Casualties of War

 You ever have one of those days when no matter what you try, everything just seems to go wrong? I’ve had one of those…ok, I’ve had half of one of those. It started out pretty good. My sweetie doesn’t usually work on Fridays, so he was home. When the kids got home from school we decided to take them all on a short adventure (since we had football practice to worry about). We piled them in the van and headed to the athletic store to pick up the Dog Walker’s brand new letterman’s jacket.

Then we drove up to Cookies by Design to get our free sugar cookies on a stick that we earned because we read some books this summer…like they have to reward us for reading…we love to read! Those eleven cookies retail for something like $75. Then we drove back to Chick Fil A and fed the entire family for $3.99. I know, I’m cool like that…I can show you the receipt. Six kids meals, two chicken salads, two large drinks, two 8-piece nuggets and two large fries. So up to that point all was going well, fantastic, really.

But things went downhill fast. I have an embroidery machine and occasionally I take on some small jobs that bring in a few extra dollars. My sweetie spent half of last weekend digitizing a custom pattern and I had 8 shirts that needed this logo. So my sweetie and the kids all waved goodbye as they headed downstairs to watch a movie so I could work in peace. They even brought me a little bag of tootsie rolls as a consolation prize for my good responsible behavior.

Things were rolling along just fine. Each shirt takes about 20 minutes to embroider, so sometimes if I’m not too paranoid I can multi-task a little. I had just gotten my serger back from the repair shop after five weeks and $120.00, so I decided to check it out to make sure it worked. I hemmed a few pairs of pajama pants for Sport while randomly watching the logos appear on the embroidery machine. I enjoyed a couple of tootsie rolls and then re-hooped the machine for the next shirt.

I stitched all of Sport’s scout patches on his vest. This was pretty frustrating because the thread kept breaking and I started over at least a dozen times. The embroidery pattern completed, so I re-hooped the next shirt and turned back to the sewing machine. Suddenly the needle broke! I pulled it from the patch and tossed it in the garbage. Then I put in a new needle and proceeded to rethread. After about a dozen stitches, the entire post holding the sewing foot detached itself from the machine! I’ve sewed for many years and never had a calamity like that. I helplessly studied the pieces. I guess that meant another trip to the repair shop.

That’s about when the embroidery machine decided it was tired and wanted to quit for the night. It stopped right in the middle of the pattern and refused to go further! (I guess I know how it feels…) I gave it a breather for about 20 minutes and then got it to sew a few stitches before I ran out of bobbin thread. I pulled off the hoop, re-threaded the bobbin, then the machine, and got a few more stitches.

Forty-five minutes later, I finally coaxed the machine to finish the design. Sadly, I’ll get to miss the fun tomorrow too because I still have two shirts to finish. See what all this frustration can cause? Besides that, I pretty much ate the entire bag of little tootsie rolls. Casualties of war, I guess.