Cars and Sewing Machines

Mother's Day gifts! Sorry the photos aren't better, I just don't have the energy tonight!



Well I have been remiss...no blogging for a week! Busy, busy, busy. The Sailor Son and his family were here for the weekend which kept me busy with preparation, time with them, and then recovering. :-)


The seal of approval on the new car. :-)



I must be getting old. Backyardigans???? .........I'm still mourning Mr. Rogers.


Sailor Son helped us move furniture so the unused "front room" is now a small but functional sitting room and the sitting room end of the kitchen is now a dining area. Getting the sofa from one room to another was a huge challenge. Let's just say it's going to live where it is for a loooong time! LOL I'm not done sorting. Lighting is all wrong, tv cable has to be relocated, shelves are needed, and the top of the sideboard hasn't been moved yet. I also haven't decided which piece of furniture to use as a kitchen "island". The ceiling fans will be changed too. But it's already an improvement.


So I had a couple of days of sorting out the two rooms to get through. I also unpacked a bunch of moving boxes that were still in the "living room". (Yes it's been almost a year!) And now I have all my dolls sorted into "keep" and "sell" piles. Sigh....this will be a really nice room when we find the energy to do it up.


I also unpacked all of our wall "art" and hung a few things. The rest are all either in that mess somewhere or balanced on the not-yet-chosen kitchen island. I've also been doing battle with ants. I made an ant trap out of sugar water and borax soaked cotton balls. I made little holes in the jar lid and the ants are jumping in! Yay!

So I've been busy. Oh! And I received my pincushion in the mail from Nancy! (also a blurry photo...sigh) I needed a place for my T pins. Thank you Nancy!


The big story for today though is about the car and sewing machine....

My new Bernina has been in the shop in Fayetteville for THREE WHOLE WEEKS! Waaaahhhh. I also (shoot me now) had to drive the Highlander back to Fayetteville for the promised new windshield and tires. (why do we have to buy everything so far away??) I managed to arrange all of this for today. I arrived in Fayetteville at 9 am (an hour and a half drive) at the car place. They nicely dropped me at the mall so I wouldn't have to sit there for 4 or 5 hours while the windshield "glue" cured. That was nice.

When I was picked up from the mall I mentioned how much I like the Highlander but that the check engine light had come on this morning. So of course all the men swung into action to figure out what the problem was. (Maybe I was giving out "lady in distress" signals. LOL) The codes pointed to the EVAP system. This is apparently the Evaporative Emission Control System (who knew!). Was the gas cap bad? Was it a valve or a leak? Either way the car was declared to be perfectly drivable. So ok, I would take it to be fixed closer to home. One of the men hadn't given up though and he came back out to fiddle with the gas cap some more and then look under the hood. He waggled around some hoses and things and muttered that it seemed to be ok. So I said, "What about that hose that isn't connected to anything?" LOL It wasn't his fault, he couldn't see it from where he was standing. So he plugged it back in place and all is fixed. Phew.

THEN I went to the Bernina shop. I had been asked to bring along the item I had been sewing on when the machine failed because the tech said it was all up to spec and he couldn't get it to fail. (we won't mention my annoyance that it took three weeks to get to this point, grumble, grumble) He and I and the store owner went back and forth between my machine and an identical one on the sales floor and proved that my machine was really not working properly. But why? We were thinking it was a presser foot issue since it wouldn't sew anything thick and kept signaling that the pressure foot was up. The tech took the cover off the needle/presser foot end of the machine and messed around with it, pushing the lever up and down. Then of course (wait for it), I leaned over his bench and said, "Why isn't that little lever going up and down with the presser foot lever?" Can you guess what's coming? Yep! I was standing in the right place again to see what was going on! After another hour-ish or so it turned out there was actually a spring missing somewhere involving the presser foot. It probably had never been there to begin with. Sheesh. Then he had to rob a spring from another machine. But I finally got to take my machine home!

So all this took me from 7:45 am to 5:30 pm. No wonder my feet hurt! I was standing almost the whole time I wasn't driving!

I think it's high time for some chocolate ice cream with Magic Shell on top!

Nighty night....