Beans and Beasties and Gas Tanks

Some of the bean starts are now big enough to put out, so yesterday morning I planted the pole beans around a bamboo teepee and transplanted a row of dry beans. The husband and I ate the first three ripe strawberries and he grudgingly admitted that maybe the red rocks were working. I weeded a bit more in the potato patch, serenaded by the low hum of bees on the plants that are blooming. Everything is looking really good.

The husband spent the day on a car repair project. Ali has a friend named Sarah who stays with her occasionally. Sarah lives in NYC but works with an outdoors-related company, so when she is out in this part of the country, she uses Ali’s place as a home base. We’ve known her for a couple of years. Sarah has a GMC Yukon that was leaking gas, so the husband said he would work on it. (He seems to have begun his car repair business fixing vehicles for people named Sarah.) Sarah brought the car over around 9 am. She had asked if she could help and learn along the way. It took two hours for them to get the tank off the Yukon before they could even replace the part.

I like to watch the husband work, and Sarah is a lot of fun to talk to, so I kept popping in and out of the shop between other tasks. That dark circle in the middle of the tank is the top of a pump, badly corroded by road salt, and that is where the leak was. Sarah brought a replacement pump with her, but the auto parts store had given her the wrong one. She called them and did some sweet talking and they agreed to drive out the correct part and exchange it. “We normally only do this for commercial mechanics,” they told her. I would argue that the husband has reached that level.

Replacing the pump was relatively straightforward, but then they had to get the tank back onto the Yukon. That took a bit of wrestling.

The Yukon was running again by dinnertime. The husband set Sarah up with the sprayer that he uses to spray lanolin on the underside of his trucks to keep them from rusting from the road salt. Hopefully that will help to slow down any further damage.

I worked on my stack of canvas grocery bags on the 1541. I successfully wound some bobbins, threaded the machine, and got the bobbin case seated correctly. Thank goodness for those Juki Junkies videos. Literally all the manual says is “Be sure you put the bobbin case back in correctly,” accompanied by a very poor line drawing. The video points out markings on the flywheel—not mentioned anywhere in the manual—and indicates how to line them up so the bobbin case clicks into place.

I sewed for about an hour and felt much more comfortable with the machine by the end of that time. It is still a Beastie, but a friendly one. And it feels good to have some of these projects moving through the queue. Those grocery bags have always been very popular—I still get requests for them.

The schedule is open for the next couple of weeks. As long as I stay on top of weeding and watering, I should have plenty of time to knock some of these sewing projects off the list. It’s amazing how much I can get done when I’m not distracted by other stuff. The word “no” has been very useful this year.