Ah, gentle reader. My impending layoff is yet an impending layoff, which puts one in an unsettled and grim mood as do current events taking place across the country and around the world. So what should one do? One does what one can. One leaves the desk and leaves the computer and leaves the house once in a while. And one makes silly shows of economizing in relatively low impact areas. Not eat beef at every possible meal? Nonsense. I will learn to mend my clothing. Which costs less than a package of Sam’s Club beef when I buy it new at Walmart, and the thread in mending doubles the value of the clothing. Regardless, I will press on.
Overweening first paragraph aside, I have taken a couple minutes to hand-sew a couple of items, but not before putting them on my desk and then moving them around over the course of days or weeks before getting to it. I started with a pair of underwear, an expensive pair of Armachillos that I wear for workouts and which I bought, what, five years ago? The seam at the floor split, probably from friction with the floor of my blue jeans. They are in great shape otherwise, so I had them on my desk for a while until I asked my wife for a spool of thread from her sewing kit. I did adequate work, I’d like to think, but after a couple of washings, I noted the seam was splitting again. Was my work faulty? No! The original seam continued to give way beyond the edge of where my repair stopped.
The second item up was my old Milwaukee Admirals sweatshirt. It’s almost twenty years old–it’s the old logo with the human admiral, not the current skeleton logo that I mocked in 2006. The cuffs and the collar are fraying, but I’m not up to fixing that. I did fix the hole under the one arm–I guess the friction of the cloth rubbing at the armpit causes these holes that are not along the seams? At any rate, it’s good enough to wear out of the house and to pick things off of the top shelf at the grocery. Not for myself; I’m a make-believe miser right now (not even using K-Cups currently, nor Duraflame logs, both dollar-a-day bad habits in 2020 and much more expensive now), and as a make-believe miser, I don’t buy things from the top shelf. But some little old lady might ask me to get something down for her (and suddenly, I find little old ladies flirting with me–what does that say about me?). The sweatshirt lay in many places on my desk and served as such a cat bed for so long that I am pretty sure that I sewed white cat hair into the mending. In part because I’d returned the sewing equipment to my beautiful wife, and the sewing bin disappeared into her office somewhere for a time. But when I found it in a common area, I snagged the dark blue thread and a needle for my office.
The third item had the shortest layover on my desk: A pair of blue jeans. I order cheap Dickies or Wrangler carpenter jeans off of Amazon at $20 (well, more now) each. I used to pick them up at Walmart, but the carpenter jeans are not a popular cut, apparently, and I sometimes couldn’t find any. And as I probably have mentioned, I need carpenter jeans because I have fat thighs (leading to the friction at the bottom). So when another pair of jeans split here (the other common fault is the belt loop at the left rear breaks at the bottom–perhaps because I buy a waist size too large and then cinch the jeans at the waist, perhaps leading to extra stress on the belt loops)–when another pair of jeans split there, I decided to take the one color fits all dark blue spool of thread and fix it. And, gentle reader, I leveled up my mending game by turning the jeans inside out so that the frayed edges would be inside and not outside. Time will tell how long this mending lasts, as I cut the thread so that it was shorter than I liked–I could not go back, tie it off, and then forth and tie it off. Instead, I got back and halfway forth.
Still, unlike the work I do for a living and the blogging I do for “fun,” it was concretely productive. Maybe I will go further and try out the sewing machine I got for Christmas over a decade ago when I saw still stewing in viewing Creative Juice on HGTV. After all, I have lots of wearable LEDs after recent events and projects.
And maybe, just maybe, I am coming out of a screen-and-desk hibernation or coma back into the real world a little bit.
And I would be remiss not to include a video of the lovely Ashley Pezzotti singing “Darn That Dream”:
She has a GoFundMe to crowdsource a new album if you’re so inclined.
