yoghurt, BOM done

Michael left at 7 AM for golf here at SCCL on Saturday (7/15) and I was quilting before 8 AM, finishing up Mary Ann’s quilt in the morning:  

After that I headed upstairs for breakfast, and to package up yoghurt for Michael (it had been incubating in the crockpot all night.  I don’t know why more people don’t make their own yoghurt…it’s so simple and so much cheaper that buying it in the grocery store!!!)  

When I came back to my studio, I started to work on my second choice for the block of the month (BOM) – Ohio Star.  I worked on those all afternoon and by dinnertime I had 2 blocks done, and some samples of how to create the quarter square blocks to show the BOM group members on Thursday:

My honey came home at 2 PM, both disgusted and happy about golfing….disgusted with his 46 on the front nine, but delighted with his 38 on the back nine….of course he also got his pretty standard birdie (actually he got 2 in a row!!)…that added to his delight!  We spent a bit of time after he got home getting ready for a meeting with Susan at 4 PM.  The 3 of us are planning to travel to try to be in a totality location for the eclipse (along with a million others!!) on August 21^st.  After we met with Susan and semi-figured out what we were doing, I got Mary Ann’s quilt off of the frame and got it cleaned up (ends in trimmed, etc).

We had a disturbing, regrettable, disappointing action happen around dinnertime.  Michael took the dog out and noticed some mail in our paper tube.  Phyllis (our regular mail carrier) was obviously not delivering on Saturday, so mail always gets messed up.  Our statement from our financial planner was put into one of our neighbor's mailboxes.  Well – our neighbor never noticed it wasn’t addressed to them….didn’t notice the 2’’ by 3-1/2’’ return address was someone they didn’t know, and opened the envelope still not noticing the cover page wasn’t their name/address and didn’t notice the letter wasn’t addressed to them or signed by anyone they knew.  They proceeded to check out all of our financial holdings  :~(.  How do we know?  Because when they stuffed the papers back into the envelope to sneak it into our tube, the papers were out of order.  I think in general I’m pretty open with people, but there are some things I’d rather not share, and our financial position and everything we own would be one of them :~(.  That kind of left a bad taste in our mouths…that someone would rifle through sensitive information like that, but studies have shown over and over again that people act differently when they are being watched than they do when they aren't.  As a matter of fact...I just finished reading a book entitled DRUNK TANK PINK and it was facinating!  The title comes from the fact that years ago, studies were done on how colors affect our behavior and it was found that pink was a very calming color.  Police stations across the country started to paint their drunk tanks in a pink color, and belligerent drunks immediately began to calm down when they were put into the cells.  Anyway, the relevent-to-our-situation-story from this book concerned an office were they had a coffee-tea-beverage room with payment being on the honor system.  The percentage of people who took drinks and never paid anything was very high.  Manangement made one small change in the room, and the amount of people actually paying for their drinks soared!!!  What did they do?  They simply posted a large picture of a pair of eyes, staring into the room.  This one small change made people rethink their behavior, and become more honest....isn't that wild?  They had many, many examples in the book of the number of small things that influence us on a daily basis that we don't even realize.  I love reading about stuff like that.

Michael finally had a chance to grill the hot dogs he’s been dying for since he bought them last week and they were AWESOME!!  After dinner, I got a double backing of fleece loaded up and my batting cut for 2 more of my Valor quilts (this is that fleece I scored just last week.  Good thing I got it because I was totally out!):

before joining him upstairs for a bit of TV.  AT 10 PM we decided it was cool enough and we lit the candles on our porch and sat there with our candles for a delightful hour before bed.