Design Wall Monday

Linking up to Design Wall Monday today with a shot of what was on the floor... Celtic Solstice blocks laid out.  They are now stacked and pinned and ready to sew into rows.  This is my third of Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilts -- you can still download the clues from her site for a few more months, I think -- and her designs emphasize the scrappy so much that the layout itself is not a big deal.  There is really a little of everything within each color family in this quilt.  Looking forward to seaming it all together soon.

Once again I have no finished projects, so no excuse to make my first stash report of the year.   If I finish this top, then I can count some fabric used, that's my rule for myself.

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(The line of asterisks is my primitive way of telling you I'm changing the subject. Most of my followers are here for the quilts, but I can't really stick to one thing at a time, as they've probably figured out by now.)

Daniel is having his first day of classes back at college.  We had school today, although Tertia and the public schools were off.

In honor of Martin Luther King and the quest for civil rights and the right to self-determination, I'm also posting about this case -- have you heard about it? Jahi McMath, a 13-year-old African-American girl declared "brain-dead" by the same hospital that botched her tonsillectomy.  It's very worrisome to me, as the parent of a child with a disability, that the family's wishes should have been so  badly ignored in this case.  Another Down syndrome parent and blogger is well worth reading on this, at Kimchi Latkes.  She has some excellent links here and here exploring the ethics of this case as well, including some about how those in the African-American community feel about medical ethics after their history of exploitation and abuse.  It makes me wonder if we really should be so self-congratulatory on overcoming racism and discrimination.  I have a friend with a mentally disabled daughter who became medically dependent after a stroke while in the hospital... she reports a widespread bigotry on the part of medical specialists, especially neurologists, against those who have mental disabilities.

Understand, it's not that the ethics in these hard cases are unclear and there is no consensus -- that may or may not be the case, if you have a "quality of life" that meets the expectations of the ethical decision-makers.  What concerns me is that the consensus appears to be different for different patients, based upon the prejudices of the people who make up the hospital boards.  And especially troubling is the lack of regard for the wishes of the families.  So this is to get you thinking about the subject of the civil and human rights of the disabled.  I'll be posting more in the next days and weeks, because it's a subject that just keeps coming up in my everyday life and reading.