Ollie's in Warsaw

 We stopped by our new Ollie's store in Warsaw yesterday. It seems brighter and roomier than the one in Fort Wayne. I really like that they have 99-cent greeting cards with a pretty good assortment. I do not remember ever seeing cards in the Fort Wayne store. 

I bought an adult coloring book for $2.99. I picked out this one because the cover illustration showed flowers with gradations of hue. I want to try my new colored pencils in that way. Besides flowers, it has butterflies and birds. When I had a limited number of pencils, making choices was pretty easy. I suspect having 180 pencils will slow things down but be more interesting.

We also bought a jigsaw puzzle for $4.99. Not a large assortment available. Ollie's is an overstock merchandise store so the goods for sale change fairly frequently. The puzzle is titled Paris Impressions. I would have preferred fewer pieces, but the puzzles with less pieces were mostly geared toward juveniles. We do not want to add lots of puzzles to the shelves we thinned out last summer. At this price, we can enjoy a new puzzle every few months and donate it to the retirement community. 

It is predicted to get to 75 degrees this afternoon. A front with rain and wind will come through early tomorrow. Then on Sunday a high of 39 degrees. Definitely March weather in northern Indiana. I now have 9 daffodil sprouts; my neighbor's daffodils are about 6 inches high. Mine obviously are not going to be early bloomers. The bulbs were planted last fall; I have no idea what to expect in terms of timing. At least there are signs that spring is on its way.

Colored Pencils Galore

 Most of my coloring has been in books I got from Swap Shop (free) or bought at a Goodwill store while we were on vacation. I have been using some pencils I have had since pre-teen years when I did color-by-number pictures. When I did an Amazon order for Christmas gifts, I needed about $8 more to get free shipping. I ordered myself a coloring book which I put in the closet until Christmas Day. It is mostly scenes of lakes, ponds, mountains, plants. All I could see before I ordered was the front and back covers.

 As I was coloring a simple picture not from that book the other day, I thought it would be nice to have more pencils so I had more choices and could do gradations of color. Voila! An order to Amazon brought me 180 colored pencils in a set. They arrived this morning.

 

It is a good thing I am not doing color-by-number these days because these pencils are arranged by color, not number. (Each pencil does have a number, however.) I may eventually put them in order by number, but I am not sure there is any advantage to that except I might see something on the swatch chart that interests me and not know exactly where to find it.

I am going to do the swatch chart with one half of the box full pressure color and the other light pressure. 

The set came in a metal case. The reviews for this brand were pretty good. The pencils are for craft/hobby use not professional use, but a few people doing reviews said they are professional artists and this brand is better than most non-professional sets. 

I am going to try to complete the swatch chart this weekend because next week I will start working on my income tax returns. Probably not much coloring going on next week. I may need to color to de-stress after working on taxes. 

An Ollie's store just opened in Warsaw. When I shopped at the Fort Wayne store for books for the retirement library, I noticed they did have adult coloring books. Maybe ours will, too. No hurry for more coloring books though because I only do a few a month. With so many fun colors, I may even try to draw a few pictures. 

Swap Shop, Ebay, Shots, More

 

About 2 weeks ago Grace Village had its autumn Swap Shop. I picked up two items: an adult coloring book and a box of 3 Salonpas pain relief patches. The coloring pictures are of bugs, birds, butterflies. I am getting in the mood to color again, but with Bible study, choir, and Winona Literary Club, it will probably be December before I have time to do that. I tried the Salonpas. It did give my lower back some relief and more importantly the adhesive did not give me little sores like the previous lidocaine patches I had used. 

I currently have a listing on eBay. It has been a few years since I sold anything on that platform. Things have changed quite a bit. There is no listing fee as long as you don't exceed 250 per month. Payment now goes through eBay which means a buyer can use most credit cards and Paypal. In the olden days, most of my buyers sent a money order direct to me or used Paypal. Ebay sends your profits to your bank account so I had to register my credit union account with them.

 You can add lots of photos to your listing without paying extra. For all of these added "benefits", the commission fee is higher, about twice what I paid before. You have to give eBay your SS number as the government will tax profits of $600 or more in most cases. How to define profit is fuzzy; since I am selling two childhood dolls, I have no realistic base for determining profit. My dolls won't sell for that much anyway. I listed my 2 1950's Vogue Ginny dolls plus clothes.

About 2 1/2 weeks ago my husband and I got the latest COVID vaccine. He went ahead and got his flu shot at the same time. I didn't want two shots at the same time so I will probably get my flu shot next week. 

A frost is predicted for Sunday night into Monday morning. My little mums are pretty much done, but I may take my geraniums into the garage to protect them. I may try to keep them a few more weeks since they have new blooms coming. We put our bird feeder up a few weeks ago. Since this week we have juncos. They are nice little birds, but we are their winter home so that reminds me that colder weather is not that far off. 

Yesterday we had our carpeting cleaned by Cook's out of North Manchester. The technicians Brian and Allan we have had before. They are Amish and super polite and respectful. I think it has been two years since our last cleaning. They both have much longer beards than I remember. It is always a bit of a hassle because we move some of the smaller lighter furniture and floor lamps into the garage or sunroom. We also move the dining table and chairs into the sunroom so the area rug can be cleaned. This time my husband waited on moving the dining table until the men arrived. It is getting too much to move such a heavy item on our own. We waited until this morning to put everything back in place (except the dining table which Brian helped move back yesterday) and to remove the blocks and pads that had been put under the loveseat and the chairs. We wanted to make sure the carpet was dry. We had fans running most of yesterday. It is good to have the cleaning done.