I feel like a sheep, sometimes, because anything I get interested in doing or making was long ago discovered by a million idiots online. Aprons, for instance. They’re actually a huge designer item now. The ones I like best are ArtifactAprons.

For my repurposing blog ideas, I was about to try making some from old pairs of jeans. We’ll see how that works out. I have to sew it in a way that I don’t need to force my sewing machine through terribly thick seams. Nearly all denim is a little too thick for me to sew with. My sewing machine is a fairly cheap one; I wish i had a heavy-duty one.

Fabric.com and Joann.com are now besieged by people making their own clothes, masks, and other items. They’re actually running out of many kinds of fabrics, and tools too. (I need a rotary cutter!) So Amazon is selling fabric, but most of it seems to be already cut into 1-yard pieces or “fat quarters” for quilting and crafts.

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Mike informs me on science news. In one long call, during which he told me about 1) the pistol shrimp, which kills prey by clicking its claw hard, creating a bubble of air that is momentarily heated to 8000 degrees, and it fires the bubble at the prey; 2) actual research into faster-than-light warp drive; and then I don’t know, something about states of matter, you know, solid, liquid, gas, and now there are a whole bunch more...

Anyway, after hanging up, it occurred to me that the visible universe from our planet — if we could live on and on and on — after eons would contain fewer and fewer stars. We’re losing thousands of stars each year because of the expanding universe, and the light from them will never reach us again -- since that expansion is accelerating. It was kind of a bittersweet thing, like the end of Star Trek The Next Generation, when the characters found out they had to stop, eventually, using Warp Drive, because it was slowly tearing the fabric of the universe apart. The sheer distances between planets were so great that at conventional speeds, they'd never reach other planets or alien beings during human lifetimes. ...This meant that their trek among the stars was going to come to an end.