New Year, New Challenges

I awaited eagerly Sharon B's announcement of the concept and color choice for the Take It Further Challenge. Sharon's theme for January is "the feeling of admiration for another". At first this made me a little anxious, because I wondered how I was going to come up with something for that concept, and thought I would just do something with the color choices. But the more I looked at the color choices, it suddenly dawned on me that those colors were the favorites of my friend Barbara. And Barbara is someone I really admire in her gardening skills.
Barbara is retired, so she has the time I don't have, to constantly be working in her garden, and she always has the most amazing gardens. When she lived in Sacramento, she was really close to the American River, and her soil was amazingly rich, as was her garden. A number of years ago, she moved to a retirement community in Rocklin, CA, and Rocklin I think was named for its soil composition. Barbara had a new challenge, the type of soil composition I have to contend with in my area. But Barbara began growing things in containers, and she still has an amazing garden, and she gives me samples when her garden overgrows!

So my January TIF challenge will be making a garden block, dedicated to Barbara, using the color scheme Sharon gave us, as these are Barbara's favorite colors. I think I will frame this when I finish and give it to my friend Barbara.

On the Winter Quilt Swap front, I have it probably 50% quilted. Hope to get some more done on this today, but not sure at this point.

I do medical transcription on the internet for a children's hospital in Florida. Usually I get up really early and get started (2 a.m.) and there is work to do when I get up. I have been up almost 3 hours now, and there has been no dictation. Since I transcribe 1000 lines a day, it looks like I am going to be sitting here all day. Recently I have had my work done by 9:30 to 10 and I have the rest of the day to play... And then this afternoon, I have an appointment with the dentist to get a crown on my tooth. A hunk of it broke off the day before my birthday in
October, but I had used up all my dental insurance for the year, so they put a temporary on, and I have had this temporary on since October. Well due to it being the new year, I have my allotment for dental available again, so today is the first step in getting this dumb tooth fixed.