Random Verbal Doodling

I work part-time, flexible hours, from home. At one point some years ago, I did have a desk at which I could work if I were in town and so inclined. Now I save my unit the cost of desking one more body. I do have to put on adult clothes and darken the door of the building from time to time, the frequency of which has been on my mind lately.

Our relatively new (two or so years) boss has tried to have monthly staff meetings but never set a regular day and time such as a designated day of each month at a designated hour. That made it hard to find a time that ten people all had free. A date and time would be announced then changed a time or two before being cancelled. We probably had a staff meeting only every couple of months.

I used the term "staff" intentionally in the previous paragraph. Recently, the university administration decided that our office should be combined with another office, more than doubling our size. That office will remain nameless here but has much more of a business team mentality than does our office, perhaps because they had "Business" in their name while we never have. They have matching notebooks, for example, which they all bring to meetings. They may have matching pens, but I haven't checked. When I turn on my work laptop, Microsoft Teams loads automatically now; it has even started loading on my personal personal computer. I have tried to see how one uses Teams, without success. Actually, I don't want to know how to use it.

What I have been pondering is that as a staff, we had only sporadic group meetings as noted above. Now, as a team, we have meetings scheduled for the next three months. I find this unsettling. For one, I must drive to and from the office, which takes around 20 minutes if traffic and lights cooperate. If we are meeting at what has been our office, I then must pay $2.50 per hour to park and spend 10 minutes walking from and back to the parking garage. I make myself feel better about this by noting that the steps I take coming and going contribute to any daily step goal I might have set.

Why has the team-to-staff switch changed the attitude toward group meetings? Are team members more closely joined at the hip than staff members? Both groups should be working toward a common goal, in our case the accuracy and flow of information to, from, and about the university. Is it that the "team" has twice as many members as the "staff" did? This seems more plausible in that the number of possible connections between individual members or groups of members may require more monitoring.

And maybe I just need to find something better to do during those meetings than doodling random thoughts on a pad of paper that matches no one else's with a writing implement that matches no one else's.

Note: I started writing this post some time ago, before I decided to retire from what was, admittedly, a very good deal. Staff vs. team meeting no longer matters. I like that.

Back in Grad School ...

Back in grad school (which I started 42 years ago come August), three of us formed a small group we called the Lunatic Fringe and Literary Society. Each month, we would read a different science fiction book and discuss it over lunch, which had to be at a eatery none of us had ever visited. Given the time that has passed, it should not surprise me that so many of the places I remember visiting are no longer in business. In the case of a few, the building in which they were located is not longer there.

We should probably have read a wider variety of books. To this day, I feel overdosed on science fiction as a genre. Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God are the exceptions; I thought they were excellent and am glad I read them. Anything else? Nope. I tried on a recent trip to re-read The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin after reading an essay that praised it. It was a big no-go. I could not not get into reading it, no matter how hard I tried.

There is a plus side to this affliction in that it makes the list of books I want to read shorter by one genre, the proverbial silver lining to any cloud.

If I Made You a Thing

I was pondering lots of everything recently as I trimmed the edges of my latest quilt in preparation for binding. I possibly should not have rejoined the local quilt guild or, having done so, not become a more active member. This thought occurred to me as I trimmed the somewhat un-square corners of the quilt and, again, viewed the small puckers visible on the back of the quilt.

At one guild chapter meeting, a discussion was held on what type of needles members liked for what purpose. Upon my turn, I described myself  as a "ghetto quilter" and noted that a good needle was one I could thread with my 63-year-old eyes. I similarly do not obsess over what brand of thread I use for the quilting, really only caring about the color and whether it gives the effect I want. If there were quilting "neighborhoods," mine would be one you might not want to visit.

I know, for example, that there should not be puckers on the back of a quilt after it is quilted. I assume that if one stretches the backing tightly enough when basting--with thread or pins--the layers of the quilt together and/or stretches the layers snugly when quilting, the finished back will be puckerless. I have possibly achieved an unpuckered back on a wall hanging, but I am not sure I ever have on a larger piece. The two pieces I have had professionally quilted have no back puckers, nor do the quilts other guild members bring to Show and Tell. Even when I consciously try to not have puckers, well, yeah, I still end up with them.

I also know that the corners of a quilt should be square assuming, that is, that the quilt itself is rectangular in shape. Again, I am not sure I have ever had four square corners on the same quilt. As with the puckers, I might have executed square corners on a wall hanging, particularly if it were of a size matching one of my larger cutting templates. On a larger quilt, though, the border may not always be precisely the same width along a side since I might have had to trim it more in one place or another to keep a side as straight as possible.

And then there is the binding itself. I have never mastered machine binding despite having taken a very informative workshop on the subject. In terms of hand binding, the quilts others bring to Show and Tell have no visible stitches along the length of the binding. I have asked several members how they do this, and they usually reply with something like, "You just hide them." This tells me nothing about whether I am supposed to do the stitch on the back of the quilt inside where the edge will sit and put the stitch in the binding underneath what shows. If that is the case, I wish someone would show or tell me how to do it.

And if I can't hide the stitches that hold the binding down, the same can be said about the stitches that hold the label on the back of a quilt. Actually, even my labels seem to be on the plain side. Rarely do I put any decoration around the text, and the text is generally just something about the recipient of the quilt and why he or she is getting it.

I say all this but then have to admit that no one who has received one of my quilts has ever mentioned the puckers or the corners or the visible stitches. It may be that I have only given quilts to very polite people, but if you know my friends, you know that's probably not the case. They see beyond those visible shortcomings and, I hope, know how special they are to me or to whoever asked me to make the quilt in the first place.