Wednesday 14 October 2020

Everything I Need

 I haven’t been doing very much since the pandemic started back in March, but to tell the truth I didn’t do too much before the pandemic. I guess you might say I have been in training for the pandemic since I retired, I am highly experienced at isolation and frittering away hours and hours every day.

 

To the people who say that they have watched everything that there is to watch on Netflix, I say you just aren’t trying hard enough. I haven’t even scratched the surface of Netflix’s content and I watch far too much TV. Oh, there is regular TV as well that has a backlog of 70 years of programming that is still or could still be relevant. Don’t even get me started on all of those DVD’s that are lurking in my house and at the library.

 


Yes, I know that some of you are really, really, really missing sports programming, but not nearly as much as the team owners are missing the billions of dollars they are losing by not having seasons or having half assed seasons. I don’t know why they just don’t play seasons from the sixties or seventies. Only the old farts have seen those games and you can’t tell me that anyone remembers the entire NHL season from 1967. Sure, you probably could Google who won which game but you can Google the end of new movies as well and you don’t. Maybe the powers that be are worried that if we get to see sports from bygone days we just won’t be satisfied with the watered down product we get now. I could be wrong.

 


When my mom passed in 2000 we sold the house and I kept certain things that reminded me of her and that I thought I could use. Mom was a very good seamstress and had a very good sewing machine as well as a killer semi-professional ironing board that had a built in water reservoir for the iron and a vacumn that would pull the steam through the fabric to make the iron more effective I suppose. Well, it has been 20 years and neither has been used since returning from Ontario with me. Louise prefers her machine that she has used for years and it has been easier to use the hand held iron that we are used to. A couple of months ago I oiled up Mom's old machine and got it working again. A few weeks back I dropped the old iron on the floor and broke it so rather than buy a new iron I set up mom’s old board.

 


That’s right, I have been teaching myself how to sew. It helps that I can get advice and direction from Louise, but the internet also has an unlimited supply of information just there for the taking. I started sewing things for the shop, a holder for my box end wrenches since the 30 year old plastic one fell apart years ago and I just kept using it. I made some draw string bags for projects that I can’t remember now, but the bags turned out well. Since we are in the middle of a plague I made two plague doctor masks, one dark and one light. They look kind of like the spies in the Spy vs Spy comic. I tried to design a face mask based on a neoprene one I wear on extremely cold winter days. It sort of worked, but didn’t look pretty. I tried variations and found some designs for masks on the internet. With each project my skill improved from terrible to not as terrible and eventually to barely passable. I’ll take it.

 



Some of my jeans needed patching and although Louise is more than happy to fix them I decided that I could probably do it and surprise, surprise I did. The patches aren’t the best, but they are good enough for me. I have an old flannel shirt I wear around the house when I feel a chill but the collar is frayed and there was a tear around the belly. Probably from a knife fight…not because I am too fat. Anyways, I took the collar off, flipped it over and sewed it back on. Voila! It looks new again. Well, it looks like an old shirt that doesn’t have a frayed collar. Patching the rip in the shirt just involved finding a scrap of material that sort of looked like the material in the shirt

 

I found a Youtube video of a 3D face mask that works well for me and looks pretty good. I now have five of them for me, made a couple for the grandkids and even Louise is testing the pattern out to see is she likes the mask. You should give it a try if you are so inclined.

 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh8M8oukXWw

 

Well, time for me to check on the mail and see what pizza joint wants my business and which charity thinks I should give them money. Everybody needs something I suppose. Well, except me, everything I need is either on TV or my computer.

 

 

1 comment:

  1. We have been doing renos throughout the so called lock down, so never bored! I find Netflix very hit and miss. B

    ReplyDelete