Checking In For October - Part 1: Gardens and Cars

It's been busy since my last post and not necessarily with quilting -- at least not the quilting I had planned to do!  After finishing up my friend's desk mat, I expected to get started with quilting my Quilts of Valor for Veterans Day.  However, I had a lot of community garden activities to tend to first.  I had what I thought might be our garden's last pepper harvest to collect and submit (Rivers Run is one of the gardens that grow Serrano Peppers for The Bronx Hot Sauce) and needed to start cleaning our own plot for the start of the Fall growing season.  Our community garden also had a big event coming up so I spent a few extra days with our other members getting it spruced up for the event.  

I aso attended a workshop at another community garden, the Green Patch on Walton,  on natural plant-based dyes.  The brown cap in the picture below was dyed with Black Beans!

Before and After!

Caps were also dyed with onion skins!  

I was able to take another light cap (in the picture with the bean dyed cap) to try it at home.  I'm  collecting skins for that as well as harvested some fennel (which will dye something a navy-green color) from our community garden with plans to try that on some muslin.   I'd love to be able to arrange a workshop on this in our garden next Spring.    

With the preliminary gardening activites done, I thought I'd be free to quilt.  However, then there was an unplanned interruption in my schedule:  the sudden demise of our old car!  Our beloved minivan "Vanessa", a 2000 Mazda MPV breathed her last.  

Vanessa in her younger years

When the repairs she needed were going to cost more than her current value it was time to give her up.  And with that, my DH and I were thust into the world of Cars-From-This-Decade!!  It took us about a week to research models and features and view internet car reviews on YouTube.  My DH was really motivated to get this done as quick as possible since he works nights and in another borough (Queens) so had to take public transportation throughout this time.

Research done, we spent a weekend going around to dealerships and used car lots near us to familiarize ourselves with all the different car makes and models in person. Well, not all, we already knew we still needed to be able to haul cargo (for our youngest, the budding filmaker and our community garden) but figured we could downsize from a seven passenger van (in recent years we rarely used our third row and most of the time kept it "tumbled under") to a five passenger SUV crossover.  After hitting the dealerships and picking two finalists and seeing one really appealing "luxury option", we also searched internet car sales sites to expand our choices of what was available for sale.  We had been scheduled to go to a credit union car sale when a slighty older model of the "luxury option" was posted to True Car at a price that was within our budget.

Going to see it (a trip for us since it was out in Brooklyn!), we ultimately went with that one.  Ironically,  before this search this was a make we had no familiarity with --- a Hyundai.  We had seen the newer model of the car at the dealership but admittedly since we haven't had to carry a car note in ten years, it was more than what we wanted to spend on a car right now.  The tipping point was that when we checked with our insurance company on the coverage rates for all the SUV models we were seriously considering, the Hyundai was the lowest to insure.  Even better, the operator I happened to connect to also owned a Huyundai, had recently upgraded hers to get more features and assured me they were very reliable cars!  Couldn't get a better and better timed recommendation than that!  So we went with the one from True Car: a 2016 Santa Fe Sport that came with all the bells and whistles (Turbo, large touchscreen, sunroof and power everything).

Our New Yara!

To reduce our insurance costs further we also spent another week doing an online Defensive Driving Course.  At first my husband didn't want to do it -- he had done it online the last time and said it was text dense and a bit boring.  He would rather go to an in-person class like we used to do.  However this time one of the courses our insurer recommended was "Traffic School by the Impov Comedy Club".  Pretty funny, the same good information that you get in other classes and definitely not boring!  Even better, you have twenty days to complete it.  Once completed they gave us a discount code to pass along so if you're interested in saving money on your insurance (here in NY the discount is good for three years) use the coupon below:

Ok, so now that we had a car, it was time to move!  There's more to my October doings in the next post and this time it'll actually include some quilting!