Hope and Fresh Air

"... I feel as if I'm making quilts from hope and fresh air." Caroline's comment was floating in the background all yesterday and today as I sorted, trimmed, marked and sewed together all the batting scraps that have been accumulating. It was how I intended to use the Rocketeer this month, so no sense in letting them sit idly on the sewing table!

By (well past) dinnertime I had a respectable assortment of large chunks.

The "Block" disc (#19) is working great, and has proven to me that disc #9 for the multi-stitch has its faults, not the machine (touched upon in the previous blog post). This is a lovely traveling stitch from one zigzag block to the next.

This is what I expected to--but didn't--see from disc #9. That disc either came poorly made, or wore down over years of use.

I haven't settled, though! My son came by yesterday and when I asked if he'd like another project, his ears pricked right up. He took home two discs, I emailed him the wonderful overhead picture of the disc I needed, and he left saying it would be a great project to hone his CAD skills. He implied I'd have the finished product in my hands when we go over to his place tomorrow for a morning of VR fun, but I'm not holding him to that.

I've never experienced VR, and I keep thinking of the final episode of "Space Force" (on Netflix) and John Malkovich's character puking in the nearest trash can.

Have you ever received those recorded calls from some political candidate? Of course you have. Have you ever wondered how long they lasted past the 3 second mark (at which point you've already hung up)? I never did, until tonight. In the midst of sewing batt scraps, I got such a call. The name was unfamiliar, but sounded close to Florida Clown Junior's (Matt "Malicious Captain Kangaroo" Gaetz) name. Mark something? Regardless, rather than hang up immediately, I decided to perform my civic duty and keep the recording going, thereby saving someone else the hassle of receiving a call for that time period. I set the phone down nearby while I continued to sew, getting up periodically to measure and mark more pieces. Each time I'd come back to the Rocketeer I'd check the phone, and each time the recording was still going!

The longer it went, the more I was reminded of the Monk episode in which a prospector filled 100s of journals with entries, most of them complete jibberish. What on earth did this candidate have to say for this long? At one point I picked up the phone and listened to him jibber his way through an opinion about the Ways and Means Committee. At another point I turned on the speaker and heard him drop a name, then say, "She's a really good person." So I suppose it's conceivable that he was literally reading a phone book by that time. At 43 minutes my phone was signalling 'I've had enough of this crap!', but I plugged it into the charger and kept trimming and sewing. As long as that political recording was still running, I was going to keep working on the Frankenbatts.

Final tally: 57 minutes, 14 seconds. I cannot believe that this guy and/or his staff truly felt someone would listen to that barely-coherent bore for that long! Thank goodness it didn't go any longer. I was getting really hungry.