Plague diary April 30 -- freezer update

I am happy that so many of my blog readers are getting a laugh or two out of the continuing saga of my new freezer.  Vickie left a comment: "Sorry about your freezer, but thanks for the diversion.  I love following the plot twists."  Robbie commented: "It's no fun for you but it's a fun post to read!!!"  Nancy commented:  "Oh my goodness, I think you must be such fun to hang out with.  You crack me up."  Readers, I didn't want to have all this trouble but I did it just for your pleasure!  So glad it worked.

Previously on Art With a Needle....  On April 10 GE Appliances said I was approved for a buyback, since they had spent a month failing to fix the freezer, and then failing to send me a replacement model.  They would FedEx a check to my local trucking company, which would in turn drive over, hand me the check and take away the freezer.  During the following week I called the trucking company a couple of times to see whether they had received the check and marching orders, but no they hadn't.

Then, surprise!  On April 20, the check came to me in the mail!  Not as promised, but hardly anything GE has done has been as promised.  We were happy.

Then I did something that I probably shouldn't have done.  I decided to wait and see what would happen next.  Would GE's fabulous inventory system even realize that there was a freezer out there needing to be collected?  Since that system could not tell whether a "temp sensor" would be shipped right this very afternoon or be on back order until August, I didn't have high hopes.

Sure enough, a week passed.  Then on this past Monday, April 27, my pal Sandy from Home Depot called me to see how things were going.  She was surprised, but not very, to hear that the check had been mailed instead of brought by the trucking company, and she said she would call somebody and get them moving on coming to get the freezer.

And this afternoon, they came.  The freezer left, and good riddance.   We've decided that pandemic or not, we can indeed live without a freezer in the garage, that the kitchen freezer compartment can indeed hold weeks and weeks worth of food. So much for our experiment in survivalism.

Last week on Art With a Needle

I may have sewed my last mask, and delivered it Sunday afternoon.  And to celebrate, I spent most of the weekend cleaning up my studio.  Not that it will ever get "clean," but all the fabric from the masks has been folded up and put back in the drawers, and lots of other bits and pieces have been sorted and put away.  I'm doing make-work while trying to discern what I want to do next -- sew or make sculpture.  Both of them call to me, but neither voice is loud enough to drown out the other.

Meanwhile I've been doing some hand stitching onto silk scraps, some of them from the kimono project that we did in our local textile art group a couple of years ago.  Here's one piece in progress:

I'm also auditioning some bits and pieces of old textiles for another hand-stitched piece.  When I sent a photo of this composition to my dear friend Uta Lenk last week, she wasn't very impressed.

She wrote back:  "The current setting looks so much like flower pot on the balcony that it's not really Kathy."

I wrote back: "I agree that the quilt and edging are a bit sweetie for my usual style, but you're allowed to change up your style now and then, don't you think?  Maybe I need to make a smaller composition with the quilt block and edging and a little bit of something else, and save the kimono scrap and red doodad for a second piece.  I guess I will let this simmer for a bit." 

She responded:  "I am all for developing new style -- but I think you would want to become more sophisticated and artistic and not revert to making flower pots that look like that quilt block with the basket."

Well, with that resounding vote of no confidence from someone whose artistic judgment I greatly respect, I have removed the bottom half of the composition and am letting the two pieces wait to tell me what they want to do.  I hope one of them speaks up pretty soon because I need another hand-stitching project.  We have piled up some TV shows that I want to watch upstairs with Ken, not down in the studio, so I need something to do while watching.

No, you can't be art after all

Several years ago I got the idea to save the empty prescription bottles that had finished their careers of keeping us alive.  I had a vague idea that I would assemble them into a huge sculpture, with all their different sizes and shapes (because god knows we have gone through a huge variety of medications since starting to get old).  I even tried holding some together with wire, after putting holes in the bottles with an awl.  Which turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it was going to be, because prescription bottles are apparently designed to withstand earthquakes, tsunamis and chain saws.  The art project never has materialized, but the prescription bottles keep piling up.

Does this remind you of any art projects that may be resisting arrest in your own studio?  Have you ever put things away for a specific purpose -- or maybe just a vague idea -- that never happened?  I think we all have UFOs sitting there out of gas.  A lot of people feel compelled to finish them, even if they don't want to.  My friend Robin is in a group that has pledged to finish a UFO every month, on pain of financial penalty if they don't meet their deadlines!

I think this is kind of a dumb idea, with all due respect to Robin.  Yes, I have frequently put projects aside because they aren't coming along properly, or I get tired of them, and sometimes when I run into them months or years later they call out to me to be finished.  Sometimes the idea that eluded me so long ago springs to mind.  Sometimes the thought of mindless but useful sewing appeals, if my emotional state needs mindless but useful sewing.  But I firmly do NOT believe that there is a moral obligation to finish everything you start.

Especially as you get older.  Understanding that you have a limited number of days of art left in your life, do you want to spend them finishing up some ugly damn quilt or stupid knitting that arguably you should have known better than to start in the first place?  Or do you want to spend them making something that will stretch your abilities, challenge your creativity, and give you pleasure in the task?  I go for the second door.

I kept saving those prescription bottles, though, even while admitting intellectually that the huge sculpture project probably wasn't a good idea, and that I didn't even much want to do it any more even if I could figure out a plan.  The process of saving the bottles had taken on a life of its own.

Then yesterday my daughter-in-law sent me a text:  "Do you have any empty prescription bottles we can have?  A friend of ours is collecting them for part of a service project."  Well, did she come to the right place!

Seems the friend, a pharmacist, is assembling care packages for elderly people in food/pharmacy deserts.  They're putting OTC medications like aspirin, allergy and heartburn remedies, purchased in bulk, into the bottles to distribute.

Here's what I  have collected so far:

I suspect there are that many again more stashed in other places in the studio.  I will resume the search.

Update:  I found more:

Plague diary April 23

It's been five weeks today since we decided to not go anywhere that we would run into other people.

There are a few things that I like about being locked down.  Such as being able to stay up late and sleep in as late as I like.  In fact, I've been getting extremely restful and satisfying sleep throughout the plague time, plus not a single nightmare or disturbing dream about getting sick.  And I think that scam telemarketing calls are down, probably because scamsters can't trust their employees to work at top efficiency if they're not right there in the boiler room.

But of course there are things I don't like.  Top of the list is not being able to see the grandchildren, although the other day I returned some empty tupperware, sat on the porch swing while the kids played in the front yard and chatted at a distance with son and daughter-in-law.  That was nice, but not as nice as hugs and kisses.

I realize that I really dislike not being able to go grocery shopping.  At first in the lockdown my sons went to the store for me, and might call or text from the store to ask whether 2% milk was OK since there was no skim, but that stopped when they want into lockdown as well and we all started to use the grocery store pickup.  Which didn't always deliver what we ordered, and sometimes delivered what we didn't order (mixed nuts with "less than 50% peanuts," yuk).

But I like to shop for groceries as targets of opportunity.  I like to check the leftover bins, where yesterday's ground beef is marked down, and the getting-old produce is put at random into 99-cent bags.  That's when I might decide to buy five bags of getting-old apples to make a pie and some applesauce, or two bags of getting-old avocados, to eat one of at every meal till they run out.  Sometimes the red peppers look fabulous (buy a half dozen) and sometimes they look limp and pathetic (buy zero).  And if I'm not in a hurry, I like to go slowly up and down the aisles to see what looks good that I forgot to put on my list, or didn't realize that I wanted till I see it.  You can't do this with Kroger Click Pick.

from the fruit stand, chosen by ME!!!

I have been violating my orders (from my sons, not from the health department) and have made two trips to the fruit stand and one to the butcher in the last five weeks.  Wearing my mask and standing far from others.  But I'm really jonesing for a trip to the big grocery.  They have geezer time for an hour every morning, where just old people are admitted.  Some of my friends, even older than I am, go to the grocery regularly and so far seem to be uninfected, but I'm resisting so far.

Plague diary April 17 -- freezer update

When I last shared the story of my new freezer, two and a half weeks ago, GE Appliances had promised to send me a new freezer in place of the one we just bought but did not work properly.  It was going to be delivered on April 7.  At the time, I wrote "seeing will be believing."  Oh, what a cynic I am, to doubt the promises of a major American manufacturer.

(Well, actually, it's a major Chinese manufacturer, who bought the appliance division four years ago, but kept the GE name because it's so well known and trusted.)  (Right.  As my new best friend Sandy, the appliance expediter at Home Depot said to me recently on the phone, "I hate GE.")

Guess what -- no freezer on April 7.  I will spare you the gory details of my many calls and emails with GE's "customer service" people.  I will hint that they changed their story multiple times, they lied to Sandy about what they had told me a couple of days previously, they contradicted their very own emails from the week before which were still appended to the new email.

still in garage

A week ago Sandy extracted a promise, confirmed in an email to me from Andre at GE, that "in about 5 business days" the local trucking company would show up at my door with a check for $857.65 and take the freezer away.  (Well, actually he promised Sandy "three to five business days," but you know how these promises work.)  And today -- guess what -- the trucking company has not received the check and therefore has not scheduled a time to come get my freezer.

But I have both made and lost friends in this process!  First I thought I had made friends with Deshalique at GE, when she found the hard-to-get temp sensor in her secret warehouse and had it shipped to me that very afternoon!!  Then, after she refused to answer my emails, not to mention not having the part shipped, I sadly decided she was not my friend after all.  When GE send me a survey to complete about whether I would recommend GE appliances to my friends, and how would I rate my recent interaction with my case manager, I was able to rat her out by name, the only fun I've had in a while.

Then I made friends with Sabrina at GE, who promised to deliver the replacement freezer on April 7.  Since she wasn't my real case manager, she didn't have the opportunity to refuse to answer my emails wondering why it hadn't been delivered, so maybe she's still my friend despite not coming up with a freezer.

But Sandy is still and always my friend.  When GE stopped talking to me Sandy was able to get through and negotiate on my behalf.  And she always calls me back within a couple of hours to report on what she has accomplished!  I think that when and if the freezer departs, I will take Sandy some cookies, or maybe a personalized face mask.

And now I have made friends with Brian at the trucking company, with whom I chat every now and then to learn that GE has not sent the check yet.

UPDATE 1:  Sandy followed up with GE and called me an hour ago to keep me posted.  She reports that although Andre told us the truck would be here with a check in five days, he wasn't exactly telling the truth.  In fact, GE didn't approve the check until day before yesterday, so maybe a week more.  

UPDATE 2:  Vicki left a comment on this post asking whether we could get a chargeback on the credit card instead of waiting for the GE check.  Yes, that would be the simplest way to do it, but apparently simplest is not the way GE does business.  And I hesitate to even try to suggest this to GE.  I did wonder whether we could postpone paying MasterCard until we actually got the check from GE, but MasterCard is so swamped with calls that the robosystem wouldn't even put me in a queue to talk to a human being, just hung up on me.

Plague diary April 13

I started out the pandemic believing, thanks to diligent research, that fabric face masks weren't effective against viruses.  Then as time passed, conventional wisdom pivoted in the face of adversity and guess what, fabric face masks are wonderful.  So I have been sewing masks for friends and family for a couple of weeks now.

This week PYRO Gallery, the artist cooperative that I am a part of, decided to launch a Go Fund Me campaign to help pay the rent while we're closed.  We haven't been able to open the gallery in a month, and of course don't know when that will end.  The show that was supposed to be up now, in which each of the 18 PYRO artists invited a guest to exhibit, was canceled a month ago.  The show that's supposed to open in early May is probably not going to happen.

And then in mid-June, my solo show is supposed to start, but I don't think the chances are good for that schedule to hold.  (And I'm not sure I want it to... the thought of a big opening reception and gallery talk and workshop is kind of frightening.)

As part of the Go Fund Me, I offered to make face masks as a premium for any donation over $50, and already I have a dozen orders to fill.  So I'm back in the studio sewing.  Decided to upgrade my mask ties from the 1970s bias binding to fancy material, since the masks are advertised as super-duper special unique artist-made, so this afternoon I'm folding and pressing strips while watching trash TV.

If you'd like a super-duper special unique artist-made mask for your very own, we'd be very grateful for your support of PYRO Gallery.  The coronavirus is laying waste to so much that we love, and I hope that our art will survive and prosper when we come out the other side of the pandemic.