Nifty Gadgets

This has been a week and it’s only Wednesday. On Monday, I recorded this week’s podcast, finally untangled the issue we were having with the title on the new truck and formulated a plan of attack, then went to town to run errands. Came home, made dinner, and hosted the monthly Zoom meeting for our homestead foundation fundraising committee.

Yesterday morning I got up (at 4 am) and was sipping my coffee and working on loading the podcast episode when the power went out. Oh, joy. A few moments later, the pager went off for our fire department for a tree on a line on our road. The husband got up and went out to start the generator. I was running through Plans B, C, and and X in my head because I was supposed to leave at 7 am to teach a serger mastery class in Missoula. He assured me that even if the power was still out, I could go and the generator could run all day. I uploaded the podcast episode but didn’t have time to add the show notes, so that’s task #1 for this morning.

The power came back on around 6:30 am—thank you, Flathead Electric—and I left for Missoula.

This is the issue we ran into with the truck title: Most of the counties in the state of Montana levy an additional tax on vehicles titled under LLCs. Flathead County does not, so in the past several years, there has been a flood of people establishing LLCs in Flathead County to avoid paying that additional tax. The county motor vehicle department was so overwhelmed that they stopped processing title applications and farmed them out to a company called MVDExpress. However, the only MVDExpress offices are in Missoula, Bozeman, Billings, and Great Falls. There is no MVDExpress office in the county that is no longer processing title applications.

Let’s all roll our eyes together, shall we?

When we purchased the new work truck in February of 2022, the dealer sent the paperwork to the county, who sent it to MVDExpress in Billings, where it was promptly misplaced. That took several weeks to straighten out. This time, the dealer gave us some of the paperwork and sent some of it via FexEd, but we had no instructions about what to do with any of it. I was reluctant to send anything to Billings again. E-mails and phone calls went unanswered.

I took all the paperwork with me to Missoula and told the husband that I would go to the MVDExpress office after my class, hope they took walk-in appointments, and hope all the paperwork was in order.

Class was a lot of fun. I had four students with L890 sergers. All had previous serging experience, so I was able to skip over some of the basics and walk them through more advanced techniques. The store recently finished off its classroom space; previously, I had been teaching on the sales floor, which was not ideal. The classroom space is very nice and I look forward to teaching there again.

One of the benefits of teaching is that I always pick up new tips and tricks from students or store staff. One of the store employees showed us this adapter tip for a glue stick (click on the picture for a link to purchase):

An individual tip is $12.00, so they aren’t cheap, but if you do a lot of English paper piecing, I could see where this would be extremely useful.

I was done teaching at 2 pm. I know my way around Missoula well enough that I knew exactly where the MVDExpress office was located, and—lucky for me—they took walk-in appointments. After a half-hour wait, a very pleasant young man looked over the paperwork, had me sign a few things, and by 3:30 pm, I was walking out with a title and plates for the new truck. Hallelujah.

I made a quick stop at Joann Fabrics before heading home. They did not have the New Look pattern for the dress with the French dart in stock. I’ll have to order it. That Joanns is almost as awful as ours. I did check out two Walmart remnant racks yesterday, but neither had anything interesting.

The drive down and back was uneventful, although extremely foggy. The BMW is purring nicely. The husband still has to replace the thermostat, but I’ve been driving that car without heat all winter, so that fix wasn’t as critical as the transmission solenoids.

Today, I am teaching the Harper Cardigan class at the quilt store here in town. And tonight, after dinner, I going to sit in my recliner, watch YouTube videos with the husband, and work on something relaxing.