I enjoy...being a geek! Er, girl!

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Teresa guessed it first...it is, indeed, the Catherine Theron piece (Quaker Sewing Case, to be precise). It's still not done. The thing is requiring a Herculean effort to finish, and my continual mistakes are not helping. Things should be smooth now that I've reached the point of yesterday's picture, but when you're clumsy like me, you can never tell.

Today, however, I do have a finish! I finished another Ribs and Ruffles (I always want to say, "Ruffles and Ridges") scarf like the ones I did for my nieces, only this one is for myself. I wore that fluffy pink sweater to church this morning with a sparkly embellished skirt. Someone actually told me I looked like a fairy! *blush* Or, at least, was dressed like one. ;) After all this girliness, what did I come home and do?

Why, I fixed the can opener, what else??

Michael took it apart yesterday, because he was convinced its state of only working intermittently was caused by a mechanical problem. When I say, "intermittently," I mean that 1 in 20 button presses results in actual motion and an open can, rather than fruitless clicking or brief whirring. After looking at it and manipulating the internal button, it turns out I was closer to the truth when I said it was a short. It wasn't actually a short...it was even better. Let me show you the crazy:

Now, let's leave aside the stupid way that that tiny black button gets pushed. That tiny black button presses down on the tiny black spring, which causes contact 1 to...um...make contact with contact 2, thus completing the circuit and making the canopener "go". Wanna see the spring/contact 1 piece from the top? Too bad, here's a shot, anyway:

If you're thinking it's kind of rinky-dink, you're thinking like me. I tried bending contact 1 to make it hit contact 2 better, but that wasn't really the problem. The problem was that half the time when they did make contact, there was a spark!!
That is not inherently a problem, but it had aparently sparked so many times that there was carbon built up on both contacts. So, chick that I am, I grabbed a metal nail file (and yes, it is pink, too, but I really don't own that much pink stuff, I promise!!) and made the contacts all shiny again.

And now it works like a charm. ;)

JiffNotes
I can bring home the bacon...wire up an electric frypan....