Pork, Elk, and Another Kind of Animal

Tera went above and beyond yesterday and helped me with picking up and delivering pork. I had driven up to the processor on Monday afternoon and picked up our personal order, but the BMW is not a truck and I really shouldn’t treat it like one. Unfortunately, the husband was trying to get some concrete pours done while the weather was nice and was unavailable to retrieve the rest of the pork. My old red truck has the plow and chains on it, so I couldn’t drive that. Tera borrowed her husband’s full-size pickup and we made a field trip of it. (Some of the pork we were picking up belonged to them, and she’s helped me before.)

The day was lovely and sunny and we had the chance to do some visiting on the way. We had lunch back here in Kalispell, and by the end of the afternoon, all the pork was delivered. We even got to see a herd of elk!

As I was leaving Tera’s, I got a text from the husband: “Do you want me to stop and pick up your quilting machine on my way home?”

[I said to Tera, “Why is this even a question?” LOL]

I called the store to let them know he would be stopping in so they wouldn’t ask him if he was lost. (That has happened before when he’s gone into fabric stores looking for me.) He got home about 10 minutes after I did, with the table and machine on the back of his truck. The store sold me a new-in-the-box machine, but the table was the already-assembled floor model. Getting everything into the house took some doing. He pulled the forklift over and we rolled the machine from the back of the truck onto a platform so he could lower it to the porch. Unfortunately, the table was wider than the kitchen door, so he had to get underneath the table and unscrew the top.

I had planned to put this machine upstairs in the spare bedroom, but that room is small with poor lighting. After some consideration, I decided to put it here in my office. I have an L-shaped desk for my Mac. When I started doing transcription, we added another desk at right angles to it—to make a U shape—for the PC. I haven’t used the PC in over six months, so I took it down. We removed the desk and scooted the Necchi industrial treadle table over into that spot. That left a large enough space by the window for the Bernina Q20 and table.

The husband reassembled the table in that spot. We were both tired and hungry, and I would have been willing to wait to set up the machine. However, he likes to finish a job once it’s started. I should have taken some “unboxing” pictures, but we just opened the box and went for it. And now I have this:

In my head, I keep referring to this machine as “The Beast,” because it’s huge. This is a great spot for it, though, because the overhead lighting in my office is excellent. That’s an east-facing window, so the only sunlight it gets is early in the morning, and not much because of the mountains and the covered porch. The table is on casters and can be rolled out with the extensions up when I’m working on a quilt. It also has a hydraulic lift, so I can work sitting down or standing up. And we still have room for guests upstairs.

I am going to attempt to be disciplined today and cross off the rest of the tasks on my to-do list before I sit down to do any quilting. I am looking forward to getting through the backlog of quilt tops, though, and expanding my machine quilting skills in the process.

Tera and her husband are building a timber-frame barn and the husband will be doing the concrete slab some time in the next few weeks. I will take pictures of that pour when it happens.