This post started out as a Facebook status update, but I kept wanting to add explanatory details until it ended up too long and unwieldy for my Timeline, so I’m moving it here.
It all started when Elizabeth accidentally left a charger at her dad’s house, and found herself with no way to awaken her comatose laptop for a few days. Like most of us, Elizabeth is brilliant in some ways and clueless in others, and the desperation of being computerless led to…well, some poor choices. She was cranky and difficult and just when I was ready to sell her to the gypsies it was discovered that one of her poorer choices was attempting to use the power adapter from the expensive Yamaha keyboard Luke got for Christmas to charge her laptop. Clearly electronics is one of her “clueless” areas. Anyway, this killed the adapter. So now we had TWO nonfunctioning devices.
There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over Luke’s blown-out adapter, and I was rattling off punishments and whatnot, and then it occurred to me that she’s not a toddler anymore and can actually fix these sorts of problems herself. We went to Amazon.com, found a replacement adapter for about $13, she handed me the money from her savings without complaint, and the three of us considered the matter settled. Yay for kids growing up and becoming responsible for the consequences of their poor choices.
Except! You can’t just make a $13 order on Amazon. I mean, you can, but then you don’t get free shipping, and who wants to pay for shipping if they don’t have to? Besides, I had $42 worth of reward points from my Amazon Chase card on my account, just sitting there waiting to be spent.
My Chase card is a source of moral conflict for me. I mean, Chase is evil, everyone knows that. I know I should close my account with them. But points! Free stuff! Delicious points worth yummy free stuff! So, I keep my Chase card, and use if for everything I buy, and continue to feel morally conflicted about it. Life is complicated.
So anyway, I ended up getting a car charger for my cell, which I’d been needing for a while now, but it wasn’t eligible for free shipping, so I had to keep shopping, and I ended up buying a pair of jeans. I’d never done that online before because you never know how they’re going to fit, but these looked really cute so I took a chance. I had to choose between “long” and “short,” so I picked “long” because lately I’ve been wearing shoes with higher heels when I’m out in public, and some of my jeans are too short to look right with heels.
When the jeans arrived I was thrilled with how well they fit and how cute they look, but — the legs were very much too long. Luckily, thanks to Elizabeth’s interest in sewing, I thought nothing of sitting down and hemming them to the perfect length. I even had the right color of gold thread that Levi’s uses, so it doesn’t look like a homemade job.
Which brings us back to my Facebook update: “I must remember to thank Elizabeth for getting me back into sewing.”
It’s just not the same without the details.
An Invincible Summer 