Life's Mysteries

I’m supposed to be hard at work getting ready for an exhibit that opens next Friday.  I am the ‘guest quilt artist’ at the Sunshine Coast Quilt Guild biennial (if that means every two years) Quilt Show.  Which means that I have a small, enclosed on three sides section of the hall where I will hang about a dozen wall quilts.  One of them isn’t finished yet, all of them need precisely cut dowels from which to hang, all of them need specific wall labels, all of them need a single 'exhibit book' whose pages describe them and me.  None of those things are done, though all are more or less in the process.  

Yesterday, I was told that the irregularly-shaped (19.5x8.5x12 feet, with the fourth side the entry way), semi-enclosed space was losing maybe two feet on one side.  This means that instead of being a semi-enclosed room, it is now more like a 6 or 6.5 foot-wide corridor.  Sigh.  Well, the Guild is not the owner of the room, and they cannot demand that furnishings be removed, but I am the sort of unhappy recipient of the effects of that fact.  Doing those last minute/days details suddenly dropped lower on my priority list.

And thus, this morning, instead of setting to the quilting work, I found myself vacuuming the insides of our Subaru Forester.  Last week, Ed washed it (just in time for all the alder pollen to fall and attach itself to the shiny surface: alder pollen is something of a menace in more than one way: allergies and stick-to-surfaces).  Although we’re responsible about maintenance of house and car, we are neither of us reliable house/car keepers with respect to constant attention to dust and the like, so it’s a kind of entertaining activity when I do get around to doing it.  

In the process of removing all the mats and vacuuming under them and cleaning all the vinyl surfaces, I did something which caused the car lights to turn on.  I checked all the switches, but nothing I did caused the tail light, hatch light, or front yellow light (running light?) to turn off.  We actually turned the motor on and off and nothing resulted in those lights turning off (this was like doing a reboot, I think).  

Finally, Ed decided to remove the fuse from that circuit so the battery didn’t run down.  Reading the car manual to find the fuse box (amazingly, tightly hidden behind something the manual refers to as a ‘coin holder,’ I eventually discovered a page about something called ‘safety lights,’ which appear to be the very ones that were problematically on and that, says the manual, run independently of the ignition.  Their switch is hidden behind the steering wheel, in the center at the top.  This is not the switch that turns on the flashing safety lights; this is some different set of safety lights that neither of us had ever known were there.  We’ve only had the car for 10 years.  

It may be the mark of having too much if after ten years you still don’t know what you have.