Busy Days of Late

The past few days have been busy ones. It's the usual time for writing, editing, printing, stapling, rolling and rubber-banding (for delivery), and hand-delivering our monthly senior mobile home park newsletter.

Normally, I volunteer to not only write and produce the newsletter, but I also walk and deliver to almost 200 of our homes. It's one way to get me to walk - but that, sad to say, is just once a month. 

Anyhow, I normally deliver part of it on a Saturday morning and the rest on that Sunday morning. Well, Saturday was really, really wet. I ended up delivering my whole route yesterday morning. But all went well.

That done, I realized my purse was empty of my little stash of plastic-canvas/satin-ribbon crosses that I keep in there. Often when I am out and about, I run into someone who seems troubled, we talk, I give them one of the little crosses to try to cheer them up. Between the crosses and my button-face angels, I can usually find a color to brighten a troubled face.

I finished almost two dozen of them and put half of those in my purse. I need to pick up some small plastic zip loc baggies for the others.

During the printing of the newsletter, I am pretty much house bound for a few hours, so I also worked on a baby jacket and baby hat for our charity crafter's stash.

Oh, and a neighbor, a local handyman, came by. We had set this up last week. My plastic lattice along my driveway and across the back of my driveway is over 6 years old and breaking apart from the supports. I had him come by and "batten down my hatches," as it were. He screwed all of the panels on nice and tight. He also screwed in my two vertical rain spouts - driveway and front porch side, both. They were coming loose and one day, one of them had even tipped down onto my car trunk, but thankfully, it was a gentle fall and no damage. I was only able to tape it back in place. Now it is snug.

So, now I won't cringe every time I hear one of our strong gusts of winds here in the Vegas valley. Here, we call 30 mph a "breeze." It's the 50 mph and 60 mph winds that can rip off our awnings and do other damage. At least now, it's more secure here on my lot.

Oh, and I revised my Class Reunion templates for my Etsy shop. I've been paying about $80 a year to update the data base for the software. The way that comes into play is this way - on the Reunion report, there's a paragraph with a list of "consumer prices" for the date on the report. The database also pulls in current prices, as a comparison. I've decided to eliminate the current prices - everyone knows the current prices. On that report, the big thing is the prices at the time being remembered/celebrated. So now, maybe my profits will begin to appear. One can only hope. To do this, I must print backgrounds, open the software and generate a sample report, print that report onto the various backgrounds I offer, then scan each one, and save each one as both a pdf and a jpg, then compress the jpg's so that Etsy will accept the photos, and then update my Etsy listing. Yep - fun, right? Well, it's not rocket science, but it is detailed and time-consuming, but it's done. I feel so good about that - I've been thinking of that since January when the software company sent me the usual note to upgrade the package. 

So, all in all, those things and a few others, kept me moving along. That's good. When I worked on site, anywhere, there was always a sense of purpose. When we are no longer working for a paycheck or a contractor's check, sometimes it is difficult to get motivated. I'm not sure about others, but that's how it works with me.