What can you do in 3 ½ minutes?

I love finding little pockets of time throughout the day. A great example is the 3 ½ minutes that it takes to cook my steel-cut oatmeal. What did I do this morning in that 3 ½ minutes? I made my lunch, ran to the laundry room for more paper towel and prepped the bacon for cooking, took my sewing machine to the front door for Monday sewing, went downstairs and brought up my Monday sewing bag which I had forgotten to bring up when I came up earlier. Oh, and I let the dog in!

Amazing what you can get done! While the bacon was cooking (50 seconds each side), I cut up the banana for the oatmeal, washed and dried the knife, took my calcium and I usually have a few seconds left for a quick stretch. It's called being super efficient with my time!

Without mentioning any names, there are some people in my house who are not very time efficient! But we won't go there.

The radio station that I like to listen to has moved to Christmas music 24/7 until Christmas. I love Christmas, but I can't deal with that so instead of sewing in silence this morning, I popped over to my old radio station. ACK!!!  That's almost as bad, but anyway - it did entertain me however briefly. I heard this story though which I thought was pretty timely. They were talking about what the kids of today are missing because of Netflix. And what are they missing? That crazy thing you did when the commercials came on. It's like my 3 ½ minutes during the oatmeal cook time. You could get a LOT done in the commercial break. Kids don't experience that! That's how you learn time management!!!

While some people may just hang out (oh - god - they are checking Facebook and Instagram) while they wait for their oatmeal to cook, that's precious time that's wasting! Me? - I'm saving time. The social media stuff can wait until I have time for it!!!  It doesn't rule my life!

I spent a LONG time on the computer yesterday. Editing pictures, sorting pictures and writing. I made good progress. Not as much as I was planning originally to do, but doesn't matter. The first draft is done and that's the worse. It easy to edit something very rough and make it sound good than to write the very rough stuff in the first place!

I got half of the that large customer quilt loaded. Well, the backing is loaded. I'll finish loading the top and the batting later today.

I also made good progress on the next magazine quilt. It's going to be very pretty. I'm really liking it.

I had a couple of errands to run and decided that since it was a gorgeous day out that I'd walk. I had to drop some books at the library, do a bit of grocery shopping and pick up suet for the woodpecker who was not happy with me. I was going to go to the bank as well, but realized that I hadn't brought my debit card. Those three errands took me 58 minutes on foot and 6,000 steps. Now that was a great use of my one hour. I think a certain someone in our house is horrified that I do my errands on foot. Yeah - well, that's why one of us is in great shape and the other is not!

I had put out bird seed when the first snow hit last week. The wood pecker was a wee bit puzzled at first. How the heck do I get to the good stuff???

Wait a minute - how do I get the good stuff?

It wasn't long before he figured out that he could go INSIDE the ball to get the seeds.

Much better

 A little chickadee had the same problem. But I'm sure he figured it out as well. He's on the bottom left of the ball.

Little chickadee triying to get to the seed

Now there's a block of suet and another seed ball besides my two bird feeders. I'm sure this morning that they'll be packed. It's amazing how the word gets out. No birds and then all of a sudden, when you put seed out, they come in flocks!!!!  I used to have a tree close to the feeders and it got chopped back this year. Hopefully, the squirrels won't be an issue this year, but Murphy is fascinated by the feeder. Bad dog Murphy!

On that note, I've a couple of e-mail to write before I had off to Monday sewing.

Have a super day!!!!


Ciao!!!!