Nice and sunny today with temps staying in the 60s. We won't get more rain til Wednesday--maybe. It is always maybe with the weather. I should be cleaning up the patio and planters but I simply don't have the energy. This year the time change has hit me harder than it has before. Between the change of the clocks and how it has upset my sleep patterns, I am just plain washed out. I hope by next week I will be back to normal.
I have managed to get some things done: finished one crochet piece and started another. I started another which is going pretty well. Actually, I started two but unraveled one because it wasn't working well. I will try that one again sometime. I finished one embroidered dresser scarf and by Monday I should be finished with the cross-stitching on the last of the quilted placemats. I will be so glad to finish them. Have I said before how much I HATE pre-quilted pieces. Thankfully, I don't have any more of them.
The post-mortem on the election continues on the Democrats side while the Republicans are crowing about how well they did. I read/skim them all with a skeptical eye. I don't see it as either an utter Democrat disaster or a sign of a Republican eternal Heaven on earth. Although Robert Reich starts his post today with the claim that it was a disaster, he writes that many are "learning" the wrong lessons from it. He goes through six such lessons which I agree are exactly wrong. The major lesson he draws is, basically, the same one James Carville proclaimed thirty years ago: it's the economy, stupid.
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I finally finished the quilted placemats and their napkins. Stitched on them about three hours on Saturday, most of Sunday, and another two and a half hours this morning. I spent part of this morning getting the left over bobbins from several projects sorted and some skeins not yet wound put on bobbins, sorted and ready to be merged into the rest of the stock. I pulled out the table cloth I will start after my hands have rested for a couple of days.
We had guests on Saturday: my sister's son, two of his children, and his year-old grandson. So Mom has another great-great grandchild and I have a great nephew to go with the great-niece in my sister's other son's family. Little Anthony was quite a pistol. I sent them home with a small crocheted blanket for another grandchild expected early next year.
I am skimming or ignoring most of my political blogs and most of the news. So much of it is just speculation about what the new Trump administration will bring and no one really knows. I suspect even he doesn't really know. When he was elected last time a pagan blogger I read took exception to another who referred to Trump as "Loki in the White House." I can understand her objection since, as a pagan, she venerates several gods including Loki. However, trickster gods are featured in all pantheons I can think of and I would call them "features" not "bugs" in the system. They all upset the staid order and cause change--often uncomfortable change. Trump is certainly an agent of chaos and things are going to change. I would remind people who voted for him that they should have been more careful about what they wished for because they might get much more than they bargained for.
Stray thought: a lot of the commentary on the election criticize Harris for failing to provide voters with a "story" they could relate to. That is much too simplistic. Both Republicans and Democrats lost votes and it wasn't voters moving from one to the other or to a third party. Most of the missing voters simply stayed home. A significant part of the electorate rejected what the major parties offered. They didn't buy Harris' contention that the economy was really great and they didn't buy Trumps claims that the economy was catastrophic.
Another stray thought: however there is an economic story out there. Leigh at Five Acres and A Dream has raised Kinder goats for several years and has always had a brisk demand for her excess kids--until this year when the demand simply went away. She also mentions people she knows who are having to give up their pets and making other cuts to their expenses. Charles Hugh Smith at Of Two Minds notes a part of the home ownership equation that isn't much mentioned in the media. Most of the focus is on the escalating prices and difficulty of getting a mortgage but other costs are also going up: insurance (mortgage, property, flood/fire, liability), maintenance, utilities and other services. And then there is the increased cost of transportation. Like to take a bus or train or subway--fares have been increasing. The costs of owning a car (loan payments, maintenance, insurance, parking, and fuel) have also gone up. The economic statistics may be good but those numbers really don't support the Harris story that everything is good and Trump hasn't got a magic wand that can do much about them.
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