Home Fires Nov 5th to 9th 2017

Am I keeping them burning?  Well....

I seem to spend a lot of time checking the Fleet tracker on the web.  On days when the update says ‘rough seas’ or ‘lots of squalls overnight’, I spend a lot of time wondering and worrying.  Yesterday when I got home from teaching, I found an e-mail message from Mike asking me to check the weather forecast for 25 N 65 W.  He wrote “trying to figure out how to get to Tortola when the wind blows from the southeast.”  Not quite as reassuring as messages go.  I’m sure he was hoping to get a reply before I went to lab, but I didn’t find the message until I got home.  The forecast does have a lot of wind from the ESE.  That’s going to make it tough I think.

Other than fretting, I’ve been cooking meals.  Cooking for one is interesting.  Mike advised me that I should be trying to “eat down” the contents of the freezer.  Instead I seem to be filling it up.  When I make a dish, it’s so voluminous that I wind up putting a portion of it into the freezer.  My thinking is that this will make the perfect dinner for nights after lab. Having the option to re-heat something rather than start cooking is attractive (after 5 hours of standing up).  Also, let’s face it, how many days of the same dinner can any person face?

Of course on non-lab nights, I also need to eat.  New dishes get made and more stuff accumulates in the freezer.  I guess it’s a relative rate problem that I haven’t figured out yet.

On the sewing front, I have been working on a piece that is “not on the grid”—it’s (very) roughly a hexagon.  This involves lots of angles and set in seams. Do you remember geometry?.  Well, doing geometry with fabric appears to be a bad idea.  When I got the bulk of the central portion assembled it had a lot in common with a one-man tent!  I took it mostly apart and tried to re-cut the pieces more accurately.  The result may have been marginally better (trying to convince myself.)  At this point I’m trying to “block” the quilt top by dampening it and pinning it to the carpet.  As I need to make a decision about which fabric to use next, it’s becalmed in that spot.  Now that the work-week is over I might have to un-pin it and see what the result is.