A Wet Weather Tale...

....or why you should go fabric shopping on your own...

If it was a really cold, wet, windy miserable day and you had the bright idea to go to, say Logans Patchwork Fabrics, and you thought that if you suggested to the Man About the House that if he came to, say Leichhardt, and spent a small amount of time at, say Logans Patchwork Fabrics, that afterwards you and he could go and have a leisurely, delicious coffee in a cute little cafe, out of the rain...

you'd think that it would turn out to be a wonderful, really lovely day,with 2 people happy with the coffee and company and, for arguements sake, the fabric they'd purchased?

Well not if you were me!

No,  what would happen is that I'd go into Logan's Patchwork Fabrics,

and the MATH would sit in the car and leave the air blowing, but the engine turned off, and I would be slightly longer looking for exactly the right shade of green, and then I'd come back to the car and we'd go to drive off for the coffee bribe part of  the trip and the car wouldn't start!

Yes a totally dead battery in the blustery, cold, wet, windy, rainy, freezing outdoors!

So I headed back into Logans (I always get the hard jobs) and Lois kindly brought her car up and let us jumpstart ours .

In the process it became pretty obvious (so I'm told) that the battery is an acid coated, rusty looking lump of near uselessness and if we continued our plan of going to get coffee, we'd be stuck somewhere less pleasant than outside a fabulous fabric shop.

So the NRMA are called - and here's an important tip - if you have a 'dead' car on a wet day in Sydney chances are the first thing you will be told is "there is a 90 minute wait" (this I know from bitter and repeated experience) however when we said the magic word - battery - the nearest van is a mere "20 minutes wait"!!!

The lovely Logan's staff then invited us inside to keep warm and offered us coffee.

However, I'd spied a cafe just a few minutes walk away and was determined to keep my end of the bargain  with the MATH (ie cafe coffee and cake) and volunteered to head off, despite the building storm clouds, to get said coffee and cake. Just as I returned, and put our steaming cups in the car, the service van arrived.

So there I am warm and dry with a hot cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin,

The MATH and the NRMA mechanic are under the hood of my car,

and down comes the rain - well actually sideways blows the rain - and there's no escaping it...

And for the third time, I headed back into Logan's

and asked if I could have a jug of boiling water (because apparently you can't test a battery

when it's terminals are covered in white gunky stuff).

These people deserve a medal - not one little bit of eyerolling

when I went back into their shop to ask for their help a third time!

Well, $200 dollars and a new battery later and after having coffee and cake in "Cafe Mazda 2", we headed home.

Me - 3 hrs of fabric shopping, magazine reading and coffee drinking.

MATH - 3 hours of his life that he won't get back.

The moral of the story - always go fabric shopping on your own!

thanks for taking a peek over the fence...