Month: October 2015

Halloween Skirt (And Official Voting Skirt)

Here’s Anya’s Halloween skirt:

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It’s a basic circle skirt — the circle was cut for a 23″ waist. A 4.5″ strip of fabric was then cut to 24″ and made into a 2″ wide waistband and attached to the skirt. I then ran 20″ of 2″ elastic through the band & gathered the fabric. This allows the skirt to be pulled over her head or hips. Plus it means she might be able to wear it next year 🙂

And in a bid to not have a skirt used just once, it is also her official election day skirt — blood-suckers, skeletons in the closet, ghosts/mummies/reanimated corpses (how else would dead people vote?).

Federal Spending – And Opportunities For Savings

Whenever I hear debates about reducing the federal deficit, I think of the saying “penny wise and pound foolish”. It means making efforts to save pennies without watching the larger amounts — someone who drives a H2 fifty miles to work each day but foregoes a cup of coffee to save a buck.

We want to reduce the federal deficit; but we cannot touch military or social security and Medicare spending. And Medicare is 15% of that 28% for “Health And Human Services”. If we start our savings plan by declaring over 50% of our spending off-limits, we are either looking at HUGE cuts in the remaining not-quite 50% or we’re going to fail before we’ve even started.

We could abolish entire departments — say HUD, EPA, NASA, Education, and Labor — and eliminate all foreign aid and only reduce our total federal spending by 9%. Now 9% of 3.4 trillion dollars is still a lot of money (although an interesting academic experiment is to get a group of people together and discuss what you’ll cut in the federal budget. You may find yourself saying, with all seriousness, that we’re only looking at ten million dollars. It isn’t worth the time we’re taking to discuss it.).  But we could reduce Health & Human Services, Social Security, and Defense by 3% each and save the same 9%.

Looking at discretionary spending, the picture becomes even sillier. This means we’re ignoring obligatory payments like social security and Medicare. Defense and homeland security is 54% unto itself!

Whenever someone tells me they won’t cut entitlement programs and won’t touch military spending (or will increase it!), but they’re still going to balance the budget without raising taxes … I assume they are outright lying. Wishful thinking that incomes will increase and thus increase government revenue is sound budget planning. I know the Republicans dislike the CBO because they don’t include “revenue increases we think will happen” as income … but until you start to see those returns, I don’t think you can stake your financial solvency on them.

Christmas Dress (Kinda)

Anya’s Christmas dress is not actually a dress — I’d had a picture in my head of a cream colour shirt in a small metallic print fabric with a green skirt. I found a beautiful small print fabric (Robert Kaufman Winters Grandeur Metallic Small Vines Ivory) that I wanted to use for the skirt. Problem was that I didn’t really have a specific shirt pattern.

Random internet searching didn’t yield anything … and then, voila, Pinterest randomly e-mails me a picture of an almost-perfect pleated shirt. I say almost because it’s winter … so I need some kind of arm covering. I’d first through about making a green velvet jacket … but that is a little more effort than I could put into it. Seems a lot easier to make a long sleeved shirt than making a whole other piece of clothing.

I can order the fabrics!