Diminishing Returns — Janet Szabo

One of our favorite social critics is James Howard Kunstler. When we first ran across his work, he fell squarely into the category of “doomer porn,” predicting the decline of western civilization in both his non-fiction commentary (The Long Emergency, Too Much Magic) and his fiction series World Made by Hand. It’s interesting to me that in the intervening dozen years or so, he has started to sound less and less like a lunatic as his prognosticating lines up more closely with reality.

[You may attribute that to confirmation bias on my part, and I won’t dispute that it is important not to fall prey to searching for narratives that prop up one’s world view, but I will also note that more than a few people have voiced to us that their backup plan is to come to our house should things start to go south.]

In any case, JHK often talks about the diminishing returns of technology and the false belief that we can “technology” our way out of any predicament. I got off the IT expressway a long time ago, but I have kept up with enough of it that I can build websites, manage the networks here and at church, and find fixes when stuff stops working, which lately seems to be happening at an ever-increasing rate.

And as the person sewing on 50+ year-old sewing machines, including treadles, I am swimming against the tide of disposability. I would much rather fix something than buy new. (I finally did buy myself a new wool peacoat after fixing my old one twice and getting a couple extra years out of it, but I am keeping it as my “barn coat.”) It annoys me when things are not repairable, and it annoys me even more when things are not repairable because they were designed that way.

We have large-screen TV in our living room. I was trying to do that math the other day to figure out how old it is. I remember that my mother bought it for us for Christmas the year that DD#1 was a freshman in high school, which would make it 13 years old. It’s a dinosaur in electronic years. Interestingly, the motherboard went out while it was still under warranty, and HP sent two techs out here to fix it. (They did replace just the motherboard, not the whole TV.) Since then, it has worked perfectly. I have no plans to replace it. We also have the TV that DD#1 purchased when she was in grad school. We’re keeping it until she moves out of the 500 square foot apartment where she is currently living. That TV is upstairs.

A few years after we got the TV, we got a Roku box. The Roku box also has worked fine until recently, when YouTube stopped loading. The husband loves YouTube, so this constitutes a crisis in our house. Deleting and restoring the channel to the Roku feed worked the first few times, but last week, YouTube stopped working again and nothing I did fixed the problem. (I contemplated hooking up the old laptop to the TV so we could watch YouTube that way, but I couldn’t find the laptop-to-TV HDMI cable and that wouldn’t have been a good long-term solution anyway.) While we were talking through possible fixes, the husband asked me to research YouTube TV. We’re paying for DISH and there is virtually nothing on it that we watch regularly. I realized that we could get YouTube TV for less than we’re paying for DISH and it would include ESPN, which would allow us to watch Monday Night Football. I signed up for a YouTube TV trial, but when I went to the Roku box to add the channel to our feed, it wouldn’t show up.

[Every part of your house—or your house’s electronics—is connected to every other part of your house. Change things at your peril.]

I concluded that our Roku was too old and needed to be replaced, so yesterday, I stopped in at Best Buy and had a chat with the sales guy. He was actually very helpful. I explained the situation and we talked through the options. I could have purchased either a legacy Roku box or one of the new ones designed to work with the new 4D TVs. I asked him to verify that the new Roku boxes were backwards-compatible with dinosaur-aged TVs because I did not want to buy a legacy Roku box only to have our old TV die, necessitating the purchase of a new TV AND a new Roku box. (A lot of the newer TVs have the streaming devices built in, which is nice, but we’d be paying for it one way or another.)

I came home and got the Roku boxes set up on both TVs. Everything worked. Everything worked until I switched the TV to the antenna input so I could watch the local Montana PBS station. They were having a Sewing with Nancy (Zieman) marathon on the anniversary of her death. After dinner, when we switched back to the Roku, there was no sound. There was no sound from the DISH input, either. There was sound on the PBS station coming over the antenna. I monkeyed with the settings for a bit and finally unplugged the whole system for five minutes, after which we had sound again. One of my tasks today is to figure out is 1) Is this going to happen every time I switch to watching PBS on the antenna? and 2) Can I find a workaround?

I think we’re going to ditch DISH in favor of YouTube TV. If the sound problem is not fixable on the downstairs TV, then we’ll move that one to our bedroom and put the newer TV in the living room. I am a bit worried about losing PBS though; it’s not included with YouTube TV so the only way I could watch it without DISH would be on the antenna.

This shouldn’t be so difficult. Honestly, if it weren’t for YouTube, we probably wouldn’t watch anything except maybe PBS. Even the local news is awful. We used to be able to pick up the Spokane news and PBS stations on the antenna, but ever since the switch to digital signals, we can’t get them anymore, even with the antenna mounted 40 feet up on the top of the roof.

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I tried sewing the industrial hook-and-loop tape to the expansion gussets I made for the husband’s gaiters, but the machine balked. No surprise there. I suggested he keep the adhesive hook-and-loop tape on the expansion pieces until I can find some regular sew-in tape, and just to be careful about unhooking it. The adhesive is strong enough that the tape should stay attached for a short time, at least.

And I am again repairing his Milwaukie heated vest. The battery pack was rubbing against the Leatherman holster on his belt and wore holes in the both the vest lining and the pocket lining. (My suggestion to move the Leatherman holster was not met with enthusiasm.) The first fix—interfacing to patch the hole and an iron-on patch on top of that—only lasted about as long as I thought it would, which wasn’t long. Last night, I went stash diving and found a remnant of black nylon. I am now handsewing black nylon patches over the holes. I need two patches to cover the hole in the pocket lining from both sides and one larger piece to cover the hole in the vest lining. Getting into that pocket lining was fun, let me tell you. My fingers looked like a pincushion when I was done sewing the first patch because I accidentally stabbed myself so many times.

The nylon they used for the vest lining is simply too thin. It’s what you might use to line a skirt. What they needed to use was something the weight of the nylon I’m using to patch the holes. Ripstop would be even better. I hope this fix lasts a bit longer; if it doesn’t, he’s going to have to get another vest (and move his Leatherman holster). I can only do so much, and I don’t think I want to rip out and replace the entire lining.

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The French terry I ordered came on Friday. It’s all washed and ready for cutting. Joanns had all their thread on sale yesterday—buy three, get three free—so I took advantage of the opportunity to stock up on some serger thread. I’ll have a marathon cutting session and then set up an assembly line so I’m changing thread colors as little as possible.

I whipped up another reversible apron on Thursday:

This is the Mary Mulari pattern that I used for Marcie’s apron and for my chicken apron, but I am changing and refining a few things as I go along. I had enough of this chunk of chemistry-themed fabric to make a pillowcase and an apron. One of the women who is part of the Mountain Brook Craft Co-op—which has a big sale every September at our church—invited me to come to their Thursday gatherings and bring my aprons to work on. I may make that one of my goals for this winter.