Retirement planning

I haven’t done any sewing this week because I’ve been distracted by other things.

First, we had friends stop by for a visit on their way home to Massachusetts from their 5 weeks stay in Florida. They pulled in late Friday afternoon and left Monday morning. We had fun catching up and just hanging out! Of course I neglected to take any pictures :-p

Next, my neighbor asked if I would dog sit for her while she took her son (50 years old) for tests out of town… It’s a very long story that I won’t go into here, nevertheless I agreed to keep her dog for 4 days. She dropped her off a few hours after our friends left Monday morning and I took her home Friday morning.

She didn’t require a lot of care or maintenance but I was told she might potty in the house so I kept an eye on her like a hawk! Her only annoying habit was she liked to get up early to go outside…like 4 a.m. early!!! Honestly that was the hardest part because once she was up she was ready to be fed, so those four days were not a lot of fun 🤨

I’ve got my house back now and I’m falling back into my routines so I’m hoping to get into the sewing room today. I want to update the blocks on my weight-loss quilt (nothing has been lost 🥺) and to start a new pattern in the Color Block series from Debby Brown.

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I’ve just about got everything nailed down regarding my retirement coming up on April 1st. I’m 99% certain I’ll be getting medical insurance through healthcare.gov rather than Cobra. The main reason is cost – at the moment I don’t have any health issues and I usually only go to the doctor for my annual Gyn and mammo screenings so I can get a decent plan through healthcare.gov for A LOT less than what Cobra would cost me. I already pay out of pocket for my HRT patch and pill because using GoodRx is cheaper than my current Rx coverage (go figure!). I talked to my local dentist and they have a plan for $299 a year that will get me two cleanings and a full set of X-rays so I’ll be doing that as well. I will need to figure out what I want to do around vision coverage but I am not due for a prescription update for another 2 years so I’ll take my time deciding that piece.

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We’ve been making plans for the few months following my retirement and I’m getting really excited!! We’ll be driving to Tampa, FL to visit friends and celebrate DH 70th birthday the week after I retire and just yesterday we decided to leave a day early and stop in Savannah, GA on our way down. We’ve visited Savannah before and we really liked it so one day layover there will be nice… I mean, we’re retired so we can take our time right? LOL!!

Later in April we’ll be going to Charleston for a long weekend to attend a Corvette car show. Next, we saw an advertisement for a one-day Regional Tennis tournament that will be held in May here in Myrtle Beach so we plan to go watch. That’ll be my first live tennis experience. There won’t be any famous players but I’m sure I’ll still enjoy it. DH has also signed up for a car show here in Myrtle Beach in June, so the next few months will be relatively busy 😉

We’ve also been discussing going to Aruba over the Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday. I haven’t done any research or price checking just yet but I think that would be really fun!

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That’s about all for now, have a great rest of your weekend!!

Whirlwind traveling

This past week our second grandchild turned 2 years old; his mama planned the party for Saturday so we drove up Thursday to combine the trip with visiting with a few other friends as well. We live in SC and they’re in MD and we have a dog that travels with us…total travel time is about 8 hours – ugh – at least there was no rain or snow this time!

We pulled out around 6am and planned to stop about every 2 hours to let the fur baby out to stretch her legs…here’s one of my most favorite pictures of Sammi:

She does pretty good riding in the car but for the first 30 minutes she must be in my lap after that she’ll lay down in the back seat but she won’t sleep – it’s the strangest thing.

The drive up was pretty uneventful, no bad traffic delays even though we hit a few spots of road construction. We arrived at the hotel around 2pm…long day…once we were settled we all laid down for a nap {{{yawn}}}

We visited with friends Thursday & Friday and on Saturday attended the birthday party which was held at a family play center in Waldorf. It was a kid’s fantasy play land – lots of things to climb on and through and some really cool slides. They schedule everything out beginning with play time then a break in a private room where they serve food and cake and then back to more play time. All the kids had a blast and I’m sure they slept ‘like babies’ that night.

Since we wouldn’t have an opportunity to spend any additional time with the grand kids (they had other family obligations) we decided to hit the road after the party and come home. We left around 7:30pm and drove straight through with only one potty break – whew! we were beat when we got home around 2:30am. Sammi did sleep most of the way but she’ll only do that when we travel at night.

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I couldn’t wait to get back to my sewing room today – I was watching everyone else post their updates for The Splendid Sampler while I was in Md and I was chomping at the bit to get caught up on the blocks. I worked on Block 4 “Happy Happy” this morning. I appliqued all the pieces but I’m not doing the embroidery because I don’t have any floss and I really don’t want to invest in any since I don’t plan to do any embroidery work outside of this Sampler. I used a decorative stitch on the applique called “Antique Quilt”, I think it adds another element of ‘happy’ to the block 😀

Once I’m finished with this post I’ll start on Block 5 – I think that one will be relatively easy as there aren’t any really tiny pieces…yee haw!

ttfn…

 

 

It’s been too long

Oh my, I’ve been traveling so much lately…I added it up – over the last 43 days I’ve been gone 24 of them! Ugh, not my idea of fun 😦  Albeit, 10 of those days were for vacation but having them sandwiched in between business travel was just not a good idea.

I’m back home now and I have no plans to travel through the end of the year – aahhhh. I have lots of things I need to do right here at home:

• Sewing/quilting
  • Finish Christmas tree table runner
  • Finish Pink Camo/Bunny crib quilt
  • Catch up with Amanda’s QAL (she’s already on block 6!!)
  • Finish Dog Gone Cute blocks/quilt
  • Start king size quilt-as-you-go for my niece
  • Finish black/white quilt
  • …and much more I can’t recall just now
• Running
  • Get back into a regular schedule
  • Train for Half Marathon in March
• Weight Watchers
  • Yep, I re-joined!
  • Grocery shopping – so I have better choices in the house
  • Need to drop 28 lbs

I’m sure there are many other things that should be on this list but that’s all that comes to mind at the moment. And, I’ve already checked one thing off this list!!! I finished the Christmas tree table runner last night!! It just needed to be quilted and have the binding put on but for some reason I had been procrastinating really badly :-s

I did FMQ using swirl circles on the trees, and random loops in the background. I tried to do a ‘ribbon candy’ effect on the red striped section…not sure how successful I was – lol  This table runner will be mailed off to my friend in California, just in time for her to start decorating later this month…whew!

It’s been raining A LOT here in South Carolina for the past several weeks and it’s no different today, so I’ll be spending most of the day in the sewing room…let’s see what else I can check off my list!!

ttfn

And ‘sew’ it goes

I’ve been a little absent here for a few weeks due to a bit of traveling. We drove to Maryland last weekend to celebrate Grandson #1’s third birthday. Although the weather was a bit of a downer – 50’s and drizzly – the party was a huge success! The theme for the party was Fire Trucks so they had a bouncy house in the shape of a fire truck, they had a painting station and coloring station all with fire trucks and the icing on the cake (no pun intended) they had an actual fire truck show up! It was a retired truck that they rent out for parties…pretty cool!

The ‘firemen’ talked to the kids about fire safety and what to do in an emergency, they gave them all plastic fire hats and then they took them for a ride around the block. Needless to say they were very excited 🙂  After 4 hours of that Nana was ready to go back to the hotel and relax!

We visited other family & friends while in Maryland and made the drive home early on Sunday because I had to fly out first thing Monday for a business meeting in Chicago – not ideal but what are you gonna do? Luckily it was just a one night stay and I was back home Tues night. As can happen when you travel, I came down with a bit of bug on Wed and was just too tired to do any sewing 😦

I went to the doctor Friday morning to get some antibiotics because I don’t want to be sick for our big 30th Anniversary trip coming up. We’re flying out 10/16 for a ten night stay in Punta Cana. And if all that traveling wasn’t enough, I found out Friday morning that I have to travel to Detroit for a customer meeting Monday morning…ugh!!! Because of the time of the meeting I’ll need to fly in Sunday night…more ugh!!!

I had mentally planned to spend this whole weekend at home, sewing and watching football – ha! not gonna happen! So the next best thing is to get as much sewing in as possible before I have to leave again. I stayed up extra late last night and worked on two projects.

First I pounded out the October Patchwork Challenge from Tinkerbellknits. It’s called Blazing Arrow – I wasn’t really sure about my fabric choices at first but I think it worked out ok.

Next I worked on a casserole carrier commissioned by one of my neighbors. She has a Thirty One bag in black, pink and gray so she wanted something that would coordinate. I started with 24″ squares of each fabric and batting then I sewed them right sides together with the batting. Before sewing, I inserted the handles and loops so they would be caught in the seams and I left an opening to turn it right side out. I stopped there last night and finished the rest this morning. I sewed on my label then top stitched around the edge before quilting a diamond pattern. An extra bonus is it’s totally reversible…yay! It came together quickly and I’m pretty happy with it.

Sadly that’s all the sewing I’ve done in the last two weeks and unless I can get more done today, I won’t have a chance to sew again until we come back from vacation 10/26…and then, as luck would have it, I have to fly back to Chicago on 11/2…grrrr, it’s just not fair!!! LOL

Oh well, it is what it is…

Active recovery

The R4G program calls for an ‘active recovery’ workout today after the ‘long, slow run’ yesterday.  I was going to go to the gym and queue up a yoga video but we have been blessed with gorgeous weather today (high 66) so I put on my shoes and took a walk.  The first 2 miles was just me and Pandora, afterwards I stopped by the house and picked up my dog; I knew she would love a walk (she has a big fenced backyard to run in but she really enjoys walking the neighborhood when she gets the chance).

Since I didn’t want her constant stopping to sniff to impact my overall time, I shut off the tracker after the first 1/2 mile so the workout only recorded 2.5 miles when I actually completed 3 miles.  My legs are a bit sore from the 4 miles yesterday but they actually feel better after the walk.

Tomorrow is a Rest/Recovery day which is good because it’s also a travel day for me.  I should have no problem putting in the required 2 miles on Tuesday as the hotel has a nice workout room.  I’m traveling home on Wed so I’m not certain when/how I’ll get in the required 2 miles on that day unless I get up at the crack of dawn…and that’s not really a good time of day for me…but we’ll see.