I made a laundry bag from yet another tablecloth. I usually don’t like to cut up perfectly good vintage linens, but this one was rather garish and had barely been used, let alone loved to pieces. I’m glad that I made a couple of prototypes before starting the real sewing, because I had to discard my original idea to make it fold up like camera bellows. Instead, I made a simple rectangular bag. I’m happy with how it turned out; I put two handles on it that fold down inside.

I’ve also been doing some sewing off and on: two tablecloth skirts done, two to go. More than a year ago I was given a better sewing machine than my crotchety old one, and I finally took the time to figure out how to run it. Still, I don’t find sewing particularly relaxing.

I noticed that the city charges as much in fees on our electric bill as the state does in sales tax–effectively a double sales tax. We’re already paying for one new stadium via sales taxes here, and it looks like we’ll be paying for another one soon. This is the time of year when the “half of all Americans pay no taxes!!!” articles start to come out, and it is simply not true, or at least truly not as simple as the headlines try to make it sound.

I’ve also started to notice that I am one of the oldest moms with babies at the parks and playgrounds. I’m starting to wonder how many of my high school classmates have become grandparents already. Last year, I somehow miscalculated my age, and even now I keep thinking that I am a year older than I really am.

I’ve been thinking about writing some fiction, and it has been comforting to learn just how much some novelists have incorporated elements of their personal experiences into their stories. Julia Nunes’s “To the Damsels: Run” song (the sound isn’t the greatest since this is a live version) keeps running through my head; more for a character that I’m thinking up than for me:

I can’t be saved,

I’m not so frail

Fighting my battles tooth and nail

Searching for truth to no avail

Let’s build a new house.
Let’s build the new house out of the old house.
Let’s live in the old house until the new house is finished.

–Remy Charlip, Arm in Arm

Now that moving chores and tax season have begun to subside, I have been working (in my spare moments) on drafting an A-line skirt pattern for myself, and will be using the fabric from a couple of old skirts for prototypes. So the above quote from one of my favorite children’s books keeps coming back to me. I bought a commercial pattern to compare against my own, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to buy new fabric yet, so I went to the thrift store instead. I was looking for some larger items of used clothing to cut down, but everything looked too skimpy in yardage, so I ended up buying several tablecloths instead. The average used tablecloth is colorful, washable, durable, preshrunk, and economical, and is often made of natural fibers. (Stains and holes can be covered by embellishments.)

Our social calendar has been very full lately, StrongBaby has been sick (trying to get him to sleep seems to take up half of my day), and MFH is busy preparing for the Minne-Maker Faire on April 14.

The weather took a fast turn from snow to summer; I hope it backtracks a little and does some spring.

Next week I begin the cleaning, too. The packing I am mostly going to save for the following week, and then do one room per day. MFH’s job in all this is simply to cope with his home office: for the last three moves, I’ve had to just shovel his things into boxes for him as the clock ran down. Having him do more of that himself this time will hopefully make my life a little easier.

Meanwhile, the whole family has had a couple rounds of vomiting and other assorted illnesses. All the dust we’re stirring up is giving me allergy trouble, too.

In any case, God has revealed to us that we will need to downsize much more radically than we had previously anticipated. So we are working hard at this. I see it as further crystallization, or maybe distillation would be a better word.

And now at least four of us have a stomach bug. MFH also has yet another round of computer woes at precisely the wrong time.

I told MFH the other night that it seemed like things were starting to crystallize a little; a couple of little things suddenly came clear for me. Well, once crystallization starts, it can take off very rapidly.

One of those little seed crystals was that I made a more substantial writing journal–MFH long ago settled on one particular style of notebook that he always carries around, but I used random frugally-acquired notebooks, or loose paper. But somehow the cover from an old altered book I had started a long time ago, and old paper left over from my grandmother’s teaching days, came together in some quick-and-dirty bookbinding, and now I have a book-shaped journal, with lots of pages, and room to paste things in. And I think that it is a style that I will stick with.

It has been particularly exasperating this weekend. MFH has several projects that he would like to be working on all day long and half the night. I have been throwing off new ideas like sparks off a grindstone, and also wanting to dive very deeply into a couple of new subjects. Not being able to get very far with either, I end up in a very prickly mood.

I have been working on another book, though I was stuck for a while. When I am working on a project (any project, not just writing) I keep serendipitously finding all sorts of useful little tidbits for it. For book writing, I scribble them on scraps of paper, and then gradually assemble them into an outline in Freemind. But this one had a dry spell, which was finally broken by finding a little “bread crumb” of an idea in a diving magazine, of all places, over Thanksgiving. This morning I received a whole pile of bread crumbs, so I have a bunch of notes to sort through tomorrow.

I also have a long list of books that I want to read RIGHT NOW. One is the third book of Madeleine L’Engle’s Crosswicks Journals, The Irrational Season. Then I just learned that there is a fourth book in that series, Two-Part Invention.