Stuck in the spin cycle
Sometimes the “business “of life can get you stuck in the spin-cycle. You become so busy that you don’t notice what is going on right in front of you. On the treadmill of two jobs, one as a producer for a multi-media company and another sewing production for a dog clothing company, throw in three kids, two not-so-well dressed dogs and a husband who travels and it all makes for an interesting life.
Once when our washing machine was stuck in the spin cycle I spent some time trying to figure out how to get it out of the cycle. I surrendered and called the repair company. The repair man took one look at what was going on and said he would be back after one to two weeks when all of the parts came in. Come to find out the machine’s agitator had torn completely off and caused all of the little bits to get sucked up into it - the washing machine literally had eaten itself sticking the computer in the last state of its failure: the spin cycle.
Mind you, it had been giving us plenty of warning for at least a month of its imminent demise with some very loud grinding noises. Senselessly, instead of investigating we continued to run it and not only that, but, maybe we often put in the heaviest of heavy loads, towels and blankets and maybe sometimes we did it all at the same time; hey life is busy. This caused the agitator which was cracking already to finally come completely off from the weight of the wet and heavy items and then the pump to suck up all of those little bits. Needless to say it was a costly, but lucky for us, a fixable problem. Groan.
My “sewing room” in my old, old tiny house is right out in the open, really though, it is just a space in front of windows in the tiniest of dining rooms and my “space” sits right in the middle of the highway of my family. I have often sewn on deadline with my youngest son winging himself back and forth from one end of the house to the other on his scooter just behind my chair while I patiently chant to myself “It’s not his fault it’s snowing out again!” to keep myself calm.
One early morning, with a deadline looming and the need to get to my day job on time I set the machine in motion to finish a set of doggy coats. Incredulously the machine would sew about an inch before getting totally gnarled and tangled and stuck. I changed bobbins. I changed thread. And, yes, I changed the needle. I hauled the manual out and unscrewed the thread plate and looked inside, blew around, dug out clumps of lint, put it all back together and “NO SEW”! The house empty now of husband and children off to school and work, my head clear, I remembered that one of my kids had been sitting at the machine the night before. All of a sudden I was slapped in the face by my thread tension dial and I realized the sabotage! The kid had been playing with the dials and put the thread tension to “0” and it was now laughing at me for how long it took me to notice.
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