A Study in Contrasts
I have to admit that I tend to enjoy feeling myself a study in contrasts. I like to think that I enjoy an eclectic set of things. Once, in college, a friend riding in the car with me was looking at my CD collection as we tried to pick out something to play — I know, right, a “CD collection” … not something one would have in the car post-iPod, I suppose — and said to me, “So what kind of music do you like?” “I like some of everything really,” I replied. As ran his finger over the options, he said, “Oh, I see, you don’t know who you are yet …” It rang with a sense of judgment that I wasn’t expecting: what? how do liking lots of musical genres mean I’m not aware of who I am? I still think that’s strange.
But musical tastes aside, I still like to think it. When my washing machine quit working last week, I wondered if I could fix it, but was resigned to the fact that I’d never even see the inside of a washing machine and so probably not. Then today, after a trip to the laundry mat, while throwing the whites in drier at home, I thought, I wonder what it looks like in there. Grabbed the toolboxes and in 5 minutes I had the console apart to see if I could replace the timer mechanism that seemed “broken”. Turns out, “broken” meant that the plastic casing, which was secured to the panel by a single screw, had broken and the screw could no longer hold it to the panel, which mean the knob couldn’t protrude enough to move in and out, and thus turn the machine on or off.
So I thought, “let’s find one of these online and fix this thing!” Let me tell you: that timer contraption is $120.00! WTF? For $400 more I could get a brand new front-loading machine (which I want anyway, so this was not encouraging me to fix the one I have). Then I thought, “hmm, what if I …” and I did. I went to Lowe’s, bought a large washer that would pressure-anchor the remaining piece of plastic to the console. Put it all back together and washed a load of bathmats. Yeah, I’m pretty handy …
Of course, then I come downstairs and remember that I’ve spread out a Simplicity pattern for a child’s Halloween costume so that I can get the fabric and “notions” and begin work on it. So that’s me: repair washing machine, sew a child’s Halloween costume. It’s good not to be condemned by gender stereotypes … this way, I can just do any and everything …
