on beyond "darn it"

I had thought my mending expertise fizzled out around button replacement. I grew up thinking of laundry, ironing, mending, and all those obscure fabric things as needing to be snatched out of my hands before I ruined them. Now I do laundry routinely. I have even been known to iron sometimes, for special occasions. I just darned something successfully. (Not a sock, part of a very lightweight cotton outfit I was very fond of, that has been out of commission since snagging on claws last summer.) Well, more or less triumphantly. It's a bit lumpy. But the busy pattern hides it, and the outfit will be wearable the next time I want to dress up in 90 degree weather.

I am feeling triumphant enough to consider approaching other kinds of mending. Maybe even alteration. I want to put a drawstring in a pair of pajama pants that are too big for me. (Currently, they have an elastic waist, and no accomodation for a drawstring.) Should I just fold over the waistband? Are there good websites or books with instructions for this sort of thing?

did I miss something?

By this time, I should be accustomed to Aubrey-Maturin books ending with a bit of a thump. There's a huge complicated buildup, and then the cliffhanger suddenly resolves at the very end of the book. I finished _The Thirteen Gun Salute_ yesterday, and it didn't seem to follow quite the same pattern. One plot element was resolved well before the end of the book, and another was left hanging, just stranded there like it was going to be resolved in the next book. Ok...I am with these guys for the long haul, so I can be [a little] patient.

This morning, I started _The Truelove_. After setting the scene (back on the Surprise) there was a rather entertaining infodump about Stephen's adventures with a platypus, but no hint of how our shipmates had managed to escape their predicament off Batavia. WTF? And furthermore. Huh?