Embroidery, Car Problems, & a Haircut

I had a chance to pick up some embroidery floss yesterday - It's a very interesting story, but we'll get to that in a minute. :)

I told you I was going to work on some embroidery patterns I found at Little Miss Shabby. These will all be made into a quilt, once the year is up and I've gotten all the blocks done. It's a block of the month project, so I won't have all the patterns until December.

There is also a give-away at We Love French Knots, but to be eligible, you have to sew her stitch sampler, so I'm going to work on that too. It has to be done by the 25th of August, I think. No problem, right? I've got all the time in the world.

I had in mind the jewel tone colors I wanted to use for all this embroidery. So I went out to the sewing room (aka garage) to get my grandmother's old basket of embroidery supplies. When I opened it, it was as if the 1970's had come back to life :) The one skein of blue you see there at the top was the only skein that wasn't some shade of harvest orange, avocado green, yellow, red, or brown. Hmm. Not at all what I was going for. And the blue is variegated, which is also not going to help me. My own local quilt shop had such little selection that I only found two colors that would even be usable. So I was thankful to get a chance to get to the store in the bigger town.

These are the colors I was going for. Actually, I hadn't thought about using any purple or bright pink, and I wanted more of a neon/lime green, but this will do.

And now for the very interesting story behind the shopping trip...

It's never a comforting feeling to get a call from your 20 year old son when you know he's on his way home (a 3 1/2 hour drive) in your car, and have the first words you hear be, "First, I want you to know it wasn't my fault." Mind you, this is the same kid who once called to tell me, "Mom, I totaled the car." - which being interpreted, meant, "Mom, I flipped your car end over end, off a bridge, landing the car on it's roof on a very large boulder. And yes, the car really is totaled." (Then he hung up before telling me whether he was okay - which wouldn't have been a problem except for the fact that he had borrowed the phone from a passer-by.) So you can understand my apprehension when the first thing I hear is that whatever has happened wasn't his fault.

Well, thankfully, it was nothing like last time. Instead, one of the back tires had shredded, which resulted in some damage to the fender. (Odd really - the tread came off, but the tire didn't go flat. Never had that happen before).


Okay. Nobody else involved. Car still drivable. My advise... "Well, you know how to change a tire, right?" He did, and made it home safely about an hour later.

Well, that was last weekend. The reason he was driving our car in the first place, is that his own recently purchased car (May) blew a head gasket, so he sold it to the junk yard. He hadn't payed that much for it but it seemed like a decent car. Anyway, it's not wise for him to buy another car right now because he will probably be shipping to a base overseas within the next couple months. So we said (with a little trepidation, given the outcome of the last loaned car, "use ours.")

Fast forward to this weekend. This weekend, he wanted a ride to the Greyhound station so he could go visit a friend across the United States. Literally. He will go from Western Wyoming to Pennsylvania on the bus. (It will take him 2 1/2 days on the bus. Ugh. Not for me, but sounds like an adventure to him.) So we took him there yesterday morning. Now, mind you, there's not a lot of towns in Wyoming. So the nearest bus station is 100 miles from here. But then, so is the nearest Walmart, so it wasn't that big of a problem. After all, we needed a new tire ;) so off to Walmart we went.

Instead of buying one tire, we decided to buy two. (The other two have been recently replaced). Wow this is getting wordy... Anyway, I decided that I hate Walmart. Big news, eh? No, more accurately, I hate how people behave (or don't) in Walmart. People were blocking aisles, cutting in front of us, running into us, pulling out of aisles right in front of us without even looking, letting their kids run and scream through the store and not even noticing them, etc, etc. I was SO ready to get out of there. And the amount we spent. There were less than ten things on our list, but $150 later, we left with an overflowing cart... not including what we spent at the pharmacy... or on the tires. Oh yeah, and did I mention that once we got back home (100 miles, remember) we found out that the geniuses at Walmart gave us the wrong size tires. ARGH. Now the car will be out of commission for the next 10 days until we have to go back to the bus station for the 20 year old. Good thing we were planning on going back there soon. Sometimes it's months in between trips.

Now really, in the scheme of life, it isn't that big of a deal that we are without the car for another week. Thankfully we have Old Blue for my husband to drive while the car is out of commission. But it's just frustrating that people can't do the job right the first time. After all, this is what you are paying them for, right? Not to mention, when we called to inform them of the problem, the lady who answered the phone told us that we were the third customer THAT DAY to have the SAME problem! I really think they need a better system... or to hire someone who can read.

In other news, the 20 year old volunteered to cut the 7 year old's hair before he left town. This picture was taken midway through the process.

He did a really good job.

I thought this was a funny picture. Not sure what the arms crossed across the chest was all about, but he sat that way - looking like he was in a great deal of pain - through the whole process.

Anyway, it came out nice, and I didn't have to do it :) I didn't even have to clean up the hair, which is always my least favorite part! Now, to just get to doing my husband and the 2 year old's hair...