Day 136 of 365

My horoscope today read:

Your relationship with money is about to go through a very interesting phase. You'll be tasked with managing a far larger amount than you were prepared for, and you should not attempt to go it alone. The sums involved could cause you to make incorrect assumptions. If you don't understand something -- even something small -- seek out professional advice. These are murky waters, and you definitely don't want to get in over your head.

Hmmm.

When I went to the movies with a friend from work last week, she told me a story about a lottery ticket. She had won a bit on a ticket and cashed it in. Then on her way home she stopped and bought another ticket - a lottery ticket that cost $20. And won big. Big enough where she had to go to the lottery office to claim her winnings. (Not like thousands, but several hundred dollars!) Her sister, upon learning of her luck, bought her own $20 ticket. No winner.

So as my husband and I were doing our grocery shopping today, I thought about buying one of those $20 tickets. Maybe that's what my horoscope meant - that I'd win big and need a financial adviser! Unfortunately I chickened out and didn't buy one.

Then I thought maybe it had to do with work. You'll be tasked with managing a far larger amount than you were prepared for. My new job will involve managing larger sums of money than I've managed before. And since I got the word yesterday about when my first day of work will be, and knowing that one of the first tasks will be some budget revisions, maybe my horoscope was wanting me to think ahead.

Or...

They say lightning doesn't strike twice in the same spot. (Which isn't true, but it's what "they" say.) We're planning on going to the casino this coming week. Maybe lightning will strike like it did for us when we walked out of the casino with $1500 on Day 22-Day 23.

And today's picture? Early morning lightning out my front window.

And a few bonus guest pictures!

Ruth sent in these pictures of butterflies on her purple coneflowers. 

Thanks for sharing, Ruth!

Day 135 of 365

Have I ever mentioned I like to organize? (Yeah, probably a dozen or so times now.)

I got all ten packages of batting from yesterday tucked away, my fabrics purchased earlier this week are nice and neatly organized, but my scrap baskets are overflowing.

I already used a bunch of the scraps to make blocks like those on Day  104. I even gave away some of my red blocks since I made too many for the quilts I was working on.

The turtle pillows I cut this week - all 23 of them - left lots of scraps. Lots and lots of them. In all colors and shapes and sizes. I've seen pictures on the internet how most people store their scraps in bins. But I need mine tidier and neater and easier to find. I already had plenty of scraps wrapped on those cut down comic book boards, all organized my color in a couple baskets, but I was running out of room for any more baskets.

I thought about how I had some extra boxes and some leftover contact paper from when I was teaching. I decided to cut up the boxes to fit perfectly on my shelves. Wrap them in contact paper. Cut the comic book boards down even smaller to fit in the boxes.

If anyone needs any fabric scraps, you know where to shop!

Exercise update: 89 consecutive days with a little over 22 miles on the bike this week.

Day 134 of 365

Today's schedule:

Get new drivers license. Return chair mat to Staples. Get gas. Take hubby to doctor. Go to my own rheumatologist appointment. Blood work at lab. Go visit daughter. Go with daughter to look at new apartment. Take keys back to property management office. Go to lunch. Go back to property management office so husband can get glasses he dropped there. Go to JoAnn's fabric store to get big early birthday present. Go to Target for hubby and daughter to birthday shop. Take daughter back to her place. Drive in rush hour traffic. Get groceries. Get prescription at drugstore. Get buy one get one free frozen strawberry lemonade at McDonalds. Come home and ride the exercise bike.

Never did make it to the grocery store or drug store. I was too tuckered out after the full day we had.

But a couple highlights today are worth writing about. First, if you haven't tried McDonald's frozen strawberry lemonade you're missing out. I'm not one who ever gets brain freezes (I don't even know what one of those feels like) but I get throat freezes. Tart and ice cold.

And at the fabric store - my birthday is coming up and my husband knows a fabric store is a good place to shop for a present. He headed to the sewing machine section to look for me a new one, but I headed in a different part of the store. As much as a new machine would be nice, it's not necessary.

What is necessary is quilt batting for my future charity baby quilts. 10 packs of batting is much more appreciated by me than a new sewing machine right now.

I almost arranged the packages with the labels all facing the same way like I do my cans (I wrote about that on Day 131), but decided I was going to be a rebel.

Day 133 of 365

I discovered ebay a few years back.

Not as a buyer, but as a seller. I had a pair of concert tickets a few rows from the stage for George Strait. But as the date got closer, we found out we had a dilemma. It was senior night for girls basketball and our daughter was a senior. George Strait or daughter. We picked the daughter, of course!

Being that the concert was sold out, I knew I had something good on my hands. I had heard about people selling tickets on ebay, but hadn't ever been on the site and didn't know anything about it. After doing some research it appeared that I might not only get my money back for the tickets but make some profit, too.

So the tickets went up for auction. The person who won the tickets e-mailed me after the concert and said the tickets were amazing and George Strait came through their aisle and shook their hands. In the end I made a $200 profit on the tickets and got to see my daughter being honored on senior night.

Then about a year ago I heard about a way to wrap fabric nice and neat. I could either buy some corrugated type white boards (expensive) or use comic book boards.

I used to read some comic books when I was a kid (mostly Richy Rich - boy, what I would have given to live that life!), but had no idea what a comic book board was. It's a piece of thick cardstock-like paper that collectors use to help maintain the shape of the comic book. I guess you can purchase them at comic books stores, but since I don't typically hang out there - or even know where one is - I headed to ebay for my boards.

After some patient searching and waiting, I found someone getting rid of used boards. 500 of them. For a doggone descent price. 500 boards? Never would I ever need 500, but what the heck?

Unfortunately as I began to wrap all my fabric and then cut some of the boards for my smaller pieces of fabric, it became apparent that I had plenty of fabric to fill those boards.

Until today. Up until today, all of my boards had been filled with fabric.

Today I finished cutting the fabric for 22 more turtle pillows (like the one yesterday). Lots of empty comic book boards now.

Then the mail arrived. Another cheap ebay purchase. Sometimes you don't know exactly what you're going to get when you order from there, but today's fabrics filled my 5 foot table. Looks to be close to 30 yards of high quality fabric. So much I couldn't hardly get it all in the picture.

No more empty comic book boards anymore.