Monthly Archives: November 2011

Thanksgiving

One of my Facebook friends posted about having Thanksgiving all planned out and what a great holiday it is. I started to post a comment but decided to blog instead. Thanksgiving was always OUR holiday. Jeffrey’s birthday was the 24th, so it was usually a double celebration. He always cooked up a nice spread, with a turkey that he cooked and basted for hours. Sometimes we’d go to a friend’s place, but mostly we’d have Thanksgiving together. It was really hard that first Thanksgiving without him. I was very lucky that Ginger invited me over and I had a good time.

This year, I’m making the feast. We have several friends, single guys without a family to visit. It happens that they could use a place to celebrate. So I’m trying to decide what to make. Our big oven has a burned out element, so I really should replace it, if I’m planning something big. Quinn hasn’t committed to coming. So we’ll make what we can of it. It won’t be the holiday I used to have, but it can still be good.

iPhone tips

I installed an app for an O’Reilly book called “iPhone: The Missing Manual”. (There’s a free, lite version you can try first.) I thought it was so handy that I went ahead and bought the full manual. The thing that impressed me most, which I really don’t see reference to online, is how you can slide from the ABC keyboard over to do punctuation. It immediately returns you to the ABC keyboard. You slide from the button for the 123 keyboard, over to your punctuation, then just lift your finger. It truly speeds things up. I do most of my blog posts from the phone now and I keep a daily journal in Wonderful Days. I definitely want to be able to type faster on the phone, but have not managed to type well with more than one finger at a time. It’s all just part of the craziness of using a phone for things like this.

A lesson in quality

This quilt is from the Goodwill Outlet store, where you buy clothes by the pound. I normally wouldn’t have picked it up, but I was a few pounds shy of a major price break and wanted the lower price. I usually pick up old bedspreads for dog bedding. 20111106-112034.jpg Anyway someone put a lot of work into this. I suspect it was for a baby or young child. It’s unfortunate they didn’t put more thought into it. The pattern is lovely but the material used is not used wisely. Then there’s this, the reason it was discarded.

20111106-112342.jpg All of the white areas have torn loose. The material is not tightly woven enough. I tacked it down to keep it from further destruction but the quilt just isn’t good enough to really repair. The person that made this should have been more focused on beauty and utility. It would have been so simple to have used better material for the white. They could have chosen material that worked better. This fabric is really bad:

20111106-112818.jpg Which brings me back to beauty. I used to get lectures on using synthetic yarn. Now there are situations where synthetic yarns are appropriate. And there’s nothing that says it can’t be beautiful as in these gloves:

20111106-113132.jpg There’s definitely something to be said for using the best materials you can get.

I finished the Steve Jobs biography recently. What I took away from that was a reaffirmation of the importance of beauty in our lives. I think we are more pained by surrounding ourselves with cheap ugly crap than we might imagine. Beauty does not need to be expensive but it does require a careful pruning of what we choose to keep.