killing cats and small children, plus waterproofing

Today I guess I learned that toddlers have higher levels of various toxic chemicals in their blood than their mothers do. Moms are bigger, their detoxification systems are fully developed, and they don't crawl around on carpets and chew on remote controls, so it stands to reason.

In other news, this is about all I know about making waxed canvas, aka tin cloth. If you follow some links, you learn that theoretically you need turpentine as an ingredient and orange oil to cover up the smell of it, so that will not be a recipe I will try when I make the fly for my tent. There is also some possibility I could make waxed nylon, which would be lighter, but all my information is based on a $525 David Chu goose down coat, which really only tells you that, since they're marked down to the low, low price of $209.95, they maybe didn't sell as well as the manufacturer would have liked.