Hooray updates! Yesterday afternoon, on the way home, I asked myself the question that often -- OFTEN -- leads to trouble:  "Okay, so I've cleared lots of the little projects out of the way. What big beast can I tackle tonight?"

I thought about Miss Pretty Primrose, and scratched my head. Hmm. Well, my objection has been that I'd never attempted to do a full-sized quilt on my machine at home, but I had such a horrid experience at the rented longarm quilt machine last time that maybe I should just tackle it.

It's Monday. You need a little lunchtime music love. You know you do. The Avett Brothers are just fun, fun, fun. (If you're unfamiliar with the Avett Brothers, picture a trio-sometimes-quartet of punkers playing bluegrass-influenced rock.)

I haven't talked much about the ideas for Sailor's Warning because I'd not sewed even a test square together. It was little but an ephemeral, wacky idea, and there was no point doing much about it until I had my materials under control.

What if you just -- stopped?

A little while back I referenced the idea of a media blackout. I didn't say that I quietly put the blackout in place as of that post, and have consciously avoided the hamster wheel of news since then. Unsurprisingly, I'm happier. I pick up tidbits from friends on facebook and twitter, but by and large, the world is passing me by for a while.

Jeff and I are considering taking another, more blasphemous step. We bought a media device that lets us play video files on our house server, as well as Netflix Instant streaming, youtube, and another couple of sites. We're getting ready to do a media overhaul in our living room (our TV is a decade old) and he asked a question that I'd thought about before but never seriously voiced:

"What if we cancel our satellite subscription?"

I changed up the quilts page a bit recently to give some better insight to what's going on in my head over here. Drupal lets me be flexible with my content types, and some time ago I set up a content type for my quilts. If you look at http://domesticat.net/quilts you'll see my current works-in-progress are roughly ordered by state of completion. I thought I'd explain the terms; I get the impression sometimes that my friends think this process is really inscrutable, when it's not.

A couple of weeks ago, when I asked Catherine E. what kind of quilt she was interested in, she told me she loved the look of Dresden Plate quilts from the 1930s. I started researching it, and discovered something I really should have predicted, but had not: many things on places like eBay turn up from estate sales, and quilt pieces are part of estate sales. I've been staring in fascination ever since.