Like everyone who lives in one of the possible paths of Hurricane Irma, I have been working to prepare for the upcoming weather event. I have extra dog kibble, extra cat litter, plenty of coffee, and I am keeping my car filled with gas.

Yesterday, one of the items on my list of “things that must be done before the hurricane hits” was to donate blood.

As a middle-aged woman I have come to the stark realization that being able to donate blood means you are, on balance, pretty lucky.

It means you are still alive, it means you don’t have any current health problems, and it means that you haven’t had any past health problems that would preclude you donating blood.

So it was with a sense of gratitude that I set out for my 11:45 appointment at the nearby Red Cross donation site; luckily for me, I thought to grab my Kindle on the way out of the house.

After I arrived, I checked in, read the materials I needed to read in the designated reading materials seats, went back to the counter to confirm that I had read the materials, got my sticker, and was then seated in the waiting to donate blood seats where I ended up sitting for quite awhile.

Normally, I would have been grumpy about all the waiting involved, but as I mentioned, I had the Kindle with me, and I was reading Agatha Christie’s “The 4:50 From Paddington: What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw,” and while people often remark on the knitting that takes place in Miss Marple’s adventures, there are references to crochet, my favorite of which was this snippet of a conversation reported to have taken place between Miss Marple and a woman described as an “elderly irascible maidservant:”

“I taught that Miss Eyelesbarrow a crochet pattern what she’d never heard of! Proper grateful she was.”

I continued reading, and about the time Miss Eyelesbarrow found the body, my turn for donation had arrived.

Thirty minutes and a bag of Cheezits later, I was ready to go home, and inspired by the irascible maidservant, I got out my hook and resumed work on one of the Love Across the USA installation squares, enjoying what was left of a mild late summer day.

Here is where I was with it by early afternoon today:

and here it as the afternoon drew to a close:

Curious, I got out one of the other squares I am working on to see how they would look next to each other:

and while these squares will not (when all the squares are finally assembled) be next to each other, the juxtaposition of the two squares gives some sense of the scale of the project, and shows that sometimes the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.