. Repair it only if you want to use it! I don't repair them if I plan to sell them. The ones I mended were only for me and others who asked.

2. The right paper and glue are a must. I go to the craft store and hit the scrapbooking section. This paper is designed to take glue without getting soggy, and it's acid-free, and you can get colors that approximate the various shades of vintage paper. You can also get acid-free glue, and it even comes in a bottle with a nice pinpoint tip. The wax paper is also a must.

3. If one little bit of the original connection is still hanging on, it's worthwhile to me to loosen it. I want to make a whole new hinge.

4. My method is to make a hinge by shingling a new piece under the free edge and then over the other, still-intact side.

5. This part is important and hard to describe: the new hinge needs to be tucked into the binding in a natural S-curve. Otherwise when I open the book after the glue dries, the paper "bridge" that spans the break will just split apart again. You can see this better on the 1912 bird book, its repair job illustrated below.

6. I place wax paper between the repair and the intact side, then close it to let the glue dry.

The last picture shows a wonderful bird book I repaired long ago. I add it because the color contrast of the paper shows the shingled hinge structure better.

Addendum: A comment already! 8~) and I need to add something:

The book I show the steps for, above, and this one also demonstrate that it doesn't matter much which direction the repair goes. If the better free end is on the inside cover (the demo book in the above photos) I use that and glue the hinge onto the free endpage. But if the free endpage edge gives me a better one, as it did in the bird book, I hinge under THAT one and glue it to the inside cover.

It's Chester A. Reed's Birds of Eastern North America. Doubleday, Page, 1912. Color on every page, and a bittersweet reminder of when the ivory-billed woodpecker was merely "rare."

Yep, I wanted to keep and handle this one, which is why I repaired it. It's a wonder I ever sell anything.

How to trap a raccoon

Probably more than you want to know about what we've learned from our animal-trapping experiences, but this all may to uselful to someone who drops by sometime. Brought to you by the Havaheart Trap, a wonderful invention.

Raccoons are particularly gifted at getting the food bait out without entering the trap. Few of us trap them on the first try, but some things will increase your odds.

You can check the Havaheart FAQ for lots of good advice, including ways to prevent trapping neighbor cats. Some might be worth a try. I personally will not recommend using the first suggestion: Havaheart says cats won't be attracted to peanut butter on whole wheat bread. It may depend on the cat -- I live with one who adores peanut butter and harasses me for a fingerful to lick off. Some of the other suggestions they make for baits that are raccoon-friendly but disliked by cats might be better.

Meanwhile, a little can of Fancy Feast [TM] worked for us. It's nicely fragrant and Rocky ought to make a beeline for it. A neighbor with outside cats might want to be notified on Trap Night and might be willing to make other arrangements for his cats for the night. He's motivated to cooperate, or he sure oughta be, because his cats are at risk from this raccoon as well.

So: The critter will work diligently and patiently, showing much more intelligence than do many of our elected officials, to get the food out through the bars and avoid entering the trap.

A huge trap makes that harder but has disadvantages. These traps are well-structured and heavy, even empty, and with an Occupant, they're a job to carry. Plus the Occupant will be scared and angry, and will express himself in rather smelly ways, so you'll be glad if you can fit it in the trunk of even a compact car for transport to Hundred Acre Wood.
Even if the trap is fairly large, the little ba- the critter will pull and shake it, tip it, and patiently jostle the food over to a reachable position. We wire the bait bowl or can in place to thwart that.

We place the trap against a wall and put the bait on that side,














...then block other sides with scrap wood, or whatever you've got. Voila'. An irresistible midnight snack and only one way to get to it.











And when you get him, have something disposable -- scrap cardboard? -- or washable (You will want to take it straight in to the washer) to put under the occupied trap as you transport him to his new home.

You'll then want to hose the trap down or leave it out in the rain!

Conquering technology

Another in my list of things other people have probably known for years, but that I just figured out is: some players won't play a translucent CD. Specifically, this computer's disc drive can't see the thing.

NO DISC IN DRIVE

STOP CLICKING RETRY, YOU IDIOT

NO DISC IN DRIVE, AM I TALKING TO MYSELF HERE?

Presumably the light beam goes through instead of being properly blocked.
.

And another demonstration that I'm not very observant has taken place because I've owned this disc for at least a decade and never noticed. You gotta hold it up to the light, like this, and by Jove, the problem becomes, uh, clear:

So I grabbed the first piece of scrap paper at hand, cut a circle in it, Scotch[TM] taped it to the top of the disc:

... and the drive finally recognized it and let me pull off two tracks for a homemade compilation.
.
I can color in the lines too. Mostly.

Between houseguests (one batch leaves tomorrow. The next, for whom this disc is intended, arrives Wednesday) I'm assembling a nice photo essay on Graymatter. It'll go on the cat blog. Stay tuned.

Today's Contribution to Western Civilization

It's undoubtedly been discovered previously by about 30 thousand other people. But for any who are still grappling with the serious question of how to carry snacks around in a purse, tote bag, or briefcase, even long term, without their getting smushed or crushed -- I offer my solution: the hard, spring-hinged eyeglass case.

A hard case accomodates candy and snack bars or even those preservative-laden, yet fragile, cracker packs, and will preserve them from all hard-to-eat or unappetizing mutilations, even if kept in the purse or bag long term.

That's about as high as my mental biorhythm will let me soar today. Carry on, Grasshoppers.