The mute/no camera buttons are your friends

Work has rolled out yet another complete-waste-of-time innovation which is supposedly going to make us more productive.  This time it is a fancy spreadsheet with literally about 15 tabs, each one customised to show details about the team such as who is in/on leave, key issues, action items, and even a mood board where we can click on a smiley face to indicate how we are feeling (no, they do not have the emoticon that I would like to click).  This is all information that we already had systems in place for. In order to make maximum use of the new toy, we are now having daily morning team meetings in MS Teams so that our enthusiastic jobsworth promotion-hungry colleague can talk us painstakingly through all the tabs that he has joyously updated.  What this really means is that every morning I get a mid-morning break with my mike muted and my camera off where I can catch up on Facebook and email, and even tackle a bit of personal paperwork.  I make sure to have a fresh cup of tea ready as well. You would think the powers that be would have better things to focus resource on in the current environment...

I've been plugging on with the hand quilting on the 25 block applique quilt in a desultory fashion, and am now in the last 20% probably of the diagonal lines.  I think there is going to have to be a certain amount of remedial work afterwards, as some of the diagonal lines are not very straight and their spacing is pretty off.  When I drew the lines a few years ago, I was trying to have a diagonal line pass corner to corner through each square, with the lines in between evenly spaced.  That didn't work out too well as the squares are not an identical size (they're meant to be). I don't think minor differences are going to be too noticeable but there are a few gaps that are obviously too big, so I may need to pull those lines out and try again.

I'm having another try at the needletatting, this time really trying to check my work and count accurately.  I've had to pull parts out a few times when I got it wrong, including having to completely re-do the centre motif, but I am slowly progressing. At least with needletatting, you can generally undo your work, which isn't always the case with shuttle tatting.

I spent some time this week altering a dress that I bought online.  When I bought it, I thought it was a sun dress over a blouse, from the way the model was posed in the picture.  It turned out to be an actual dress, with the 'blouse' an integral part.  But the shoulder straps were strange things that started from a front waist button, travelled all the way up over the shoulders and down the back to another waist button.  This looked odd and was obviously going to be infuriating when they continually fell down.  So I opened up the seam at the bottom of the 'blouse' and tucked the straps into the seam at the front and back, and closed it up again.  It works quite well now.  I am a bit annoyed at the obviously crooked placement of the gingham in the bodice, which makes the waist look like it's crooked even though it's not.  But there's no way to fix it without major surgery so I've just left it.  I like the dress, sort of a vintage vibe.

I found I got on much better with the disposable rectangle mask that I tried, so I've made a simple fabric copy.  I was in the mall again on Thursday to go to the chemist, and there were more people wearing masks and some signs outside shops asking that customers wear them.  But I've a couple of friends who work in retail and they both had stories about unpleasant customers not wanting to wear masks or use hand sanitiser and taking it out on the shop girls.

I've been procrastinating about studying Japanese much more since returning to work, partly because I've had enough of concentrating on a screen by the end of a work day.  I've bought a Steam game called Learn Japanese to Survive: Kanji Combat in the optimistic hope that it will prove an easier way to learn kanji, or at least a more fun way.  We'll see.

Our pear tree has been shedding more windfalls and the birds have been pecking away at the fruits still on the tree, so I decided to go out and pick everything I could reach.  Before we bought this house (with the pear tree) I didn't know that pears ripen off the tree.  The first year I kept waiting for the fruits to ripen and they just seemed to go from green to rotten in a couple of days on the tree, I thought they would be like apples.  But no, you have to pick them then keep them cool for a period of time and they will then ripen.  Perhaps because the weather has been so changeable, there was much more variation in ripeness this year.  Some were over-ripe, some were ready to be picked, and others were definitely still green.  I brought them all inside regardless to the basement, although I don't know how many we will get through.  DS doesn't like pears and DH is only lukewarm about them.  The last few years I gave away bags of pears to my lace friends when they visited but that isn't an option this year. I don't want to make perry or chutney, so I end up making pies until even I am sick of them.  Oh, and it turns out that encouraging our climbing rose to scramble charmingly through the branches of the pear tree was not the best idea in the world:  my arms are all scratched up now by rose thorns.  May have to re-think that one.