How to Fix A Plug In Twenty Easy Steps

As you may remember from days gone by, technology doesn’t really like sailing.  Our sewing machine, an industrial Bernina my mom helped pick out, was an early victim of our difficult conditions.  We eventually bought a new machine designed for marine use, and puzzled over what to do with the Bernina.  We hit on the clever plan of fixing it and giving it to our Colombian friends.  More locker space for us, a sewing machine for them.  Perfect.

We (read: I) didn’t get around to going to the sewing machine shop.  It was far away, I wasn’t really sure where it was, I had no idea how to explain a broken presser foot in Spanish... I had many excuses.  We had time.  But suddenly our departure came over the horizon and, excuses or not, the thing had to be fixed.  Crumbs.  So we enlisted the help of the local expat technology connection.  Two weeks, one car accident (his) and a lot of phone calls (read: hails on the VHF radio), we still didn’t have the machine back.  So I trooped over to his workshop, reclaimed the machine and prevailed on the man to find a colleague who could turn the machine around quickly.  After all, it was only the presser foot that was broken... it should be easy to fix, right?  In this manner, last Sunday I made my way across town to hand over the Bernina to el mago de la tecnología.

There are days when I am heartily sorry that I don’t have a spy camera, and Sunday was one of them.

El Mago greeted me kindly when I arrived.  I picked my way down a narrow hallway littered with electronic detritus.  Halfway along, I handed the machine to El Mago over a four-foot-high stack of boxes, shimmied around them myself and followed him into the eight-by-twelve work area.  Space had been carved out in front of the desk for two lawn chairs, but the rest of the room was filled with discarded electronics.  Fans, televisions, motherboards; all were stacked higgledy-piggeldy along the shelves and the floor.  An ancient set of huge DVD players were turned on their ends and shelved like books along the shelf by the ceiling.

El Mago gestured to the chair closest to the doorway.  I had expected to drop off the machine and return the next day, but if he was willing to do it while I waited, then I was waiting.  I sat down carefully, trying not to topple a forlorn-looking fax machine crouched directly behind me.  By my knees was an open cubby filled to overflowing with wire coils, plugs, cords and unidentifiable metal bits and bobs.  I settled in to watch the magic unfold.

Over the next three hours, I had a lesson in small appliance repair.  Rather, I had a in lesson in How to Fix Whatever Comes Your Way.  Back home, you would take your broken Bernina to your local Bernina repair shop where a Bernina master technician who studied the sewing repair arts for twenty years deep in the mountains of Switzerland would charge you the Earth to use genuine Bernina parts to fix your machine.  And somehow we think that is normal and right, and deny we have wandered over the city limits into Crazyville.  Here, instead, I had El Mago, a man clearly possessed of many years of experience with technology of all sorts.  How many Bernina hours he’d racked up I didn’t know or care.  He was reassuring somehow, like a Spanish Mr Rogers.  Maybe not as tidy, but I could see my machine was in good hands.

El Mago settled back into his chair.  He searched about his desk until he located a multimeter.  There followed a long period during which each hole and prong in the pigtailed cord was tested against each other hole and prong.  Sometimes there were happy noises, sometimes not.  El Mago thought.  He decided that he wasn’t happy with the part of the plug that connected to the presser foot.

Now.  I don’t know if you have ever tried to open up a plug.  What am I saying?  Of course I know: you haven’t.  Unless you once were an eleven-year-old with a do-it-yourself electronics kit, it has never even occurred to you that one can open a plug.  My friends, I am here to confirm it is so.

How To Repair A Plug

As witnessed by Papillon Crew

1.  Examine the seam of the plug very carefully.
2. Gently apply a hacksaw blade to said seam.
3. Saw energetically.
4. Repeat with opposite seam.
5. Crack the seam.  Listen to the distant death throes of the Bernina Repair Guild.
6. Examine the innards.
7. Jam the bare ends of the cord connected to your soldering iron to a powerbar.
8. Plug random item over the bare wires to hold them in place.
9. Cut a wire in the plug.
10. Strip the plug wire with an 8” machete (handle missing).
11. Gently pin the plug under the partially-disassembled 40” flat screen TV that dominates your desk.
12. Re-solder aforementioned wire.
13. Test the plug with your multimeter and pronounce yourself satisfied.
14. Send your son out for local crazy glue.
15. Snap the plug back together.
16. Gob local crazy glue into the seam.
17. Apply white powdered catalyst to the local crazy glue.
18. Allow to dry.
19. Use a black Sharpie to cover up the hideous white scar now encircling your plug.
20. Pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

Et, voilà!  C’est magnifique!

The plug now beeped at the appropriate times, but the presser foot still didn’t work.  Time to get to the source.  El Mago opened up the foot itself.  There followed a saga of soldering, motherboard repair and switch fiddling that would be ripe fodder for an epic poem.  I especially enjoyed the use of the soldering iron to melt off extraneous bits of an extra part El Mago had to cram into the presser foot to make it work.

Work progressed, and I continued to witness events that would give any workplace safety inspector a myocardial infarction.  More than once I was glad to have the chair nearest the door while crackling sparks flew beside me.  As the afternoon wore on, El Mago had a number of visitors.  A few stopped dead when they saw me and walked away.  Most stayed and chatted for a few minutes.  His son, a man in his twenties wearing a white rosary and a black shirt stating,  “The Demon Deacons Are Battleproof,” sat outside the front door on the concrete pad, stripping a flatscreen TV.  A junkie came by, his eyes rolling in different directions, hair at full attention, selling metal things.  El Mago bought a motherboard for a dollar.  We had a dicey moment when El Mago needed something from a shelf on the side wall, and had to climb over a few piles of TVs to reach it, but I caught the falling stack before any harm was done.  The time passed quickly.

Three hours after my arrival, the machine was fixed.  I thanked El Mago in my best Spanish for repairing the machine so quickly, and was on my way.  Tell me I would have had that interesting an afternoon in a shop with floor space and a soldering iron with an actual plug.

The sewing machine is now in the hands of our friends, and we are almost ready to set sail.  Didn’t I say that last time?  Now we are really, really almost ready.  Swimmable waters, here we come!

 

It's Not Easy Being Green

Amy must be a saint to put up with all that.

How could you let them do that [go sailing with small children]?

Dear friends, today we will take a trip through the rocky country of second-hand comments.  It is difficult terrain, and I fear I am strapping on my driving goggles for my benefit alone.  But I am going to give it a try.

Sailormoon-Indy and I have a few things to say.

The two comments at the top of this page are the most-often-reported comments I get via family members who have been discussing our trip with the outside world.  (And isn’t that sad?  Not, “Wow!  They must be having so much fun!”, or, “Gosh, am I jealous.  I’d love to visit so many interesting places.”

Let’s deal with Amy’s sainthood first.  I realize that I invite some of that.  I like telling funny stories about life aboard.  And as everyone knows, bad things are funnier than good things, or even regular things.  I’ve posted a lot of pictures lately about our zone of destruction.  And I’m sure, if read a certain way, it sounds like I’m moaning.  The trouble with humour is that you have to recognize it.  (Or write it well, so maybe I've just failed in my attempts.)

But you know what?  If I really minded, it wouldn’t be happening.  Not any of it.  Not the painting, not the fridge, not the boat, if it comes to that.  I suppose what really gets my goat about this comment is that it implies that I am only a helpless bystander in this operation.  It presents Erik as an overbearing ogre forcing the unwilling crew to do his will.  It presents me as a powerless generic female with no will of my own or ability to change events.  I’ll tell you, it boils my potatoes just to write those words.  They are categorically untrue.

I don’t want to have to post a disclaimer on the blog that states: “These posts are intended to be a humorous retelling of real events.”  And, really, you don’t need that, do you?  You are smart and interesting and have a sense of humor, right?  Right.  So let’s all just keep that in mind.  And if people give you the head shake and start feeling sorry for poor Amy, you don’t have to set them straight.  Just don’t tell me about it.

As for comment two, this one cracks me up.  Friends of the Heckle & Jeckle set often trot this one out.  To which I say: really?  As though I were a 14-year old girl with minimal judgement running off to join the circus with my wall-eyed 21-year old boyfriend with a dubious employment history and a prison record.  People.  In case it escaped your notice, Erik and I are quickly closing in on middle age.  We are intelligent, educated people capable of gathering facts, calculating risk and following best practices.  I maintain we are safer on Papillon than we would be commuting to work each day.  So don’t fret, grandparent-ly types.  And don’t judge our parents harshly for (sigh) “letting us go.”

Now.  All that was very stressful.  So, to finish on a high note: fiesta!  We had the painters and their families aboard on Saturday, and a wonderful time was had by all.  I now have an iTunes playlist filled with Colombian ballads (there is a big obsession with mi corazon around here), and a freezer full of deditos, little finger-like bread products filled with cheese.  Yum!  The girls and I love them.

Fiesta, fiesta, fiesta with our wonderful Colombian friends.

We depart shortly for the San Blas islands in Panama, where, I'm told, the water is clear and the internet non-existent.  I'll try to post via SSB, but the photos, alas, will have to wait.  Until then...

Classified

For Sale: Spouse

As-is condition

Wife seeks new situation for relentless serial home-improver husband.  Ability to deal with dust, destruction and major inconvenience a must.  Beautiful results guaranteed for the patient new owner.

No refunds or returns.  Absolutely no trade-ins.

It's just some primer.  Pretty benign so far.

Wait... a tent?

Yes, it's a tent.  Goodbye, stove and pantry.

Boba Fett prepares to enter the fridge area.

Ready to paint!

And that is why the tent is up.

Ta da!  A beautifully painted fridge box.  Now, if we could only make some lids...

Back in the police van again

Monday was a holiday in Cartagena, so the kids and I packed a bag and headed to the beach.  It was the last day of Christmas holidays, so the place was wall-to-wall people.  Our friends who have an apartment on the beach had staked out a cabana, made lunch and drinks; as you can see, it was a good deal.  We took turns with the girls by the water, with the other two adults enjoying themselves in the shade of the plastic tent.

Well fed and well watered, my friend Third Grade Teacher and I were happily discussing what Stylish will be doing next year when a mob of people approached our cabana from both sides.  My Spanish is pretty terrible, but Teacher speaks it pretty well.  We deciphered something about a red bag.  Thinking someone had lost a bag, we shook our heads and said we hadn’t seen it.  The crowd frowned and slowly dispersed.  We returned to our chat.

Dumb.

Sixty seconds later, a doubled mob and two policemen showed up... holding my red bag.  Yes, my bag had been stolen and I hadn’t even missed it.

Joe Pike would not be impressed with my situational awareness.

I checked the bag, and nothing was missing.  The mob, comprised of vendors and locals, must have nabbed the thief almost immediately.  How they knew it was my bag is anyone’s guess.  Maybe my Ortho Biotech bag from a conference a decade ago looked sufficiently gringa-esque that it was a small logical leap to determine it belonged to me.  In any case, the bag was back, intact, and I was happy.

The locals, especially locals who sell things on the beach, do not want you to get ripped off here.  (I’d like to see a similar crowd notice the theft and retrieve my property anywhere else I’ve lived.  Good luck.) Tourism in Colombia already has to fight a bad reputation.  But the flipside of the coin is, if they catch someone, they want your help to do something about it.  Which meant many insistent hands pushed me along with the police officers, and ol’ Amy was back in a Colombian police van.

We trundled down the street to the cop shop.  The thief was standing on the top step of the police station, handcuffed, firmly gripped by two officers, mumbling at me and giving me pleading looks.  Great.  They whisked him away, and a discussion ensued about who spoke enough English to talk to me.  A crowd of maybe twenty cops was peering at me by now.  Ah, being the center of attention.  Young Cop was elected to the task.  We had the following conversation.

Young Cop:  What happened?

Amy:  I was sitting with my friend in the cabana.  I didn’t know the bag was gone until the crowd returned it to me.

YC:  The man steal your bag?

A:  Someone took my bag, but I didn’t see anything.  I didn’t know until the police brought the bag back to me.

YC:  The man, he tall and black? [sidenote: the man in handcuffs looked skinny, pale and 86% meth.]

A:  I did not see who took my bag.

YC: [frowning]  You not see?

A:  I did not see.

[Much grumbling between the policemen.] 

YC:  What he take?

A:  Nothing.

YC: [bigger frown]  Nothing?

A:  No.  Nothing was missing.  [I looked through the bag again.  Money, towel – all there.  I was smart enough not to pack a wallet, credit cards or a camera.]

YC:  This important, señora.  He no take anything?

A:  There is nothing missing.  He didn’t take anything out.

[Exasperated grumbling.]

YC:  You sit there.

Young cop stalked out of the room, leaving me in an annex with five junior officers.  They looked bored on a holiday afternoon, and the prospect of an unaccompanied gringa to babysit lifted them from their lethargy.  They muttered together for a minute, then elected a spokesman.  After a few attempts I deciphered a request for my name.  They all rolled that around for a while, with increasing delight.  “Eh-mee.”  “Eeeehhhh-meeee.”  Some teenage boy snickers that reminded me uncomfortably of Beavis and Butthead ensued.  I looked hopefully at the closed door for Young Cop.

They were experimenting with the delights of saying “Canada” when my savior, Young Cop, returned.  We went back to the main building, where YC had prepared a written statement for me to sign.  He explained it to me as I read it very, very slowly.  YC got a little impatient with me, but there was no way I was signing anything unless I knew what it said and it was entirely true, both for my sake and for the bag-snatcher’s.  Statement complete, I listened to a stern lecture about keeping my eyes on my things at the beach.  Truly, the bag was eight inches from my foot; what else could I have done?  I thought I was watching.

My request for a ride back was politely declined, so, excitement at an end, I had to hoof it back down the beach to my friends and the girls, buoyed by the knowledge that I was a cog in the wheels of justice.  And thus concluded my second encounter with Colombian police.  Please, let’s not make it a third.

Huevos especiales

Hola, amigos!  I am Señor Huevo.  Let me introduce you to the muy interesante world of Colombian eggs.

Most of the time, I am casual.

I am a relatable character.  Just look at my hat!

But sometimes, I put on my sombrero, and then, look out!

Fiesta!

I enjoy my close, personal relationship with the Disney corporation.

That will be an extra $10, please.

 Some days, my heart is so filled with love, I must give things away!  Like rice!

Mi Amiga Señora Chicken invites you to come hither and take something from her basket.

But best of all, I love my friends.  Ha ha!

Those egg friends know fear.

And now, amigos, I must say adiós.  The good people at Carulla insist that Señora Amy stop taking pictures in their store.  I will miss you.  But remember, Colombian eggs are the fun eggs!

At the corner grocery store

I spend a lot of time grocery shopping.  Mostly because we live out of a cooler and I have to buy ice every day, but even so, I'd be at the store once a week anyway.  This means I have gotten to experience the entertaining world of foreign shopping in a more local environment.

Shopping in the U.S. was pretty easy.  While the stores were too big and it could take a while to find everything, at least you knew it was there.  (Except melba toast and green olives, items conspicuously absent between Virginia and Georgia.  Don't ask me why.)

Once we reached Mexico, it was time for a vocabulary lesson.  Now I looked for azucar and harina instead of sugar and flour.  And the stores were smaller, and the cheese was bland, but altogether, it was regular ol' grocery shopping.

Not so in Colombia.

Never have I been so annoyed with myself for not keeping my camera handy at all times.  While the yuckiest thing I've seen - a slowly liquefying ham that I watched sag for a full six weeks past its expiry date - was in Roatan, Cartagena is simply fun.

Take for example the meat aisle.  One of the more popular brands of lunchmeats is called Cunit.  Except that "I" is kind of tucked under the "T".  And I can tell you, I did a double-take the first time I saw a wall-sized display of cunit meat products.  That sort of thing can take a girl by surprise.

You might want to make that "I" a little bit bigger.

Sometimes surprising things show up.  On Christmas eve, I found a proper German Stollen crammed onto a shelf in the sugar aisle in our local store.  Only one.  There was no price marker on the shelf, and I couldn't find another one anywhere in the store.  Erik and his parents were delighted, and pronounced it excellent.  Our little Christmas miracle.

But the thing I truly wish I had a photo of are the eggs.  Yes, the eggs.  because here, my friends, companies do not put "the prize in the box" in cereal.  They put it with the eggs.  So far, I've seen Cars 2 eggs, with an actual car included, and, my personal favourite, Pirates of the Caribbean eggs, featuring decorative eyepatches and bandanas.  The boxes were so enticing!  Ridiculously expensive, but I was barely able to say no to those prize-eggs.

Next time, dear readers.  Next time, I'll get you a photo of fancy eggs, even if I have to go back to the boat to get my camera.