TODAY'S ATC: DESIGN A...

I sat down to work on this ATC a couple of days ago, and wondered, What was I thinking?!

The idea of this swap was to take this image of a snail

and create an ATC with it. I hate googly eyes. Pretty much always have. And those look like googly eyes to me. Furthermore, they're out there on the ends of the snail's antennae. I guess that's not altogether unreasonable, since those feelers do act as eyes, but they bother me out there! And then there's the shape of the shell, an oval. Aren't snail shells round?

But I'd signed up for the swap, and that was that. Had to make an ATC.

The first thing that happened was I worked on another swap for awhile, an easy one: Gather up thirty different beads, and send them to your swap partner. I was looking through a tray of beads when I unearthed a card of self-stick yarn. Don't know how it go there, but it started me on my snail project.

A bit of scrapbooking paper, some paint, glue, glitter, buttons, and wire later, and I had this:


My snail is cozily dressed for fall weather in an autumnal sweater and coordinating headwear, and I think she's adorable. Should I say that? Is that being too vain? I can't help it--I didn't even want to send her off when I finished, and that's a pretty big change from wishing I hadn't signed up for the swap!

In other news, I reached a bit of a mile post today: I applied for Social Security. Should start getting benefits early next year. Feels funny writing that here. It's like shouting, "HEY, World! I'm OLD!!"

I am going for the early retirement option, in spite of the fact that if I waited until I'm 66 the monthly payout would be larger. They tell you what your monthly benefit will be at each age, so I subtracted the lower monthly benefit figure from the higher one, to see how much more per month I'd get at 66, and then divided that into the total of what I'd draw in the four years before turning 66. Turns out it would take twelve years to make up for what I'd lose by waiting, and we decided it really wasn't worth the wait.

So, as of about February of next year, I'm officially a retired person. Wow.