first crocus

Posted on March 8, 2009 by Kathy

This afternoon when I was out between rain showers with Bode saw some tiny yellow crocuses blooming in the grass between the sidewalk and curb at a house where a gardener lives. The birds out back in the trees have been singing like it is spring too. Saw the first robins today too. Hard to believe that less than a week ago it was 8°F (-13°C) in the morning.

I decided to give up Yahoo! groups for Lent. Then discovered that Celt’s Vintage Crochet web site, where I have been getting some great out-of-print doily patterns, had moved from Angelfire to a Yahoo! Group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/celtsvintagecrochet/. So gave up and joined. Too long to go without making doilies.

Still haven’t started any seeds indoors, but should soon. Got some new marigold seed. The seed I planted last year didn’t grow and seemed to be a lot more things chewed off in the beds.

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wish on a star vintage doily and other February things

Posted on February 28, 2009 by Kathy

Guess I should get this done while it is still February.

three variations on a vintage doily pattern   doily with alternate border   detail of doily border

This started in 2005 [details] when I ran out of salmon pink variegated thread (from my mom’s stash) and set the doily aside. I then did an entire doily in size 30 ecru thread using a size 11 hook (10 or 11 was recommended). I unraveled the unfinished doily to the meshes around the star center, then put in a simple border of shells. I then tried the pattern in a gold variegated thread (from my dad’s cousin Hazel’s stash, there were several full spools and a couple that had been used) using a size 12 hook and got the size that the pattern indicated.

The colors are not accurate, used a halogen lamp and camera without flash. I have done several other doilies this month, some just blocked yesterday. Need to do something better to get pictures. Maybe the scanner or working outdoors with the camera if the weather cooperates.

Guess I am getting practice for when the analog TV signal is cut off (WQED is saying April 1). Crocheting while listening to the radio is a very 1930s or 1940s kind of thing.

Spent most of February in a construction zone. Last spring there were some reports of gas leaks, I could smell it a couple times from the sidewalk (no gas lines in this house). After a lot of testing and trial digging, Dominion decided that several blocks worth of pipelines needed to be replaced. This past week the crew got here. I took these photos from the front door:

my front yard placing a plate to cover a trench

They haven’t been working on weekends, so today I went out for groceries even though the milk was not done to be able to unload the car near the front door.

On February 12 the ice up river broke up (probably with some assistance) and I saw it going down the river when I was out walking Bode. Wished that I had taken the camera. I stopped to talk with one of the regular walkers. He said he grew up in Cadogan, across the river, and had witnessed the 1936 flood. That is the one that was so bad that a system of locks and dams were constructed – public works projects.

Later that afternoon I went back in the car with the camera. The ice chunks and slushy snow were not as thick as earlier but it was still pretty impressive. It is the highest I have seen the river since I moved back. I got chilled but even then it was hard to turn away to go back home. There are still chunks of ice on the banks, although the river level is back to normal.

Allegheny river view after jam breakup   [view video]

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a modest proposal

Posted on February 25, 2009 by Kathy

Consumers and credit seem to be a major issue right now. Perhaps it is time to admit that legal changes made in the early 1980s were a BAD MISTAKE and see what we can do to rectify things. If you remember back that long, that is when you could no longer go to your neighborhood bank and ask for a small loan. You were told that you needed to put such things on a credit card. I ran into that when I wanted to buy a used car to drive to work when my vintage Pinto station wagon’s engine blew up.

Sure, there is plenty of guilt to go around. Big Money should have not put so much pressure on the government. And politicians should have resisted more. Consumers should have been more careful, although they were subjected to some very intense marketing efforts to do otherwise. Should the academic economists have been more forceful in stating that trying to build an economy based on consumer debt was not good? That is water under the bridge or over the dam depending on your favorite metaphor.

I think a good place to start is to decide just how much punishment is fair for people who made foolish purchases on credit. Bear in mind, not all this was frivolity. Many of us have put things like medical insurance premiums, medication, or other serious things on a credit card. Not sure if we can do anything about this injustice, but working hard on reforming health care might be a good start.

So here is the proposal. All those transactions are on computers, so can be traced. How about deciding that once a debtor has paid the equivalent of the item’s purchase price (or some multiple of that) in interest it is enough punishment? They would then be given credit for any interest paid beyond that limit. That will get a lot of people out of debt and maybe there would be enough of a surplus that they feel confident to make a few and perhaps wiser purchases. With a realistic limit on the amount of interest that can be charged, hopefully people won’t be so likely to get so deeply in debt.

There will be people who have passed away or gone bust and are in homeless shelters or otherwise not reachable. Their excessive interest paid should be put into a fund to provide programs for credit counseling or other social programs.

I think at this point the taxpayers have done plenty, now it is time to send a message that greed is not to be rewarded and everyone needs to pitch in.

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the Boston effect

Posted on February 19, 2009 by Kathy

I was on LiveJournal before MySpace and Facebook and enjoyed it. They had an active knitting community plus people I knew from PerlMonks were there. I remember reading that at one time a very high percentage of the Boston metro area population was on LiveJournal. Made sense with the large number of educational institutions, high tech industries, and great internet infrastructure (i.e. residents may never have experienced a dial-up connection).

I joined Facebook at the invitation of a cousin who was working in South Korea at the time. I was a good way to keep in touch. The way our family has worked is that the matriarch or patriarch kept everyone updated on family events, as had their parents before them. Now that group is in their 80s and some of the most active networkers of the past are too ill to keep up. Enter Facebook to fill the gap.

I did volunteer work last year for MitoAction, an organization based in Boston MA. We were establishing a presence on Facebook so I added a number of MitoAction members to my friends list. They were indeed well connected, in fact, almost all the friend suggestions I got from then on were from Boston area residents and their friends. I visited the Boston area once in the 1970s for a week of HPLC training. My main memories are getting caught in a nor’easter storm flying in from Illinois which delayed my arrival, and the cabbie who picked me up from the airport hotel the next day who was quite a colorful character and got me caught up on all the local news.

So, a couple weeks ago I removed most of the Boston “friends” not because of any animosity but to see if I could contact more of my midwest friends and relatives. It seems to have worked.

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digital TV woes

Posted on February 9, 2009 by Kathy

Well dear reader, it is starting to look like we have been had.

I used the government web site to obtain a card for a $40 credit towards getting an analog to digital converter box for my TV last August. So, I am not one of those procrastinators that the recent discussions about not being prepared for the switch are about. Indeed, the procrastinators may be the wise ones.

In all the information that is out, there is very little mention of the fact that the digital signals are very much weaker than the current analog signals. That means that the government subsidized box you bought, as is the case for me, is pretty much useless. That is, you order the coupon, go to a store (where there is blessed little information available except that you can only return the digital box if it is defective), pay your share, take it home, install it, and do a scan where you find NOTHING. Then the meaning of all or nothing sinks in…

I know, caveat emptor, but it would have really been helpful if there had been a link on the web sites where you could put in your zip code and see plotted out the reach of digital signals in your market area. For people who didn’t have internet access, the businesses selling the converter boxes could have printed such maps for consumers to consult. This isn’t exactly rocket science, but maybe engineers had as little say as scientists in the Bush administration while this was going on.

So, it seems that extending the deadline for the conversion will be of little value to many of the people that it is intended to help. It will be just prolonging the realization that they are out of luck if they can’t afford cable or satellite subscriptions. That has turned out to be more of an issue now many families are feeling the pinch of the economy.

So, maybe people will need to develop some hobbies to fill the time formerly spent watching TV for entertainment. Might even be some good come of that if they start to exercise more or spend more time with friends and families. But, the analog stations had as part of their charter that because the “air waves” they were using were a public resource, they needed to devote a certain percentage of their air time to public interest programming and also things like emergency alerts for example to inform viewers of severe weather conditions.

It may not be too late to recover from this. My friends in Europe are continually amazed that our public broadcasting has to find commercial sponsors and solicit donations from viewers to remain in business. Perhaps a solution might be to designate one “Public” TV station per viewing market to continue broadcasting an analog signal for emergency broadcasts. The remainder of the time could be devoted to a subset of what is now considered “public TV” programming plus local news fed from the commercial digital stations. And, I think it would be very fair if the people who are profiting from the digital conversion pay the majority of the costs of broadcasting this analog signal.

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