Cleaning and Mending — Janet Szabo

I started on the living room as soon as the husband left for work yesterday morning. All the slipcovers, window valances, insulated curtains, and dog bed covers went into the wash. Furniture got moved, floors vacuumed and mopped, baseboards and window trim wiped down, everything on the mantel washed, and when I was done, I put it all back together in reverse. The insulated curtains and tension rods went into storage until next fall.

I also mended the slipcovers on the sofa and loveseat. I don’t want to replace the covers because they weren’t cheap and still have years of use left in them, but there is elastic at the back that has stretched out and made the covers droopy. (It was not very high-quality elastic to begin with.) I decided that while they were off the furniture, I’d just go ahead and fix the elastic. Replacing the entire length of elastic would have involved more surgery than I was willing to undertake, but I was able to cut the old elastic off and splice new, heavy-duty elastic (from the stash, of course) in its place. I attached the new elastic with three parallel lines of stretch zig-zag to make sure it would hold, and I’m very happy with the result. The slipcovers fit nicely again with no droopy spots. Yay.

The window valances are looking a bit faded. I bought those about 10 years ago, but I doubt I’d be able to find anything else of similar quality now. Making new ones will go on the list of things to do next winter.

I spent most of the day cleaning, so I haven’t yet worked on the porch shade. I need to bang out another batch of masks this morning and then I’ll work on the shade. I’m also planning to deliver the Candy Coated quilt to its new owner.

Eggs are in the incubator:

I will check them in a week to see which ones are viable.

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I am going to make some comments on the current state of things, so feel free to skip this part if you want.

I heard it said a few days ago that “Nuance is a dead language.” That pretty well sums up the mood in this country. It’s virtually impossible for people to see things other than in black and white. It requires extra effort to consider points of view that don’t fit neatly into our preferred narratives. I am not sure when we stopped being willing to put forth that effort, but we did, and we’re all the poorer for it.

Social media is a two-edged sword. Podcast host Amy Dingmann, of A Farmish Kind of Life, has had some really good commentary about social media lately. She noted that she got to the point where she had to remove social media from her phone, only checking it a couple of times a day on her office computer. The atmosphere had become too toxic. Unfortunately, for those of us running small businesses, disconnecting from social media isn’t always practical, and when she discovered that removing those apps from her phone meant people who needed to reach her sometimes couldn’t, she reinstalled them, but with tighter filters.

I ran across this piece this morning, and it’s worth reading: The Social Media Shame Machine is in Overdrive Right Now. I don’t agree with everything the author says—the libertarian in me rebels against the notion that we need some kind of authority figure to tell us what to do in order to relieve our anxiety—but she makes some great points about the misuse of social media.

One of the biggest takeaways from this whole situation, I think, is that many things can be true at the same time. I am looking at this from the perspective of someone who lives in a huge state with fewer than a million people, but who also has two kids in a major metropolitan area that has been hit hard by this virus. We just reached 400 confirmed cases in Montana with fewer than 10 deaths. Our local hospital had to furlough 600 workers this week. Can we conclude, then, that the coronavirus was a non-event? It wasn’t a non-event in Seattle, where my kids live. Or in New York City. Perhaps the fact that Montana was at the end of the curve and had time to prepare made the difference. Perhaps it’s because our population is more spread out. Perhaps we haven’t yet seen the worst of it. But it can be true that it hasn’t been as bad here but was still bad in other places.

I’ve entertained more than a few conspiracy theories in the past month. I am not quite ready to dismiss all of them as lunacy. It can be true that this virus came from the wild instead of being a bioweapon gone wrong (deliberately or accidentally). It can also be true that some government entities (see Michigan) are using this situation as an opportunity for control and overreach and that we need to be vigilant against that. (Why is it necessary to ban the sale of seeds at Wal-Mart at precisely the time they are needed to prevent food shortages down the line?) It can be true that we have a solid scientific grounding that should guide our response to this situation, and also true that this virus exhibits characteristics that are requiring us to build the plane as we fly it.

Life is risky (ask me how I know). The anxiety brought on by uncertainty is uncomfortable—sometimes unbearably so. Feeling our way through this as a society is much like walking across a field full of landmines, but I think it’s important that we don’t make the problem worse by insisting that there was one correct response to this situation and it either was or wasn’t implemented, depending on our worldview. Perhaps this would be a good time to resurrect and become fluent in that dead language.

Come back for the fluffy chick photos in a few weeks.