Zatera Ul

Renters in Minnesota, give your Certificate of Rent Paid (CRP) a close reading this year. Your friendly state government has stolen some of the renters’ property tax refund money to balance the budget. Instead of estimating property tax as 19% of rent paid, they are using 15%, and the money to pay the difference is currently “unalloted”. A lawsuit over the legality of this is pending, according to the CRP.

Practically, what that means for my family is that the state will not be giving us about $100 of our money back, which is equivalent to a 13% increase in our state income tax bill.

But I got some sewing done yesterday: four more pairs of underwear. Sewing underwear is about as relaxing as sewing can get, because the mistakes will all be hidden under other clothing.

TLG has been taking ten-minute naps again. But he sleeps ok at night, as long as you don’t compare him to a fictional baby that sleeps 12 hours straight.

He gave drinking straight from a cup a try, and was very proud of himself. He also learned how to blow in a recorder and make it toot, just like his big sister does.

OLC has been doing a lot of singing and strumming her ukulele, just like Julia Nunes (her favorite youtube celebrity). MFH took OLC to see Julia in concert a couple of weeks ago, and Julia signed both of their ukuleles.

I’m very grateful for the breastfeeding hormones that keep me fairly mellowed out most of the time.

My current project is making-over a corduroy hat that I liked, except that it was just too small enough to be annoying. I’m going to reuse the brim, and make a new crown for it.

I recently read The Alpha Strategy, by John A. Pugsley, which asserts that the best investment in an economy like ours is tangible goods, because of inflation and other eroders of value. A post at Coffee Tea Books and Me outlines basically the same strategy.

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I was reading in Nehemiah how debts with (if I am reading it right) only 1% interest were considered crushing burdens. Back then, they easily could be.

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I finished the bra project, it turned out both awesome and amateurish at the same time. Then I made an apron, which was a simple project, but still took three days. Now I am resting up for the next big project, whatever that will be. I am extra tired because MFH worked 60-plus hours last week, and we ran around a lot on the weekend to compensate for being extra cooped-up.

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TLG hit his nine-month birthday, and really took off walking. Now he toddles here and there, and falls down a lot.

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I did the first pass through the taxes, and we will be able to take the earned income tax credit this year, thanks to TLG. So are we rich (living almost comfortably on one income), or are we poor? Sometimes it is hard to tell.

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Our car has gone a whole year without needing any major repairs, which is a first for us. Why yes, we do tithe. We tithed all the years that we paid thousands and thousands of dollars to fix it, too. I’ve been looking around on the internet, trying to determine whether or not it is actually possible to fit three car seats in the back seat. Some people say yes, some say no way, no how. We have two Britax seats, which sit fairly high, so I think we might be able to squeeze a lower, narrow seat between them. MFH has been able to sit between them for a short ride.

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I started a list of predictions for things that will occur within my lifetime. I am trying to decide whether “Laws will be passed to require car seat installation by a certified technician” should be added to the list. The trend is heading that way, but sometimes people need to move car seats from one car to another so someone else can transport the kids.

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I was holding off on finishing TLG’s birth story until we found out how much our insurance was going to pay for the prenatal care and birth. It turns out that all they will pay for is the lab work. By Minnesota law, they have to cover prenatal care and some other things, but our CPM was an out-of-network provider, and we had to pay a high deductible first, and we got to pay deductibles twice because the pregnancy was not all in one calendar year, and the insurance was pretty stingy on what midwife charges they actually allowed toward the deductible, and they specifically exclude homebirth and most medical care not supervised by a physician anyway. As MaxedOutMama says, “Health coverage does not equal health care!” Sometimes health coverage doesn’t even equal health coverage. Even though our midwife is licensed by the state to provide prenatal and homebirth care, there’s a gap in the insurance coverage statutes there. In the end we came out sort of ahead, because of the lower premiums for the high-deductible plan, and because MFH’s employer kicks some cash into the health savings account to return some of their lower premium costs to him. We also got to pay $100 just for our midwife’s insurance biller to bill our insurance, because “it’s a high-deductible plan and I might not get paid otherwise.” (I didn’t ask how she would have gotten paid for billing a normal-deductible plan, because I computed a zero probability of getting an answer that wouldn’t further tick me off.)

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The same insurance company just sent us the annual plan overview booklet. If we want the actual printed certificate of coverage, we have to put in an order for it, and they had a paragraph in the booklet saying, “If everyone was nice to us and didn’t order anything, we would save $X million in postage and printing costs.” No thanks, I want my $5 worth of real physical official documentation, and they can spare me the guilt trip.

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One of Home Living’s recent posts had a wonderful comment that basically said, “The Lord knows all about the constraints of your situation. Do the best that you can, even if it isn’t that great, and accept God’s grace for the rest.”

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I had that it’s-too-quiet-what-are-they-up-to feeling, and found the children in the kitchen. OLC was dusting her brother liberally with unflavored gelatin. Clearly if we start stocking up on things, they need to be things that are toddler-proof.

We survived toddler duty at church yesterday. It’s been a while since we were drafted for that role, and in the meantime the toddler room has acquired, of all things, a Little Tykes car. I already had some issues with the toys in there, it is quite well-equipped to be a day care, but not so well-equipped for religious training. All of the teaching for the children happens during Sunday school (which we don’t attend, because of time and energy constraints); during the boring grown-up parts of the service the under-7 children play under supervision. So basically all OLC is learning at church is how to run around and tickle her friends. She (and TLG) are too active to be trained to sit through a service without more support from the congregation than we’ve gotten. But I’ve been teaching her a lot at home.

We did find out where my personal line in the sand was on toys in the church: No secular licensed characters. I found a few of these in the toddler room, decided that responsibility should come with some degree of power, and dealt with them accordingly. OLC doesn’t know about most of these characters, and she certainly doesn’t need to learn about them in church.

My other mental line in the sand is: No depictions of Noah’s Ark as a Happy Fun Animal Cruise. There is not much that I can do about that one, though; my church took the greatest catastrophe in Bible history as the decorating theme for the entire nursery.

Government careening into a great deal more onerous and family-squelching legislation and regulation? Check.

Whole subcultures of society being trained to hate people like us? Check.

Obstacles and petty annoyances at ever turn? Check.

God shielding us from the worst of the storms, and sustaining us without fail: Check.

There is an emerging theme in my sabbatical activities: remaking my whole wardrobe. It is something that has never really gotten proper attention, especially not since I had a baby and my whole body changed, and I’m very glad that God is giving me some time and space to address it now.

I put the shoe project on hold, because nothing I can make is going to stand up to the ice, snow, slush, and salt that is outside right now. The underwear project is on hold until I buy some more elastic. So I am working on making myself a bra that actually fits.

Reading up on bra fitting, I’ve begun to understand why I’ve had so many problems with bras in the past. The biggest reason is hypoplasia (best described at this link, but warning: contains photos of weird boobs). Hypoplastic boobs have their own distinctive shape, and this explains why I’ve savagely ripped the underwires out of every bra that I’ve ever worn that had them. I did have the good fortune to have my boobs develop and grow some during pregnancy and breastfeeding, so they are not quite so hypoplastic now. I am successfully breastfeeding, but TLG has made me quite lopsided, because he has a strong preference for one side, and will hardly eat from the other one at all. So I might as well custom make one myself.

I’ve learned enough about patternmaking in the last few years to get started making my own custom bra pattern; things like draping, folding, shaping, and seaming. I do need to read up on darts a little more. I am going to give underwires another try, also I’m trying to make the bra nursing-compatible.

I may or may not be the first person to try using plastic needlepoint canvas as structural material in a bra; I didn’t come up with anything in my Google search. I made a pair of underwires yesterday, from a metal hoop that I found at the side of the road some time ago. (I had a couple of Metal Shop for Physics Majors classes in college, if you’re wondering where I learned to use a hacksaw and a file.)

So I am working on the first cup prototypes now; I did a couple of design iterations with muslin and paper patterns first. The children’s nap schedules miraculously aligned this afternoon, so I was able to make a good start on the cup structures.

This is for my own reference as much as anything else:

1. It’s much easier to format your book while you write it than to go back and format it all after it’s written. It took me almost as long to format the book as it did to write it.

2. Open Office Writer is not too bad, and it is free, but learning how to do some things, such as page styles, in it was a lot of work.

3. In particular, connecting page styles in sequence was something that I had a hard time figuring out. The answer is to put in a page break, specify which page style follows the break, and in the options for that page style, specify which page style goes on the next page. This is how you chain different page styles together, particularly for chapters, where the first page in the chapter has a particular style, then the rest of the chapter alternates between two different styles (left page and right page).

4. Putting the chapter title up in the page header means having a distinct set of the three chapter-related page styles for each chapter, so that the heading has the correct chapter title, and the page style flow is correct.

5. Look at books in your own library for examples of book sizes, fonts, page layouts, and so forth that you would like to use in your book (Lulu leaves practically all the layout and formatting to you; some other print-on-demand/self-publishing services provide software that does some of that for you).

6. If in mid-project you feel like you’re a terrible writer and graphic designer, go look at what has been published by the professionals. People have been paid good money to do much worse work than you can do today in your own home. Printing presses are very expensive machines, particularly when they’re idle, so publishers will throw all sorts of crap into print in the slack times. (It is quite helpful to read about the basics of graphic design before you start do-it-yourselfing.)

7. Figuring out early in the project how you want to distribute/market the book will help; Lulu has somewhat more stringent guidelines for manuscripts that you have them act as distributor for. Expect to have to do most of the marketing of your book yourself.

8. Pay attention to which fonts Lulu prefers. I put a non-Lulu font in the manuscript, by embedding the font in the PDF. On the cover, I put the non-Lulu font text in the cover image, so it was just part of the image.

9. Lulu’s FAQs on making covers are a little skimpy. I made it through and ended up with a cover that looked ok, but I couldn’t even tell you for sure if it was a “one-piece cover” or a “two-piece cover”. I think it was a two-piece. On my end, I did all my cover design in an image editing program, starting with the Lulu cover templates, and made a single cover image for the front cover that contained the title and everything, and another image for the back cover. Then in the Lulu wizards, I turned off the title they were trying to superimpose on the front cover image, and went from there.

10. It’s much easier to catch typos and bad phrasing on a paper printout than on a computer screen. Easier to mark it up with red pen, too.

11. I used Inkscape (free) for my image editing, but it doesn’t export images to any of the file formats that Lulu requires, so I had to export to a format that Adobe Illustrator (free version) could import, and then export again to a Lulu-compatible file format. The images still came out ok in the end.

12. My husband the talented amateur photographer took digital pictures of my drawings for the book, because we didn’t have a scanner available.

13. Lulu’s online book previews are much lower quality, resolution-wise, than the actual printed book, or digital download version of the book.

14. If you want your book to bring in some profit, don’t write a novel or a book of poems. Write something that has useful information for your readers, one way or another. I was surprised to find no other books on the same subject as mine (frugal baby care) on Lulu at all.

15. If you price your book without any profit to yourself, Lulu will allow you to offer it as a free download. (My book is available for free download until next November).

16. Writing a book is a lot of work, but you can get it done a little bit at a time; the same way you eat an elephant.

17. I used FreeMind (free software) for my book outline. This builds a tree-like structure of nodes. The big benefit of FreeMind over creating a traditional outline in a word processor is that you can “fold up” and hide some of the smaller branches and leaves of the tree, and just view the trunk and major branches. Toward the end of the outlining process, the outline got large and unwieldy and slow. But my computer is very old.

18. While I was in the process of writing, several resources that I didn’t know about before serendipitously fell into my lap, and I was able to draw on them for the book.

19. Before you start quoting from other works, read up on copyright and Fair Use and plagiarism. All but the very shortest of quotes may require written permission from the copyright holder to use in your book. In my opinion, shorter quotes are allowable under Fair Use (a very ill-defined principle) without requiring permission. Stating another’s idea in different words is not a copyright violation.

20. When you think you have the book nearly done, you still have a lot of work left to do. It’s kind of like an event horizon, time stretches out around you, while your distance from being completely done remains almost constant. At some point, you’re going to have to call it “good enough” and quit. It’s not easy.

It is a very white Christmas here, and still lots of fluffy snow coming down. I’m tired because there were drunken Russians out yelling and playing in the snow right outside my window, at two or three in the morning, and because TLG wanted about twenty feedings during the night. Kind of in a happy chocolate and bacon fog now, with the added bonus of a warm baby snoozing on my lap.

But still, it’s all about a crowded, dirty stable*, weary travelers, and a very special birth.

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*If the inn was full, probably the inn’s stable was, too. As I mentioned in my book (in the context of co-sleeping), my mental picture of the manger scene is a stable full of donkeys, with one forlorn donkey sent outside to make room for Mary and Joseph, and baby Jesus being placed in a manger just to keep him from being trampled or squashed.

TLG is eight months old, and we have already seen him take a couple of unsupported steps while flinging himself at the ottoman. He is an enthusiastic eater. I don’t spoon-feed him very often, I just put things on his tray and he dives in with both fists. He is also in the middle of another bout of teething, which makes him uncharacteristically fussy. I started teaching him a little baby sign language, and he makes the sign for “nurse” now and then.

OLC has a little notebook of her own, and recently she was drawing long zigzaggy lines, carefully positioned between the lines on the pages to look like real writing. She still “reads” (makes up) Pippi and Peter stories to herself occasionally.

I am fighting off yet another bug or two. I am beginning to suspect that I’m allergic to something or other, maybe to the cat. I’m still working on a play stove/sink for OLC for Christmas. I bought a stainless steel dog bowl to use as the sink; the rest is from odds and ends that we had around. I was hoping to put legs on it today, but circumstances and childrenses are not cooperating. One interruption after another.

I was letting OLC play with the old Suzy Homemaker oven that my sister and I used to play with at my grandparents’ house, but forty-year-old turquoise plastic doesn’t stand up to a toddler very well, and I decided to salvage the burners and knobs, and make her a new toy stove.

I knew that the oven had a 100 watt bulb inside and could be used for baking little things, like an Easy-bake oven; not that we were ever allowed to plug it in. When OLC inherited it, I just cut the cord right off, and took the bulb out. What I didn’t know, until I started taking the stove apart, was that all the knobs were functional. The oven knob turns the oven on and off, like you might expect. [Correction: It doesn't do anything; you would turn on the oven bulb by plugging the stove in.] But the burner knobs actually open and close vents to the oven chamber under the burners, so the kid could turn the burners “on” and “off” and (slightly) warm things on the stovetop. Also, there’s a door latch and heat indicator that switch on as the oven heats up, so it can’t be opened when it’s too hot. A good design, much cooler than I had realized, but sadly not in step with “modern safety standards”*.

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*I went into this subject in my book a bit, about how practices that were common even ten years ago, such as buying used car seats and using them for a few more years, are now greeted with gasps of horror. “Safety inflation” is what I called it. It adds quite a bit to the cost of raising a child.