Day 236 Retirement party and Beyonce

Today I (Lynn) attended a surprise retirement party for my dear friend Nancy. She is the first of my closest friends to retire. We are all green with envy but so happy for her.

This may sound weird but as I (Taylor) watched the VMAs I actually became a beyonce fan. I've never really not been a fan or disliked her but I actually became a fan of hers after her performance tonight. She's a top notch talent and entertainer and she proved that tonight. 

Day 235 Newks and quilt class

Tonight I (Taylor) went to dinner with on of my best friends, Jess. I've heard great things about Newks so we decided to give it a try. I had the crab and corn chowder and four cheese mac and cheese. It was absolutely delicious! Oh and we watched Need for Speed. I actually rather enjoyed that as well!

Today I took a class using a ruler called rapid fire lemoyne star. The ruler and technique was developed by Deb Tucker. I am not good with rulers and following directions but this was very easy and the result was wonderful.

Day 234 Shopping and lunch and Crisp Apple

I am sure you are wondering what could be so special about shopping and lunch. Today I (Lynn) was invited by my boss's wife to take part in a special day of shopping and lunch. There were a lot of wives of our coach's and administrative staff. None of who I knew. They were very welcoming and we had a great time. Such nice people. I hope we get invited again next year.

Tonight I tried another angry orchard, crisp apple. And again, I greatly enjoyed it :)

Day 233 Survey and Special Kids

Tonight while reading this wonderful book by Carolyn Jourdan called "Out on a Limb", my (Lynn) phone rang. It was someone doing a survey. It was a long survey about an amendment that is going to be on the November ballot. Apparently our state will be deciding if we need to amend our state constitution to make abortion harder to obtain and allow the government to decide what a woman should do with her body. I am sure it will pass. I live in the Bible Belt. I must confess sometimes I would like to leave these mountains I love and move to a place where more people believe like me. It is so frustrating to be surrounded by so many people who think you believe the same thing they do when you don't. I felt bad for the young man doing the survey. Each question was very wordy and difficult to understand. There will many people who don't vote on this issue because they won't understand what it says. 

This morning I had a meeting with a local organization called Special Kids. They're a non profit organization that helps families with children that need special therapy that a number of insurances don't pay for long term. It was a very humbling experience to get to see all of these amazing kids. 

Day 232 New morning news and Dan Cathy

For as long as I can remember I (Lynn) have watched the local NBC station's morning news program. I think it began because I love the Today show so I would just have it on NBC. I really don't like any of the reporters or anchors or weather people on that program. In fact, most mornings they make me angry. They mispronounce words, including cities in the area. I have never heard them read a story without a mistake. They say ridiculous stuff and think they are funny. Today I thought "why am I watching this?" This year is about changing things up, so I found a morning news program I like. From now on I will start my morning with the ABC morning news program.

Tonight we had a corporate hosted event in Nashville. It was a free event for the public and we had a local music artist come and put on a concert. It was a lot of fun and I even got to meet the president of our company, Dan Cathy. 

Day 231 Creating and Guts

Tonight I (Lynn) had to create a 12" block. My fiber art group decided at our last meeting to make small quilts using a process called a round robin. The concept is that each person makes a center of a quilt and then we pass the blocks around between the members with each person adding a row. At the end the person who make the beginning block gets it back to finish. One member of our group donated some 2.5 inch strips of fabric and we all picked 5 strips by blindly reaching into a bag. We were required to use at least three of those strips. I added some hand dyed strips I had purchased from a friend who dyed it herself. When I sat down to sew, I had no idea what I would end up with but I like how it turned out.

So today was a big step for me. I won't shout it out to the world, but today what I did took a lot of guts for me. Hopefully this turns out well for me! 

Day 230 Mustard and Facebook posts

Today was a horrible day at work (Lynn). Every task was twice as hard as it should have been. But the most challenging thing today was having a huge blob of mustard on my shirt most of the day. It was right on my left breast and was a circle about three inches across. I tried getting out with a tide pen. Apparently a tide pen does not work on mustard. You could not miss it and of course most of the afternoon there were tons of people in and out of my office. So my first today - walking around with a huge mustard stain on my shirt. Not my finest moment.

This morning I (Taylor) had a marketing director meeting with the Nashville area marketing directors. We had a couple of home office people come an talk about social media and public relations. I learned something brand new from the social media guy. When you boost posts on your stores Facebook page there are a lot of different ways to customize who you target. You can do sex, age, location, etc. I also learned that you can customize based on what a person has posted about on their own personal Facebook page. For example. If we want to boost a post about our iced coffee and wanted to target women aged 21-36 you could set those peramiters. You can also add in interests. So you could type in Starbucks. So any female ages 21-36 that has talked about Starbucks, you can boost your post to them! How crazy awesome is that!?!