Today I did get out for a walk. I went to the thrift store and looked at all the shiny statusy things that I had absolutely no interest in buying. They had some size 11 shoes, but too narrow–where am I supposed to put the outer half of each foot?! They even had one pair of “12W” shoes; placed with the men’s shoes because of course no woman would be caught dead with feet that large. Worse, the 12W shoes were only a cruel imitation of a wide width shoe. As in: If that was a wide shoe, then a 12N in their sizing couldn’t have run more than two inches wide…ruler feet. I’m definitely going to have to just make myself some shoes.

My city recently was commended as one of the most livable cities in the U.S., partly for all the walking and biking trails. I found that part ironic because almost no one actually walks for the sake of walking here. Most of the trail use is for Exercise, capital E most definitely intended. A few people go out to walk their dogs. Rarely someone can be seen with a stroller. Very awful rarely, a poorer or younger person will walk to work. Just walking is very gauche around here; everyone drives everywhere. Except us, and we don’t actually walk all that often. So all the nice trails and crosswalks and underpasses and bridges see rather light use.

I also don’t consider a town centered around a big mall (as the surrogate downtown), and a definite lack of antique and surplus stores to be particularly livable. And where are the detached starter homes??

I did notice, last week when I went to pick up the farm share during rush hour, that all the traffic was going from the suburbs into the city; people living in southern Minneapolis driving home from their workplaces in the outer suburbs. Very little traffic going in the other direction.

I’ve been making some definite progress on my fiddle kit lately, and it’s been fun. I’m almost ready to glue the neck on, which is one of the more finicky tasks. My physics machine shop classes paid off; I got the neck to fit into the mortise very nicely. Someday I need to learn how to sharpen chisels properly…I ended up using my detail knife and my “crooked knife” to cut the whole mortise for the neck.

MFH is working another long, long, long day.

Ninety degree heat, with at least ninety percent humidity. I think alligators are going to start crawling up out of the Minnesota swamps.

Two children getting over being sick, and cranky with the heat.

A large dose of artificial colors all around from the two pounds–I am not exaggerating for comedic effect—of candy that OLC picked up from the parade last weekend.

TLG broke a glass, and got a small cut on his foot. He removed his Band-Aid after ten seconds.

Three-quarters of the water that I’ve given him to drink today has ended up spilled on the floor.

He can climb over the baby gate now and get into MFH’s stuff, unless I close the door, which makes that whole side of the apartment dark and dismal. We need to start making Dutch doors.

He also climbed up onto the changing table and got into the diaper pail.

He can also pull chairs away from the dining room table enough to climb onto it and get into the pieces of my fiddle kit that I am working on. I am at the most difficult part of the assembly process: fitting the neck to the body.

His sister got into a roll of film, and pulled most of the film out. I hope there weren’t any pictures on it, or MFH will cry.

It’s relatively easy to see what the forces of evil are up to. Not always easy, though, to see what God is doing. There will be at least a remnant preserved, but who will be in it? And what should the Christian non-remnant be doing until they are wiped out? In any case, I’m a firm believer in praying for enemies, and I expect to see some of them in heaven.

And if she hadn’t pissed off so many of the commenters by insulting renters in general, perhaps someone would have pointed this out to her earlier. When she said (in the comments) that anyone who fulfills their lease and moves out after one year is not a Good Renter, that did it for me.

MFH’s strategy was to prepare for the heavy influx of spring greens by eating lots of salads over the last couple of months. My strategy was to not eat salads at all for the last couple of months, so I wouldn’t be sick of salad when the farm share stuff started coming. We both still think we’re right.

This year we went with this CSA. We went to their Blessing of the Farms and Fields, they have a small farm, the soil is quite sandy but they have obviously been working hard to build it up. Last I heard, they still had some shares available.

My storage loft I narrowed and put behind the couch in the living room. (My inspiration was an apartment-style loft that I saw in a book, it was one big room with the bedroom and bathroom housed in little cabins at each end.) Then I walled the loft in, so now I have about 20 square feet of space all to myself, plus fabric/craft storage on the level above. Going without a personal space for a week was difficult. Twenty square feet is enough, I just need room to sit and think and have some of my special things around me.

I figure that this is the seventh configuration that I’ve put the loft into. I originally built it before I was married, cost was about $100 for the lumber and hardware. I did all the cutting and drilling with hand tools. Previously I had flipped it and added a level and widened it.

Moving all these things around was a tremendous amount of work, now most of the big things are done and I only have an endless list of little things to do.

One project, now begun, is a massive rearrangement of furniture in the apartment. We’ve been here for two years now, and I’ve done very little rearranging until now; a big change from the days when I used to move to a whole new place every year or two. So I’ve been moving heavy objects around for several days now, trying not to squash little children, and I’m all tired and sore and cranky, and I still have a lot left to move around and resettle.

My computer is now stranded about fifty feet away from the internet, until I buy a cable, so I have been online hardly at all.

I was going to make up some words to the tune of The Second Week of Deer Camp (”We sit and sleep and do some puzzles, but never pass voir dire“), but I did actually get pulled for a jury, and somehow passed voir dire. The case promises to be…uh…hmm…interesting.

Logistically, being a juror sucks. But I have to remind myself about that sometimes, which led me to deduce that the courthouse at some point hired a consultant to figure out how to brainwash the jury pool into thinking that jury duty doesn’t suck. Apparently the consultant said something like:

1. Don’t excuse anyone from jury duty for any reason, only postpone. [Several people present in the jury pool had court dates for themselves or family falling within their jury duty period.]

2. Put the jury assembly room in the worst location in the building. Underground, no windows, minimal amenities. But outside the security perimeter.

3. Make an informational video showing people being unnaturally happy about being on a jury. No one will take it literally, but it will leave a subconscious impression.

4. Make two small concessions to start with: make lunch “hour” an hour-and-a-half, and let everyone out at 4:30 sharp.

5. Make an on-call option so most people present on the first day will be drawn up for jury selection. [I overheard that Monday 11 am and 2:30 pm are hot times for assembling jury panels.]

6. Upstairs in the courtrooms, make sure everyone is VERY deferential to the jurors. [The attorneys, naturally, are campaigning for a favorable verdict (now I see why so many politicians are lawyers!). The judge apologized for the wonky AC.]

7. From the beginning, tell the jurors that they’ll probably be there for the full two weeks, and maybe more. Then, let nearly all of them off early.

8. Receive comments from a suggestion box and a followup juror survey, most people will be so relieved to be free that they will forget all their negative comments.

The transitions from the courthouse back to the world of crumbs, poop, and squawking have been difficult for me. I’m always slow to make transitions, and it’s clear to me now that I couldn’t be a 9-to-5 working mother without a lot of gear-grinding.

I’m thinking about this because of Barbara’s link to a RedState article opposing Net Neutrality. I’d only heard of Net Neutrality in a positive light before, mostly from Boing Boing, as in “Support Net Neutrality, or the evil ISPs will block your access to the parts of the internet that they don’t want you to read!” Whereas the article says, Net Neutrality will give the FCC broad powers to regulate the internet–even worse: Prediction Nine about an internet tax is about to come true!! They then link this to Google lobbying, which ties nicely in with my Prediction Six. But the point is that either way, the Wild West days of the internet are about to come to a close.

Vaccination is another area where I think there might someday be two jaws lurking; previous post here.

And I’ve just about come to the conclusion that the Republican-Democrat binary is basically the same thing.

—————

Updated to add: Border security is another one, I think. If we fix the unrestrained illegal immigration, we could end up with a border that’s so tight that none of our own refugees will be able to get out.

Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead, by Tamara Draut. This book is from 2005, and explains how people born in the 70’s are struggling in an unravelling economy. The author is from a liberal think tank, so I don’t agree with her top-down big-government solutions. I also think the young adults in her book made a whole lot of poor financial decisions. She makes a $50,000 income sound like poverty level, when actually it is the median household income in the U.S. She also seems to think that graduation from college necessitates the purchase of brand-new sheets, towels, and cars, even if they must be bought on credit. “See, that’s why you’re poor,” is what I was thinking. The harder they tried not to look poor, the poorer they became.

Nevertheless, I thought her observation that zoning and development decisions have sometimes been rigged to favor childless households was interesting–families with school-age children use more local services (mostly schools) than they generate in property taxes, so some areas actively discourage their residence by impeding the building of affordable single-family detached homes, and by pushing for high-end homes, denser housing, and senior housing instead.

The other interesting thing about the book is that I caught some overtones of Fourth Turning ideas in it, probably because she cited Millenials Rising by the same authors. The attraction of The Fourth Turning is that we can blame most of my generation’s ills on the misdeeds of the previous two generations, while holding out some hope that our perilous times will resolve sometime before we die. However, I don’t agree that history is entirely cyclical; probably there are some cycles in recent U.S. history, but there is also a more linear progression toward decadence and decay and the general decline and fall of Western civilization.

What I have been pondering a lot lately is which effect I think will dominate in the next few decades. For the near term, my color trend tea-leaf economic readings are mixed; some bright springy colors in accessories, but still far outnumbered by the things designed to harmonize with funereal, bad-feng-shooey granite. Target even put a black plastic granite-patterned strip under their display Crockpots: “Look, it goes with granite! Really!” (Because the drab stainless steel, black, and dark blood-red products didn’t look that great against the pure white shelves.)

The one bit of economic hope in the retail sector that I have seen recently was at Bachman’s (local gardening store chain). In their decorating section, they had a lot of real, made-over, and somewhat repurposed antiques. Kind of a chic old-fashioned thrifty look, and one that MFH and I actually thought was kind of cool. A nice segue from the granite look, if they can pull it off.