Stripping the Singer 66

Now we get to find out if Janet has well and truly lost her mind.

Yesterday started out okay and went a bit sideways. I was in town by 8 a.m. getting a rock chip—the fifth, but who’s counting?—repaired in my windshield. Something about the angle of the windshield in the BMW makes it prone to attracting rocks, but fixing chips is free and replacing a windshield is not, so I get them fixed as soon as they happen. I was back home in the garden by mid-morning when my cell phone rang. It was our banker from the bank in town where we keep the husband’s business accounts. He has been our banker forever and he likes to check in periodically, but he said he was calling because of some suspicious attempts to get into our account through online banking. I said, “Hmmm, that’s weird—I got an e-mail this morning from the ISP in town letting me know that someone had tried to get into the husband’s e-mail account.” We chatted a bit longer and the woman in charge of online banking (who was also on the call) said she would change the online banking password for me and put an alert on it to monitor for any additional activity.

[I am very careful with our passwords. I use separate ones for e-mail, for banking, and for other websites, and the ones for banking are generated randomly. I never log into online banking from my phone or from a computer outside of the house. The husband doesn’t do any online banking. No one had yet hacked into anything, but my index of suspicion was rising rapidly.]

I came into the house to find a message on the answering machine from Chase Card Services for DD#2. I took down the information and texted her. It turns out that Discover Card had also contacted her about an attempt to open a card in her name. She contacted the bank where she has her account and credit card and found out that they had locked her account because someone calling from a Spokane phone number had contacted them, trying to get access at 2:30 a.m. Monday morning.

I spoke to our bank again; they also confirmed that the hacking attempts were coming from a Spokane phone number. I am going to try to collect all of that information and hand it over to the Spokane police department. The fact that both DD#2 and the husband’s business account are being targeted narrows things down quite a bit. Only one business would have both DD#2’s contact information and the husband’s bank account number and e-mail information and it just so happens to be in Spokane. We have a separate account at a different bank for our household expenses and anything having to with DD#2—with that one exception—would come from that bank and have my name on it.

All appropriate precautions have been taken and everything is locked down for the moment. And nothing would make me happier than to find out that this low-life scum received a visit from the Spokane PD.

But now we get to the fun part of the day. I decided that there was no time like the present to work on stripping a sewing machine, so I went down to the basement and looked over my collection of machines and chose this one:

It’s a Singer 66. The paint on the bed is already chipped and the decals are silvered and not worth saving.

This makes it an excellent candidate for a repaint, which is probably the reason I acquired it in the first place.

I put a table out on the gravel driveway and covered it with a cloth, then put down a foil tray down and set the machine in it to catch any drips. I am using CitriStrip to strip the paint. It’s supposed to be less toxic than other strippers. It’s a thick gel that gets painted on:

The directions say to let it sit up to 24 hours. I started checking after about two hours and the paint was starting to come off the bed fairly easily. Other parts of the machines are going to take a bit longer and/or a second application.

[The mail lady pulled in to deliver a package and was very interested in what was happening.]

I haven’t decided yet what the next steps will be once I get the paint off. I could try to repaint it myself or perhaps find a body shop that’s willing and have them do it. Don’t expect to see a lot of rapid progress—this is a long-term project that may show up now and then as things get done.

The broody Black Australorp is still parked in the nesting box, although I went in the other day to feed the chickens and found this:

I am surprised that the Black Australorp allowed this. And it’s one of the Leghorns, which are totally devoid of any maternal instincts whatsoever. The Leghorn wasn’t in the box for very long. The chickens do this quite a bit, despite the fact that there are 13 other perfectly good nesting boxes in the coop. Sometimes I’ll find three of them trying to squeeze into the same box.

The husband reminds me that they have brains the size of peas and I shouldn’t expect too much. I’ll be thrilled if we even get one chick.