E:/LETTERS/OCTBAN10.TXT 3 October 2010 All the linen sheets are in the linen closet now. I hemmed two tonight instead of one, thanks to a malware scanner that took twice as long as it was supposed to. The sheets are three yards wide, but the length is less than twice the length of my ironing board. When I hemmed the first side after putting pink false hems on the sheet that's been washed a few times, I was very surprised at how much difference in tedium the difference in length made. It will be a while before I put pink bands on the new sheets because I want them washed several times to be sure they won't shrink and pucker, so I wrote down how I put the bands on so I wouldn't have to figure it out from scratch again. Then made it into a Web page so that I could find it. Haven't uploaded it yet. Dave went to Kokomo Thursday, to attend a meeting of the soaring club that met on Friday, and see other sights about town. I took advantage of his absence to make two batches of pickled-garlic rice. I put twice as much garlic into the second batch, and that was overdoing it just a tad. He came back Saturday morning before I'd left for the farmer's market. I ended up not going even though Dave said that the roads were dry. Later I walked downtown to see the festival; hoped to have lunch, but only candy and kettle corn was available. Seems to me that food vendors at festivals used to be a more common; I wonder whether a change in the law has discouraged them? Doud's had a table of fruit, and I bought a bag of asian pears to make up for missing the market. This is banned-books week. Sometimes books really are banned, but that's hard to remember when people post so many lists that consist of incidents in which somebody chose not to buy the book. If you let that mean "banned", I've banned most of the books ever published. Some idiot on Usenet is trying to make "most" mean "more than half" when it's plain and obvious that "majority" in the dictionary definition refers to a large majority. When I called him on it by asking whether he'd say he got most of his money back if he were repaid a dollar more than half, he huffed that he wouldn't discuss his finances! Ah, well, there are other idiots who want to make "majority" mean "most". 5 October 2010 At naptime today, I learned that it's really, really hard to kick off your blankets when you are wearing fuzzy socks. 6 October 2010 My spun-silk shirt has moved to the top of my priority list, and it's all together but for one sleeve, which I left undone this spring so I could use it to test sleeve designs for my linen jersey, but I slept until ten this morning despite having gone to bed at midnight, and didn't feel like doing anything as intellectually challenging as sewing in the sleeve I pinned yesterday, so I spent the morning working on the table of contents to the "Notions" chapter of _Rough Sewing_. Making a Table of Contents is harder than it looks -- before you can have an organized table of contents, you have to have an organized essay! But I made significant progress, with the aid of the