Horn MultiLift 6000: 252 Pounds of Pure Quilting Bliss

Posted by Nadine

For many years–okay, for all the years that I’ve been quilting–I’ve wished for a table that was specially made for sewing machines, where my machine would sit down in the table so that the machine bed was level with the table top. I think this can be so much better for machine quilting, though obviously, I’ve been getting along just fine without this table for 20 years! Still, most of the reason that I didn’t ever invest in such a table was because we were living in Germany, and that kind of furniture wasn’t all that readily available there, and what there was seemed a lot more expensive than what you could get here in the US at the time.

As soon as I was partially settled in the new house though, I started thinking about that table, and looking around to see what was available these days. Of course, the first thing I found that I was really excited about was a bit bittersweet.

Awesome table, but when I called the local Horn of America dealer to check on pricing, the conversation went something like this:

Me: Can you tell me the price on the Horn MultiLift 6000 please?
Dealer: Sure, just a sec. Hmm, yes, the MSRP on that is five thousand—something something something (she said exactly what the MSRP was, but I quit listening at the five thousand part).
Me: Oh, okay. (rather weakly…)
Dealer: However, we always sell for 25% off the MSRP so that would actually be three thousand, eight hundred—something something. (yeah, I quit listening again…).
Me: Ah, hmmm. Continue reading →

An Interesting Place

Posted by Nadine

By way of a little “touching base/checking in” type post, I find myself in an interesting place at the moment, both literally and figuratively:

Augusta is an interesting place. So far, we really like it here, high pollen counts and high temperatures notwithstanding. We’re not actually in Augusta, but in a smaller town just outside of it. It’s a nice area, and most things I need or want to do are within a few minutes from the house, and I very quickly embraced the idea that anything over ten miles away is “too far” and even five miles is pushing it. The Augusta area is big enough to have a nice mall with a Dillard’s and a Macy’s (which is almost “too far” it must be said), but not big enough for a Nordstrom or Neiman Marcus, and I’m okay with that. If it was that big, it would be too big like Atlanta, and I don’t think I’d like living there. Augusta seems just right.

Our house is an interesting place. For that matter, so is home ownership. You see, I’ve never owned a house before, and it still feels a bit…strange…somehow. It’s all ours, and we can do what we like with it, and we don’t have to put up with strange landlords or worry about what issues or faults might become evident as time goes on that perhaps weren’t apparent when we moved in or that the landlords didn’t want to tell us about. The house itself is wonderful, and I’m still amazed that I found it. I think I fall in love with it a little more as each week passes. We love the neighborhood, all three streets of it, and our neighbors are nice and quiet and nearly invisible, just the way we like to be. Every once in a while though, I still stop and think about how weird it is to have our own house, and maybe have a few roots starting to set themselves into the ground finally. Continue reading →

No Complaints Here…Well, Maybe Just One

Posted by Nadine

As some of you may know, I’ve wanted to move back to the US for a number of years. Honestly, fear was probably what kept us here. Fear of the unknown, fear of the little hell that is moving your entire life from one continent to another (it wasn’t fun the first time, it isn’t fun this time, and let me tell you, I’m never doing this again), fear of buying a house (though more accurately, fear of not being able to afford to buy the kind of house that we wanted).

Despite all those fears, I still wanted to be back in the States, I just wasn’t looking forward to getting there and the whole moving process, and it was easier to stay here of course. We shouldn’t have stayed so long really, but some things seem to have worked out for the better, like the location that we’re going to and the housing market right now being a buyers market.

Even so, there are just so many things about living here that I’m tired of, and have been for years (some of which, in all fairness to Germany, has to do with the US Army and all it’s idiocy). It’s a nice place to visit, but I don’t want to live in Germany any longer. I won’t go into the laundry list of stuff that annoys me on a daily basis here; suffice it to say that I’ve groused enough over the years about all of this stuff that ITMan is now saying “Okay, we’re headed back to the States finally. It’s what you’ve wanted for years, so I don’t want to hear any complaints from you when we get there.” Hmfph. Continue reading →

Auf Wiedersehen to Germany

Posted by Nadine

Yep, we’re finally saying it. The packers are here, and though it will shortly be in boxes, my studio now looks like this:

Yes, I know, this doesn’t look much different from the last time I checked in with all of you readers oh, so many months ago (if any of you are still here after months of radio silence). But you’ll just have to trust me that it did look different in the interim because I did organize and arrange my studio so that I could use it, though it was never really “home.” How could it be, when it was a sardine can compared to what I had before? Sure, there was a very small bit of quilting going on in the last few months, but my heart wasn’t in it for various reasons. One of the biggest reasons was that I had a hard time finding anything when I needed it, and I’d get irritated when creativity stopped because I couldn’t find whatever it was I needed at the time, and I’d turn the lights off and head down the stairs to do something else. There’s only so much organization you can do in a sardine can with low slanted ceilings…

Anyway, enough about the past few months and onward to the exciting part! We are finally moving back to the United States! Honestly, it’s well past the time that we should have been headed for the next chapter of our lives. ITMan has a new job in Augusta, Georgia, and we’ll be there in less than a month. Things happen fast when they finally happen, especially when the Army is involved. Continue reading →

Easy Come, Easy Go

Posted by Nadine

We are somewhat settled in The Estates (must think of a better name for this abode at some point, but for now, this works!), or as settled as we can realistically be when it’s only two weeks after moving day. There have been lots of changes, mostly for the better, and then some of the changes that I planned for got changed, so life is still a bit upside down.

The new house is truly a gem. We’re a bit hesitant to be very enthusiastic about it all just yet considering that we thought Matchstick Manor was pretty great when we moved in there and it was only after living there for a month or so that its faults, some minor and some not, started to become apparent and it went steadily down the smelly drain from there. It’s hard not to be happy with the new place though since it’s got so many nice extras and it’s built so well, so we just keep adding “so far” to all of our glowing compliments about it. I think we’re subconsciously waiting to discover some awful flaw that will tarnish our shiny new find.

The differences between this house and the last one are both amazing and huge. This is the kind of house we should have been living in all these years, but we couldn’t find one that we could afford to rent. I could go on for a few posts about it all, but the thing that’s uppermost in my mind today is the awesome separate studio I was supposed to have in the small house. Yep, you read that correctly: supposed to have. My shiny new studio has morphed into a much smaller attic type room in the main house that currently is so full of boxes that it’s going to be difficult to unpack and get organized. Easy come, easy go. Continue reading →

Getting in Touch

Posted by Nadine

with:

My gamer side. Yeah, like you couldn’t tell from my absence what I’ve been doing for the last two months! The addiction to World of Warcraft rages on. My Night Elf Hunter promptly took a back seat to my Death Knight at level 55, and I’m working on the slow journey to level 80 with the Death Knight. And along the way, I’ve made a few more characters, so I have my own small case of alt-itis. I don’t have the veritable army of alts that my mother has, but still, if I make more than two more new characters, I’ll have to make them on a new server since I can’t have more than ten on the server that I play on now. Then they’ll be the poor relations, since there won’t be any of my other characters over there on the other server to share gold. Gold makes it all so much easier…big surprise…
My family more often, both the immediate members and the ones far away, as we play WoW together. I see my youngest daughter and husband more, since we all play in my studio together on separate computers. Sometimes we adventure together in-game, or help each other kill the difficult monsters. I talk to my mother, aunt and cousin more, though it must be noted that the conversations are mostly game related and take place in the in-game chat window! 🙂
The taxes. Ugh. Big UGH. But it’s not like you can just not do them. 😐 (Though at the moment, it’s tempting to make a try for the “not doing them” technique, and see how long I can stay under the radar on that.) And I have all that business stuff to make it 150% more complicated this year too. Yes, I’m whining. It’s my blog and I’ll cry if I want to!
My chauffeur side. I spend way too much time driving lately. GuitarGirl has graduated from high school, gotten a new job at the Commissary and started college classes, so my taxi duties have quadrupled (or maybe quintupled) in the last few weeks. Not that I don’t enjoy driving my car as I’m still in love with everything about it even though it’s over three years old. It’s just an awesomeness that I’ll never get over probably. In fact it’s the only thing that makes the taxi duties tolerable at all, but I still would rather pass on it and never leave my house unless I felt like it and there was good shopping on the other end of the journey, tyvm. On top of all that, it’s a bit freaky to have a child in college. I’m just sayin’.

But not in touch with: Continue reading →