The correct answer to "How much did UAB bill Blue Cross Blue Shield for Jeff's stay?" was $557,501.66, which means our winner is Susanna Leberman, assistant archivist at the Huntsville - Madison County Public Library. Her guess: $550,013. Well played!

Susanna works on the same floor of HMCPL as I do, and has followed a lot of my quilts from beginning to completion. Since she works in the library archives, she has a strong interest in historical preservation, and says that she didn't get a quilt when she got married ten years ago.

Thank you, all of you, for helping turn $557,501.66 from a jaw-dropping, heartbreaking number into something that has good connotations for me, for Susanna, and for Jeff's family. I could TOTALLY be convinced to do this again when the HealthSouth tally arrives. :)

I've needed care labels for some time, so I decided to do something that would work for both new and old quilts alike. I've ordered a yard of quilt-weight cotton to be printed at spoonflower.com with this repeat:

Assuming the freecycler I've heard from comes through, I'll be getting rid of the old sofa and love seat in the Room Of Many Purposes within the next few days. We think the room was originally supposed to be a formal dining room; it has a chair rail and is open to the living room. We aren't 'formal dining room' people, so we tossed in couches and put in a few rickety bookshelves and called it the reading room.

Let it be known: being a cat is hard, hard work. Especially when hanging all that shelving is involved.

I had huge help this weekend from Crystal and Jacob. Because of Jeff's accident, I wasn't able to take my earned holidays for Christmas and New Year's, and since it was nearing the end of March, it was verging on use-or-lose status for them. I'd been babbling incessantly about doing a Great Shelving Project to anyone who would listen (and several people who politely wished I'd just shut up) and we finally got cracking on it. Of course, about halfway through, Jacob had an insight which totally changed the course of the project -- more on that insight after the photos.

John Wilson's photo pretty much sums me up right now: