4 September 2008 We got a little sprinkle today. Last week I stepped on Al's tail as I was coming back from the bathroom in the middle of the night, and he didn't react at *all*; didn't even pause in crunching his dry food. Meanwhile, I was nearly falling on my nose. I've moved his dry-food dish farther from the bathroom door. 12 September 2008 The ribbon-cutting for 250E was the day before yesterday -- or, at least, it was predicted in the previous day's paper -- but I haven't gone out to look yet. Argonne is still open. There's an election going on in Canada, which considerably diminishes the value of James Nicoll's Live Journal. James goes all boring whenever the conversation turns to any sort of politics, and I'm not interested in my *own* elections. I'm voting for a candidate who can't possibly win, so that I can say "I didn't vote for him" when the inevitable disasters ensue. As a bystander, I kinder favored Obama on aesthetic grounds until the press did a couple of obvious hatchet jobs on McCain. And Palin is cool. I haven't read any credible source for the claim that she can field-dress a moose, though. And a really revolting fellow, who would be killfiled if he were on Usenet instead of hogging the Times-Union's letter column, was sufficiently wowed by moose-dressing to take all the fun out of admiring it. Sigh. I made a hobby of writing letters to the Albany Times-Union, but I don't want to be seen in the kind of company that writing to the the Warsaw Times-Union would put me in. I suppose the Beeson clan should be glad of that. Rainy out. Good day to cut the beta for my new fall suit, and I left the kitchen table expanded after drafting the pattern yesterday. My, "drafting a pattern" sounds ambitious! I copied the pattern for my blue-flowered white linen shift, shortened it to knee length (to wear over matching slacks in the final version) and copied the high neck from Draft 2005 over the scoop neck. I was puzzled for a while that the shoulder seams were longer in back than in front after I drew the new neck, then I remembered that I had closed up the dowager-hump darts in Draft 2005, and they are still needed in the shift pattern, so I widened the back neck enough to make the shoulder seams match, then drew in dowager's hump darts to take out the extra width. The darts are precisely the width of the darts in the linen shift, so things should work out just right -- but I'm making a beta anyway! Don McCunn would add wide, wide seam allowances, whack up the final fabric, and make adjustments on a live model -- but I don't have a model, nor the experience to shove all mistakes into the seam allowances. And I can use a long-sleeved white cotton-and-linen shirting shirt next summer. 13 September 2008 A *little* rain, I said we could use a *little* rain. Prediction of four inches by nightfall. The Farmer's Market has been planning a party, complete with hog roast, all summer -- I need corn, but I ain't going. Sounded like the sycamore lost a big limb shortly after I got up. No wind, it just fell. Dave's mom said once that every now and again they shake themselves. She was talking about bark all over the lawn, though. We skipped our walk yesterday. Looks as though we won't go today, either. Thursday, the sod had been laid at the new house. I said, "The house is sitting there saying "I've been here for years." Dave said "It has!" I heard heavy-machinery noises from that direction this morning. But directions from inside the house are deceiving, and it's unlikely that they'd be landscaping on a Saturday. The foot races weren't rained out -- Dave just told me that if I decide to drive to the market, I should go out by way of Chestnut -- the bridge on Park is closed. I'll have to go soon, if I do -- it's after eleven and the farmers go home at twelve. I'm not sure, but they may need to vacate the premises by twelve. We do need dark chocolate, which only Marsh sells. (Marsh is on the same street as the fairground.) (But it zig-zags a bit and has at least three names.) 14 September 2008 I got some cat food too -- I was much surprised, the last time I went to Big R, to find that they had discontinued Science Diet in three-ounce cans. Didn't check to see whether small cans of Iams are still available on the other side of the shelf, as Iams puts so much stiffener in their cat food that Al won't eat it -- and canned food is supposed to be a treat. On the other hand, they had a bag of the litter I thought they'd discontinued. Only the one, though. Overslept this morning and went to church in slacks and pigtail. And in such a hurry that I didn't think to take the umbrella, but Joe and Lois drove me home after the service. Forgot both Handcraft Circle and a board meeting last week. The previous week, the church secretary asked me whether I was willing to watch a baby some mornings; I told her it probably wasn't a good idea. Running out of time to go to Bonneyville Mill and buy corn meal, red-wheat flour, rye, and buckwheat. I haven't opened the fifty-pound bag of white wheat I got the last time, but probably will the next time I bake. I meant to buy twenty pounds of flour, but he had a fifty-pound bag that had been ordered and not picked up, so I thought "why not?" -- if I don't get back to buy my winter supply, I'll be very glad I did. I can get red wheat, probably rye, and maybe buckwheat at Spring Creek, but not hard white wheat. I've about given up white flour for everything but making gravy, and I have *such* a lovely white-flour dispenser. Couldn't use it for whole-grain flour unless I baked bread every day. 17 September 2008 Today's mail included a Real*Good catalog, which should be sub-titled "products for stupid people". A "ceramic eggshell", for example, filled with potting medium and unspecified herb seeds; once the seed has sprouted, you can go to Ace (which sells identified full-grown already-potted herbs for about a third of what you paid for the eggshell) and buy a pot and some potting medium to transplant it into. But the catalog did provide five minutes of amusement. 19 September 2008 Today, being nearly out of dry cat food, I ventured down 250E for the first time. "Down" is the operative word; they brought in many, many tons of fill and made the road slope almost evenly from 30 to Wooster. I'd been warned that there is no longer a steep climb to tell you that the tracks are coming, but spotting the track was still a "Gack! I'm traveling at pffft!" moment. Luckily, the crossing was smooth and even, so even though it's diagonal, I didn't come to grief. I'll have to learn to watch for it; I can't rely on it *staying* new. Nothing of interest in the dollar store, but one of Big R's mannikins was wearing a witch's hat made of spider-pattern lace. Big R has re-stocked the thirty-pound bags of corncob litter. I didn't get any; did get two bottles of dish soap. Then to Aldi's for some peppers, since I won't be going to the farmer's market tomorrow. Bought a pannier of canned goods and, on impulse, a box of flax-seed granola. That bike was loaded! The cat food alone weighs over seventeen pounds. Lovely day for a ride. Didn't think much of riding on 30, though. Didn't put enough horseradish in the deviled eggs. Bought the eggs yesterday. Lovely day -- as was today -- so I decided to return two of my three books first, so as to go to Owens by way of the boardwalk. As I mounted up, I puzzled over the best way to get to the library, then realized that it's been *ages* since I rode around the lake. So I did, but by the shortest route, so it doesn't matter that I didn't think to go back for my cycling shoes. Stopped a bit to look at the dam, which is fully closed. Also got rid of some old magazines I found when I tidied up the pile of cat-litter sacks on the cupboard. Also a child's book I had picked up at a garage sale or some such place, and didn't like. The books I returned were _From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil Frankweiler_ and Kjelgard's _Fawn in the Forest_. _Mixed-up Files_ was good, but left me with rather less to say than a book that's been mentioned that often should. Won the Newbury Medal; probably deserves it as much as any. _Fawn in the Forest_ was a collection of stories that suffered a lot by being read together. It became all too plain that (with the possible exception of the title story) they were all the same story: wild animal gets into dire peril, is saved by a miracle. Most protagonists were recently-widowed new mothers; one was the oldest fish in the pool, and one was the oldest cock pheasant in the forest. Slight change of pace for a story in which it was a winter storm, rather than a predator, that threatened certain death, and there were several threatenees. The title story is an American _Bambi_. 16 September 2008 No sign of activity on Argonne, but when we got up this morning there was a load of drain pipe and a bobcat parked in front of our house. They took the bobcat off the trailer, then put it back on again, then the pipe truck very, very carefully backed into Boy's City Drive and receded from view, and now the bobcat is gone too -- to Oakwood, we presume, as the proposed repaving extends from Oakwood to Park, which would be all of Lakeview. We calculate that the drain-repair job will nip the end off the fancy driveway of the new house that has been under construction for so long. I think maybe the landscape company kept the plants in the flower beds clear of what will be dug up. I have just learned that the meaning of "whole milk" has been very, very quietly changed from 4% fat to 3.25%. Seems to have been taken down in stages, as I found one reference to 3.75%. Could have been a typo, of course. Hmm . . . if I'm going to make deviled eggs next Friday, I'd better buy the eggs *now*. I almost got a sock wet walking through the park on the way home from church tonight. Realized that the grass looked funny just in time. Ground was dry enough that most places didn't even get puddles, but the lake is up to normal -- Dave says he took the boat out for a lap during my nap today, and it floated over the bar just fine. I didn't hear any wind, but there are dead limbs all over the lawn. I'm going to have to bake some kettle bread to burn them up! Paper says that there was some wind damage in town. Haven't seen any, but I haven't been out much. I really, really should have remembered to go to the kitchen-committee meeting. There's now a chest-type freezer in the hallway near the kitchen door. Is it ours, or did one of the other committees install it -- Kiddie Kollege is always filling up the fridges. Is it permanent, or for a special event? It's empty, but cold. 25 September 2008 Today we went to the brush dump with a trailer of dirty sand -- debris that had been piled on the beach for so long that most of the organic matter rotted -- then we hauled the load back, and stopped at the highway department to borrow a key. Pete *gave* Dave a key, but said that it wouldn't be any good after three weeks, as they have had too many people dumping trash and aren't going to let the public in any more -- you aren't even supposed to dump cut lumber, just plants, brush, trees, and concrete. (The concrete gets ground up and hauled off for gravel now and again.) But he said that if we pile the stuff up on the beach, the town will send a dump truck in to pick it up two or three times in the summer. We both thought that sounded much nicer than loading and unloading it ourselves! I had Dave dump me off in Columbia City yesterday (Wednesday) and rode my bike home. Wasn't worth much today. Don't get sore any more, or even tired -- just stupid. Route needs more graveyards. That's the only place where I can lie down beside the road without attracting ambulances. There were two graveyards, but one was only a few minutes after I'd left the other, so I didn't stop. 27 September 2008 Dave wants a do-rag. I've already downloaded a couple of patterns off the Web, and gone so far as to dig out a pad of large paper to draw on. (An old desk calendar.) 7 October 2008 The following Monday, I drew the pattern, cut it out, *and* sewed it together -- a record sewing job for me. (I've got a shirt that's been in progress for weeks, and I've been known to take *years*.) I also did the wash and baked bread. I felt very accomplished at the end of the day. I'm fighting Thunderbird for the right to edit the Banner. It's doing its thing again: I click an arrow key to move one line, and it jumps to some random spot in the file. All Windows programs know what you want to do better than you do. It also puts hard returns at the end of every line whenever I save as a draft. Did it never enter the pointy little heads of the programmers that someone who saves a draft might conceivably intend to edit it before sending? -- Joy Beeson http://joybeeson.home.comcast.net/ http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/ http://www.timeswrsw.com/craig/cam/ (local weather) west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A.