Bit of a sunshine and shadows day

Yesterday was my birthday and as we shared a birthday Keith's too.  It felt odd and wrong somehow to be celebrating a birthday without him there to share it with me.  So it was a difficult day, lots of ups and some downs. Two of the ups was the arrival of flowers from Marc and Alix. They are currently on holiday in Turkey and had arranged for it to be delivered before they left.  And being taken out for dinner by Sy and Julie, where we were joined by the rest of the family.  It was a lovely time and Flynn kept us amused.

The flowers I received are lovely but I somehow think they would look better either without the yellow saucer of without the vase.  But I love sunflowers.

Flynn and Matty deciding on what to eat, doesn't Flynn look like a real boy now with his hair cut.

He loves to draw and if you are wondering what he is drawing we were told it was a flower, a plane, a helicopter and the Gruffalo's feet.

Julie was teaching him to whistle without much success.

Although he enjoyed his chicken dippers he liked Julie's spicy side salad better. 

I'm missing my 830 which went in for repairs and service last month.  I'd been sewing quite happily and had come to the end of what I was doing.  I pressed the cut thread button then realised I'd pressed the automatic needle threader button by mistake.  I cancelled the action but the needle threader sprang out and instantly wrapped itself round the needle arm. I could not persuade it to return to its proper position.  I rang my dealer and following their expert's advice tried to disentangle it, to no avail.  It was decided that as it must be close to service time I'd send it back to them and they'd do the repair at the same time.  The general feeling was that as it was close to 5 years old the needle threader was probably at the end of its useful days and needed replacing.

I haven't heard from them since they picked up the machine on the 29th July so yesterday I rang David Drummond for an update.  He  told me when they put the 830 on the bench opened it up they realised there were several problems and immediately sent it back to Bernina. David declined to say what the problems were as he didn't want to commit himself, sounds expensive to me.  He hasn't had any feedback from Bernina but was going to chase it up.  Has anyone else had the same or a similar problem with their machine?