End of the Week

I'm not used to weeks this busy.  Here's the tally, so far:

• two airport runs
• 11 dinner guests Sunday p.m. (sandwiches)
• 7 overnight houseguests Sun. p.m. - Thurs. a.m. (2 adults, 5 cousins)
• numerous carpools and car exchanges
• 13 dinner guests Monday p.m. (hamburgers, hotdogs, potato salad, baked beans, brownies)
• one trip, 14 people, to Powell's Books on Tuesday
• 13 dinner guests Tuesday p.m. (pepperoncini beef sandwiches, or with rice; cake)
• one 14-year-old boy (Secundus, of course) who broke his front tooth playing "fish out of water" and had to be taken to the dentist for an emergency filling at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
• 9 dinner guests Wed. p.m. (soft tacos/ Mexican mountains.  Made with ground turkey that I promise I cooked to an internal temp. hot enough to kill any possible salmonella).
• Early pickup for me Thurs. a.m. to carpool to Newberg, OR for the Veritas conference.
• One mother-in-law who waited until the cousins had all left before telling Steve about the chest pain she had been having and asking to be taken to the E.R.  One stent inserted through balloon angioplasty and one overnight hospital stay.
• Early pickup again this morning for the Veritas conference.
• Steve and the kids took in the Clark County Fair this morning and then picked up Grandma at the hospital and took her home.

The Veritas conference was good and very stimulating, and I'm almost done knitting my socks, but I'll spare you the brain dump.  I'm ready for a very slow evening of mindless TV.  And putting in a request for a very boring week next week.

WIP Wednesday #5: Mainly About the Farmer

Another WIP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced. With a family reunion and cooking for 19 this week, I only have a few more Farmer's Wife blocks to add today.  Group shot above of the first 16: my fabrics are from my scrap boxes mainly, and I make myself use something vintage, thrifted or upcycled (from repurposed clothing) in every block.  I'm pretty happy with the mix of colors and not worrying too much about the final look of the finished quilt.  I think it will all work out.

Block 15: Buzzard's Roost.  Both fabrics in this one are from a recent trip to the Goodwill Outlet, where I found several scraps of interesting fabric in one bin.  I generally don't use large-scale prints, especially in such small blocks, but this one was interesting.  It ends up looking very modern even though the fabric is older.  For people who are following along with the block analysis and cutting, the central square was cut 3.5", the larger triangles are quarter-square triangles cut from a 4.25" square (twice diagonally - you will have two triangles of each color left over) and the smaller HST triangles are cut from  2 3/8" squares (once diagonally).

Block 16: Calico Puzzle.  This isn't puzzling at all, just a straightforward 9-patch variation.  Squares cut 2.5", triangles cut 2 7/8".  I'm not so sure about the color combination now, but it's very similar to the kind of quilts I loved when I first started quilting in the (gasp!) 1980's.  I needed more green to balance that #6 block, Big Dipper.  But what I think I'm going to need to do is put in more of the lime green, because it's just a lot brighter than anything else and really jumps out at me.  And I want more red, and yellow.

Part of the cleaning for the family reunion was in the girls' room, where the floor was at last cleared and vacuumed for the two sleeping bags in addition to the two beds.  In the process I took this picture of the valance I made several years ago when we remodeled and painted that room.  My youngest is the artist who makes the wall decorations...

... and the under-the-desk decoration, made from Bendaroos.  Why she felt the need to put up a fake spiderweb when she doesn't like real spiders is beyond me, but she's certainly creative.

Here's the quilt, 12 years old now, that the lovely ladies of the "Hearts and Hands" quilt group in Denver made for me when I was expecting Tertia and preparing to move out here.  I don't think it's ever been shared online before.  It's a real beauty.

Book Review: Demonic by Ann Coulter

Source: amazon.com via Katherine on Pinterest

After reading Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America, I'm through apologizing to anyone for my fanship of conservative provocateuse Ann Coulter.  She's exactly right.  She knows her history better than many tenured professors at major universities, and uses her considerable research and writing skills to present a compelling case that liberal groupthink must be countered vigorously by ordinary Americans and resolute leaders if we want civilization to survive.  The question that kept coming to me, page after page while reading, was "Why aren't we taught this in our history classes?"

If Coulter tends to follow her meticulously-researched facts with a chaser of caustic wit, usually at the expense of contemporary Democrats, it's probably because earnest conservatives without that protective armor of irony quickly fall victim to the relentless attacks of the very mob psychology she describes here.  (Not that those who do write with the requisite irony are safe from attack, as Coulter's own biography demonstrates, but at least they give fair warning to the rabble that they are not intellectual lightweights, and that in itself does scare off quite a few.  I know whereof I speak.  There are sectors of the online knitting community -- yes, knitting -- where the liberal bullying and Palin Derangement Syndrome make it unsafe for conservatives to post.  And of course, the 2009 Ides of March purge has never been satisfactorily explained.)

Central to Coulter's argument is the neglected history of the French Revolution, which she retells in chilling detail in two seminal chapters that are not for children or the faint of heart.  Later in the book she returns to the mob-induced Terror and links it to its modern equivalents.  From pp. 265-266:

   ... In the course of France's short revolution, 600,000 French citizens were killed and another 145,000 fled the country.  That's in a country with between 24 and 26 million people, about the current population of Texas.  In terms of population loss, that would be the equivalent of the United States having a 9/11 attack every day for seven years.

   ... How did the nation of Voltaire, Descartes, Pascal, and Moliere transform itself into a bloody saturnalia overnight?  This is a question liberals don't want us to think about.

   The inheritors of the French revolutionary tradition always adhere to the same basic program.  Psychopaths from Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong to Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, and Fidel Castro have used the rabble to grab power, with essentially the same justification, the same objectives, and the same bloody results.

  All these monsters were praised in the New York Times and enthusiastically supported by the Democratic Party.

Some of the more shocking results of mob psychology in our times are terrible miscarriages of the criminal justice system.  Sometimes the innocent are falsely accused, as during the '80s, when false accusations of child abuse led to witch hunts and wrongful imprisonments led by, among others, Janet Reno.  Sometimes the guilty are wrongly excused, as when 5 attackers in the vicious 1989 rape of the Central Park jogger had their convictions vacated, despite their videotaped confessions and being found guilty in a jury trial.  (This is also a very difficult chapter to read, and the book as a whole is definitely not for children).

I challenge my Democratic friends to read this book.  You will not like it; you will probably be infuriated.  But ask yourself if your party is really going in a direction you are happy with, or, as Coulter contends, has become "the party of abortion, adultery, and everything bestial in society."  While I personally want Republicans to win at the ballot box, I would also like to live in an America where both parties are equal believers in basic human rights and dignity, and where there is a free, fair, and civil debate.

Sometimes, I think, living a decent life really is as simple as keeping the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule.  Moderns who pretend otherwise, who base their morality on an attempt to be well thought of and sophisticated, nearly always fall into the mob mentality that Coulter so aptly describes in this book.

Rhapsody in blue

Farmer's Wife blocks

#13  Buckwheat.
I had to dust off my math skills for this one.  I actually drafted it on graph paper and measured the base unit square, which is set on point.  Finished size is 1 7/16", so I cut the 4 square units 1 15/16" (using the square = +.5" rule). The tricky part was the triangles -- there are two kinds.  Half square triangles use the same finished measurement but get 7/8" added -- so they were cut 2 5/16".  But the quarter square triangles (the ones along the outer edge of the block with points facing in) have a different base measurement: 2" finished.  So I used the quarter square = + 1.25" rule and cut those squares 3 1/4".  Even though they are the same size triangles as the inner HSTs, if I had used the same cutting method the bias stretch would have been along the outer edge of the block, which is not something you want.  If that happens, the block is a hundred times more likely to stretch out of true square alignment.  I'm happy with the fabric choices on this one, and the corners are pretty good.  I was really careful with the sewing and the block is actually a tiny bit bigger than 6.5".

#14  Butterfly at the Crossroads.
Again with the math.  I didn't have to draft this one, but it's based on units that are 1/5 of 6", which works out to 1.2" -- or one and a scant quarter inch on the rotary ruler.  So the squares are 1 3/4" (scant), HSTs are 2 1/8" (scant), and the rectangles are 1 3/4" (scant) x 2 7/8".  The fabrics are from a thrift store shirt in an ugly ("puke colored" my son says) orange Hawaiian print, and remnants from boxers I made for Steve from a French map fabric.  (Any fabric with maps on it is great for Steve).

Sock Summit

Today I went to the Sock Summit marketplace.  This monument to fibery capitalism is sensory overload for any knitter, and there was a lot of spinning fiber too.  I succeeded in keeping the expenditures under budget -- barely.  Left to right: Sanguine Gryphon Skinny Bugga in "Bog Fritillary," Little Red Bicycle Hipster Sock in "Vixen," souvenir Sock Summit coffee mug, and Holiday Yarns spinning fiber with superwash merino, nylon, silk, and silver in it.

There was a sock museum demonstrating sock knitting techniques through the ages.  I saw the preliminary heats of the "fastest sock knitter" contest.  There are famous lights in the knitting world there -- the Yarn Harlot and I crossed paths in the ladies' room.  I chatted with Wanda Jenkins about the Buttercup top that I was wearing and both of us have knit.  If I had had unlimited funds I would have bought another spindle from them -- I really like the Lark, but I don't really need another spindle.

Wow, that was fun.  Good thing I don't go someplace like this every week.

Summer Listening - book reviews

Catching up on the audiobooks we listened to recently:
The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy, by P.G. Wodehouse, features some stories that I believe were excerpted from Carry On, Jeeves.  I've talked about Wodehouse before -- if you haven't made his acquaintance yet, it's time.  Jeeves and Wooster stories are a really good place to start.

Popes and the Papacy: a History, by Thomas F. X. Noble for the Teaching Company, was a fascinating and surprisingly fast-moving overview.  In 24 lectures on 12 CDs, we go from "the Rise of the Petrine Idea" to Benedict XVI and beyond.  From my professional perspective, I would have appreciated a deeper exploration of the era from the Apostolic age to the fall of Rome -- but of course that's just the era for which we have very few records.  Basically, the bishops of Rome were the last responsible adults left standing after the Roman emperors retreated to Constantinople and the barbarians invaded.  Hearing about the corruption of the medieval popes is enough to raise any Protestant's hackles; the lecturer is doubtless Catholic because he doesn't probe too deeply here, but neither does he gloss over the less stellar moments of the papacy.  This was the first Teaching Company lecture series we listened to, but I'm sure it won't be the last.

Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates is children's lit of an earlier era.  I always loved his Robin Hood, and in recent years we've listened to audiobooks of Otto of the Silver Hand and Men of Iron: he seems to be one of the classic authors who is well liked by librarians.  I think this is more of a compilation of unrelated stories, put together by a later editor.  They're fun, not too deep, and of course fit in with the recent Disneyland theme.