WTF-Beta

I love vegetables and have coffee and chocolate every day, so this is good news. (The chocolate is milk chocolate, but never mind that. It's got polyphenols in it, plus a smidge of calcium and protein from the milk. I'm sure my statin will deal with the milk fat.)

She had a stroke and is in rehab. Details here:

https://www.facebook.com/kathy.gray.9026 /

@Bernard said in Minimalist, you say?:

Not as bad as some, but the price is outrageous. Interesting choice of materials, I guess it doesn't get that cold in CO. The right decor could warm it up a bit.

A basketball hoop and chandelier in the same room? LOL.

A basketball hoop, a chandelier, a hot tub, and a pole in the same room.

What on earth?

Each of these things has its place, but I wouldn't say that it was one place where they would all coexist.

wtg, I had forgotten about Cuban's project. It will be interesting to see how it disrupts things, and it will also be interesting to see if anything arises to disrupt other aspects of health care costs. Prescription drugs are fairly easy to deliver. Nursing homes and end-of-life care, not so much. It is in those areas that it is easiest to see the way that the wealth of a generation could be transferred into the pockets of a few instead of to the next generation.

@Quirt-Evans said in An Interesting Article About Health Insurance ...:

"all of us, even the relatively healthy, now use a lot of health care. It’s no longer an unexpected need — an insurable risk. It has turned into one of our largest expected needs. Expected needs aren’t insurable."

I think this is true. I have also thought for a long time now that health care is something that just doesn't work on the free market. If I want some trinket and the price goes too high, I don't buy it. This is a pretty direct control on the price of the trinket.

By contrast, I would empty my pockets to save my life or the life of a loved one. I have been in enough physical pain to know that the point would come when I would empty my pockets to relieve my pain or the pain of a loved one. Thus, I--and I presume most people--would not walk away from overpriced lifesaving or suffering-relieving treatment in the way that I would walk away from another overpriced item.

It follows that there has to be some kind of external control on prices, or the people who control lifesaving or suffering-relieving treatments will eventually take all we have. Health insurance companies are emphatically not going to do that for us; they prefer to just deny us coverage. No viable alternatives have arisen that I know about that would allow us to take our business somewhere where we can get better treatment or better rates. Governmental regulation seems the only alternative, but health insurance companies pretty much own our government. Anybody can see that our system is unsustainable, but I don't see any way to reform it.

I have taken hydroxychloroquine for many years for its on-label purpose (mild autoimmune stuff). As far as I know, I've never had any side effects at all. It's like taking sugar pills, except my hands and feet hurt when I forget to take it. I wonder if the side effects you felt happened because you also had Covid doing its thing in your body and there was some kind of interaction.

I've also wondered whether taking hydroxychloroquine as a maintenance drug has anything to do with the fact that I've only had Covid once, and it was a very mild case. Also I don't react nearly as severely to the Covid vaccine as Quirt does. Our bodies are complicated machines.

Oh, and I'll go to Muffin's Sister's in February for her birthday. I wouldn't want you to think she was getting left out.

Muffin and Muffin's Partner will arrive on Christmas Eve. Muffin's Partner's parents and aunt will be with us for the day on Christmas, so I am happily poking around in my new kitchen, getting ready for the feast. On the day after, two of their best friends are coming out to spend the day after Christmas. (Boxing Day, I guess).

Then a couple of days later, I'm flying to Orlando to spend time with Muffin's Brother's family. And after I get back, we'll go spend a day with my sister south of Boston. I expect we will also see the East Coast Quirtlet and Quirt's mom in there somewhere, too.

This is why we left Oklahoma.

Muffin and I went to the yarn store this weekend and I got yarn for the first few rows of the cat afghan, so that I could do the pilot test for the engineering part of the project. (It will be a many-colored thing and also they had plenty of the black and gray yarn from the same dye lots, so I'm not worried about matching.)

I'm almost finished with the fifth row, which gives me two "starter" rows and one three-row-deep band of cat faces. I'm happy with the size of the cats, and I think it will work up very nicely. I might make them a little smaller--finer yarn, smaller hook--for a small project like a scarf, since it would make the cat faces crisper, but I don't want to spend fifty years on it. Stud Muffin graduates in a year and a half!

I did the first two rows where you're basically just getting things started, then I did the next three-row band in black, which comprises the first band of cat faces. Now that I can see how much yarn it takes to do a row, I'll go back and get yarn in several other "cat colors." I hope I can find a sort of heathered golden brown and a similar gray, so that I can get a tabby effect. I have the black and gray. I'll get a different shade of gray and two shades of solid brown. (There are white cats in the world, but there doesn't need to be any white in a blanket used by a teenager.) So I'll have at least seven bands of cats before I have to repeat, and I think I'll have to repeat seven times. (I'm less sure about that last factor.)

The picture shows tassles and no border. I think the tassles will just get messed up, and I think a border, probably black, will make it stand up to hard use better.

I'm excited. I love starting a new project!

Those felted slippers are to die for! But the process does look a little terrifying. I also really like the ones wtg posted. They look like they fit like a glove. (Only you don't have to make the fingers!)

I missed sk's grandmother's work before. Wow! I love all of those. I have some dresser scarves my grandmother made a very long time ago. (She died in 1939.) One of them has the roses made of standing crochet stitches (my mother called that Irish crochet), very much like the work sk's grandmother did. The others are embroidered with crocheted edging. There's a woman named Poppy Lu who upcycles old needlework into clothing and posts the process on TikTok and other video sites.Those felted slippers are to die for! I also really like the ones wtg posted. They look like they fit like a glove. (Only you don't have to make the fingers!

I missed sk's grandmother's work before. Wow! I love all of those. I have some dresser scarves my grandmother made a very long time ago. (She died in 1939.) One of them has the roses made of standing crochet stitches (my mother called that Irish crochet), very much like the work sk's grandmother did. The others are embroidered with crocheted edging. There's a woman named Poppy Lu who upcycles old needlework into clothing and posts the process on TikTok and other video sites: https://www.tiktok.com/@poppyluclothing

WHOA!
I experienced the gamut of emotions while reading your thread title.
Costco Wagyu Roast? Sounds delicious. I'm in!
A thousand bucks???? That's a big nope.

@wtg

I like that one, too. It looks lovely on top of Marlene.

@pique
I think the tree on top of the wood stove looks so cozy.

@AndyD
I love all of this, but especially the stockings on the staircase.

@ShiroKuro
Your new place is so pretty and it looks great decorated!

@dolmansaxlil

This is so pretty. I'm guessing you quilted that tree scarf?

wtg, I like your tall, thin tree. It's a lot easier to fit that silhouette into rooms where people live.

EDITED TO ADD: I see that Bernard has three of those tall, thin trees to spread festivity all over the house. And Mik has one, too! And sk!

We've had an artificial tree for many years, but it was huge and heavy and we gave it to someone in Oklahoma, since we knew that the volunteer fire department here would sell us a live one and deliver it. But a real tree has the diameter it has (and that's the diameter that the Christmas tree growers shear it to have.)

Quirt picked it out and was worried that the diameter might not fit the available space, but it fit really well.

As for the big TV, Quirt mentioned when we met that we had a reverse piano-to-TV size ratio. Now, my smaller TV has long since been set aside for humongous ones in the living room and bedroom, and his smaller piano lives at my son's house in Orlando, where his youngest is working on Fur Elise and Rondo alla Turka.

Wow, those diagonal bows are very striking! It's a beautiful tree, Steve, AND I'm amazed at the level of design and planning. I take more of an accumulate-pretty-stuff-and-then-throw-it-up-there approach.

Everybody's trees are so pretty! I love decorating for Christmas and I love seeing other people's decorations just as much.

Thank you! I was actually DMing you for help but you anticipated my need.

The piano sounds really good, but LOUD! It's like living inside a hollow-bodied instrument made of wood that's been seasoned for 140 years. And it doesn't help that the sound also reflects off glass windows that are huge, because the house didn't have electric lights when it was built. We just got the Roman shades installed, and maybe they do help the sound bouncing off the windows some, but I raised the one behind the piano for the month, so that the Christmas tree lights would be visible from the street. I also raised the lid for December, just for looks, so I'm sure my holiday playing will be audible to passers-by, poor things.

My new tech (who is great and came recommended by both Jon and Rich) asked delicately whether it might be time to voice it when he tuned it in July, saying that he didn't like to dictate people's taste, but...hmm... I told him I'd wait until his next visit so that I could hear it with rugs, furniture, and window treatments, but we both knew it was going to need voicing. It was already getting a bit bright before we left Oklahoma, so it's time.

We had to put it where it would fit, so there are two floor vents near but not under it. The window on the right gets no sun, because of a tree and the house next door, so that's good. The double window faces north and is under a porch, so no sun there, either. The exterior wall isn't ideal, but we insulated the house and there are storm windows that keep most of the drafts out.

I'm planning to move that recliner upstairs to my office and replace it with someething smaller, and hanging pictures is going to be a more involved process than I'm used to since the walls are plaster and not sheetrock, but I'm really happy to have the rugs down, which only happened right before Thanksgiving. Moving is hard work, y'all. But this place is feeling really homey now.