I can't win an argument normally.........

especially with the grandchildren!  I personally think all three year old's should be lawyers as they all have the art of negotiating down pat!!  So imagine my surprise when I discovered I had won a competition.  I live behind an author and she was having a Facebook competition to guess how many words she would write in a month.  What would you think?  The answer will be at the bottom of the post.  I came the closest without going over.  She handed me my prize over the fence yesterday 😊  I am as pleased as punch with the prize.

I got a signed copy of one of her books:

and this lovely mug and pen. 

If you have a moment you can read  more about her here.

Now onto something completely different.  I was looking at this bag of peas I had in my freezer:

What other types of peas are they if they're not 100% natural?

Answer to the question was just under 24,000 words, I guessed around 23,500.  That's a lot of words isn't it?

Many things annoy me, but paying Bank fees really tick me off.

We are with the TD Bank and have been ever since we came to Canada.  I keep threatening to move all our stuff, but basically I am just too damn lazy to do it and can't be bothered with all the hassle.

One thing though that drives me crazy are the bloody bank fees.  It's around $15 a month if you go over a set amount of transactions which I always do.  So one way of getting around that is that you have to have a minimum balance of $3,500 in your chequing account to defer those fees.    Although it annoys the heck out of me, I know I cannot make over $15 in interest a month in a savings account with that money, so moved money into our chequing account so I don't pay the service charges.

$3,500 is an odd number to me, so I have $4,000 in there and just "forget" about it.  When I balance my cheque book it's minus the $4,000 as it doesn't exist in my cheque book.  I also make sure I have nothing less than $100 in our chequing account.  If it falls down to $100 in my mind we have no money.

We have only ever been overdrawn once and it was a cheque we had made out to the Government for our citizenship application, and back in the day, when the banks weren't open all hours I figured it wouldn't be processed for an extra day, but it was.  Luckily we had money in our savings account and they moved the money over from there for us but they charged us a fee for doing it.

By "forgetting/pretending" that $4,000 doesn't exist and mentally telling myself that we CANNOT go down below that $100 balance in the chequing account we should never ever have service charges.

Do you have a trick that you use so you don't have service charges?

I have discovered some new to me authors and when I order the books from the library you won't be hearing nothing from me as I'll have my nose in a book.

I have read four of Maggie Sefton's books so far and they are good.  Here is a link to her site.  I have been reading the Kelly Flynn series, which is set around a knitting store.  The books feature both knitting patterns and recipes.

I can't wait to order books by the author Laura Childs.  Here is a link to her site.  I'll be honest I am not sure which series to start with. The Tea Shop Mysteries seem to be calling my name?  Plus they are set in Charleston, South Carolina which is a place I love.

Monica Ferris books also look like my type of book.  Check out her site here.

Last but not least Earlene Fowler books have a quilting theme about them.  Here is a link to her site.