I was given a gift card on my birthday for TJ Maxx/Homegoods. In case you're not familiar with it, it's a discount department store. TJ Maxx and Homegoods are actually 2 separate stores but run by the same company. In my area, their stores are connected so you can shop through both of them and a gift card for one is good for the other. I love looking through all their stuff - sometimes they have some really fun things! I'm trying to watch my money since I'm not working at the moment but a gift card is like free money.

Do you know I walked through BOTH stores and, even though I found some cool stuff, all I came out of there with was a colander? I mean, I needed a colander because the one I had was getting rust spots on it but this was supposed to be a fun shopping spree! And colanders aren't really fun, just utilitarian. I did find a few purses that I was interested in until I saw the prices- 2 were $50 and one was $80! I would never pay that much at a real store, much less a discount store. They were leather but still, that much is just ridiculous.

Well, I still have a lot left on the gift card since I spent so little so I'll give it a little while and then I'll go again and try to do a better job of "fun spending."

I am ALMOST DONE with my never-ending cross-stitch project and I ran out of thread! Yes, I just bought a bunch of thread locally and ordered some online, none of it in the color I need. I guess I just drastically misjudged how far one skein would go. The answer is not far enough! So frustrating!

I'm adding a new little section to my Pixel Art page - I'm calling it Rescued Pixels and putting it below my Toybox. I'm just enthralled with all these little cliques (and the adorable teeny graphics) people were coming up with in the early 2000s. If there was an object, there was a clique for it - glasses, marshmallows, passionfruit, coconuts. Just anything and everything! Unlike today's cliques where people are given a template to create their own item, the clique creators made the graphics and you adopted them onto your page. Some creators went crazy and had tons to choose from. And some had just a few.

Anyway, I've spent this past week trying to hunt down graphics. It's been real hit and miss and I'm finding more broken graphic links than anything which is so disappointing. I've spent time going through member lists and trying multiple versions of Wayback Machine saves. Usually when I get this obsessive about something I'm avoiding something else but I don't have anything else I'm currently NOT trying to do.

In the process of looking for graphics, I end up reading an awful lot of teenagers' blogs. Lots of friend fights, getting in trouble at school, like liking a certain someone, being excited about trips. It's wild. I wonder where these people are now and how they've turned out.

Listening

Someone on the 32-Bit Discourse was asking for recommendations of 80s music. That's my era! I had a fun time trying to figure out some tunes that maybe were popular back in the day but might not be so well-remembered today. I spent some time looking for and listening to tunes. Several users answered and it was interesting to see the range of music chosen.

Here's my list:

Currently (like right now as I'm working on this blog post) I'm listening to Those Lowdown Blues with Bob Corritore a local show that's been going on for 40 years. If you are at all into blues, it's supercool. Not just awesome music but also history and background on the music and musicians.

Reading

I finally decided to just pick something from my Libby list and chose Veil of Lies by Jeri Westerson, a mystery set in the 14th century. We'll see how this goes. The last medieval mystery I tried out let me down and ended up being a DNF.

Watching

I had started The Bureau (the original French version) a while ago and I just finished it up tonight. It was really good! I always enjoy a good spy show. Other than that it's just been a lot of YouTube while I'm waiting for my mystery series on the Acorn channel to start their new seasons, which should be within the next month or so.

That's it for this week!