Odds and Ends

John's Visit to Pasadena

Every year John goes to a conference in the US southwest in around March.   Last year it was Palm Springs and this year it was Pasadena.   Unluckily for me because of the timing of my angiogram and getting the results we couldn't be sure that I could go along (although with the results of the angiogram it turns out I could have).   But he made sure to take lots of pictures on his free time during it and the 1/2 day he had at the end of the conference for me to see.

 Some architectural detail that got his attention.

After the conference ended he had a free afternoon before flying home the next day and used it to go see the Huntington and the Norton Simon.   He'd never been to the Huntington before but after a blogging friend (Mel) shared pictures from their visits to it last year I told him if he had a chance he might want to check it out.    We'd been to the Norton Simon before (2005) and he wanted to go back to it too so it was a full afternoon.   He ended up wishing they'd had a lot more to spend at the Huntington - good - that means when I finally get to go back to Pasadena we'll be checking it out.  :)  He ended up being sorry that he had only taken the little point and shoot (in interests of saving space & weight in his carryon) and would have loved to have had his DSLR with him to do it justice as he's just not all that used to the point and shoot.

 

These last two pictures are from the Norton Simon Museum - there are a lot more but I decided I better not share pictures from it's sculpture garden just in case that's not allowed.

 

Finally Scrapping Legoland 2003

I'm going a bit slower this week on the scrapping as I had to relearn how to do a collage and life just interfered - the nerve of it.  :)  But I am finally into the California pictures. 

I've decided to break the trip album up into sections.   There are just so many pictures from the attractions/activities from that part of the trip that we really want in the album.   Each section is going to have a title page and this is the one for Legoland.  I think this is the last digital page till I get to the next section.  In 2003 we were just starting to take digital pictures with my little point & shoot and still had the SLR so a lot of the pictures aren't digital that we'd like in there.   

Credits:  Red paper is from Anna Aspnes of Designerdigitals.com kit that she shared in Ali Edwards Yesterday and Today class.  The yellow is from Maurine Stettler of Let me Scrapbook Designs at Scrapbook Studio from the Fiesta Blog Hop. 

 Not sure if going with the lego colours was a good idea or not.

We had a super time there and spent way more time than we thought we would  - it's not just for kids as our friends Gigi & Darrell who were our unofficial guides told us.

 

Change in Yesterday's Layout

I found just what I'd been looking for this morning for the layout I shared yesterday.   I finally did a search on digital scrapbooking construction and came up with the Scrap Orchard site.  It had exactly what I wanted.   I knew it had to be there somewhere.  :)   So here is the revised layout.

Paper is from Lifesong Kreations by Karla, World Traveler kit  and the construction signs are from the Under Construction collaboration kit by Laura Banasiak and Suzy Q Scraps at Scrap Orchard.

Still simple but a little less so today.   Ok - on to Legoland.

Yesterday and Today

This has nothing to do with the Yesterday & Today course but is about what I've been doing yesterday and today.  The past couple of days have been busy - some of it by choice and some of it not.  I could have done without the not part - more on that later.  :)

Sunday I started working on one of those layouts where there are no pictures and trying to come up with something to put on it has been stumping me.  I just didn't seem to have anything in my digi stash that was calling out to me to use on it.  So.... yesterday I spent a good portion of the day looking for new digi supplies that might be travel, especially road trip, related.   I found some on ScrapGirls and have spent a lot of the time downloading the zip files (talk about slow).   Next step unzip them all and look for something that just might work on this page.

Paper is from Lifesong Kreations by Karla, World Traveler kit that I flipped (so the steering wheel was on the North American side of the car).  

So far I'm coming up blank but ....   Anyone have any suggestion as to what to use or a good digi site with road trip type embellishments etc.?

Ok, for the not part.   While I was working away on this I had my readers on with my regular glasses sitting beside me on the desk.  I reached past them to answer the phone & knocked them on the floor.  Now this is where it gets fun - Not!   Well not then anyway.   I couldn't see where they'd landed but checked around the wheels of my chair and they weren't there so I thought I'd carefully back up and have a better view of where they might be.   That is until I heard crunch as I put my heels down (I usually sit with my toes on the floor but not my heels).  Ok, found my spares (one prescription ago) and off to the Optometrist I went where the assistant fixed the bent nose piece for me.   Great.   That is until about an hour later when I got an intense pain in one eye, a sure sign that the bifocal part must be out of alignment.  Back to the spares and after a quick call was told to come back in today when my Optometrist would be in and she would fix that part. 

Todayit was back to the Optometrist who hopefully has fixed those glasses for good :) and then on to what I really had planned to do.   Namely get the winter tires put on my vehicle (possibility of snow tomorrow some time so we want to be ready), have a much delayed chai latte & chat with my school days friend while I was over in her city (right next door to ours) and download more of those ScrapGirls files while I had some time.  If i can't come up with an idea for that page it's just going to stay the way it is and I'll move on to Legoland in California. I bought some neat lego type paper from Paper Wizard years ago to use on those layouts and I'm just dying to get at them.

The Best Laid Plans

Talk about your plans for the day going out the window.  Yesterday was one for the books.   Why can't you get better time estimates when you're having work done?  I knew I had to take the Camry in for the usual stuff plus a look at the brakes (they were feeling kind of mushy) and it's emission test (so we can get the license sticker for 2012).  So  I made plans about what I could do to kill the time.   I took the laptop over with me as I figured I could work on organizing 2010's & 2011's pictures while I waited to meet my friend from school days at 10.   I was told it shouldn't take any longer than 2 hours so I figured I'd leave the power cable at home - Note to self:  Don't do that ever again.  I did also take my Kindle (more about that later).  The plan was to work away on the laptop till either the car was ready or they gave me a ride over to meet Janie at Starbucks at 10.  Somewhere in there I needed to go to Costco too to pick up some 12x12 prints I'd had printed of digital layouts that I had never printed off.

Nine forty-five comes along and I can see that the car is still up on the hoist and I can also see that I have hardly any battery life left on the laptop.  Hmmm, after a chat with them where I was told they needed 45 minutes to one more hour they gave me a ride over to Starbucks.   Janie and I had a great visit over our favourite Starbucks drinks (Tazo Chai for me) and she drove me back there at 11:45 (so they've had 2 hours extra at this point right?).  The car by their estimation should be done.   Whats this - I don't see it out in any of the parking spots.  I'm thinking Oh Oh.  I walked in and get "Its not finished.  Its taking longer than we thought.  We'll need another 45 minutes."  Whats with that?    Seeing as they are in the next town to where I live it's pretty senseless having them take me home and just a few minutes later come back and bring me back.  Ok, I did have stuff I needed to do but I'll make the best of it and read my Kindle.  I open it up and theres a screen staring me in the face telling me it needs charging and you've got it - the charger is at home.  ARGH!  

One hour later and finally the car is ready.   With my one very quick stop at Costco (less than 5 minutes away from them) I got home at 1:45  Almost 2 hours later than I had expected.   And I still had to have lunch.  Needless to say I was not impressed and I made sure the owner who we've known for decades knew I wasn't impressed.  He was actually quite shocked that the car or should I say his mechanic took that long.  If they had given me a better idea of the time initially I would have had them bring me home and got some work done for the kids' visit this coming week.  They've always been so good before at time estimates but this time was the pits.  :)

I decided after all that I needed some scrapbooking time.  Any excuse right and I think you need something to look at after reading about my morning yesterday.  Last night, I shared with you my version of the colour assignment for DYL (Design Your Life).  I decided it really needed another page to go along with it and this morning I managed to finish it off after flipping the template, reducing the size of the journaling block and putting in another picture.  I'm pretty happy with it except it shows my wonky big toe that I broke years ago (that's another story all together).  :)   I wasn't sure though, seeing as week one was about symmetry, if I needed to have a circle on the right page to match the left one but I don't think so as I think the bones of the layouts are symmetrical without doing that.  What do you think?  Does it need the extra circle for balance?

 
Here's the complete 2 page layout and I'm happy to say I've got something done from 2005.  :)  Supplies:Template - Cathy Zielske, Papers - blue -Jessica Sprague Beautiful You Kit, red - same kit, cream - Katie Pertiet of Designer Digitals Vintage Blooms kit, beige Jessica Sprague Grand Intentions kit. Date Stamp from The Voyager Collection at Digital Scrapbook Page by Kristmess, Ring on the far right are  from Flutter Expressions at scrappity-do-dah and the Believe in Miracles kit, the font is Tahoma for both title & journaling.

 

Toe Rings and Week 1 Colour Assignment

Evidently every week of DYL there is an assignment to do with colour and this was my first one.  Cathy gave us a colour scheme to work with but it just wasn't me so instead I took the colour scheme from an ad I'd always liked the looks of.   The colours were blue, cream, beige(brown) and red. Nothing to do with what it was an ad for (I think Citi Bank) just that I liked the colour scheme in it.  The template was for 8 1/2 x 11 page and I really have problems with that - I've always done 12x12 right from day one.

Back in April's Story Telling Time I shared part of the story of my toe rings.   Well today I did part of the layout for it for my colour assignment.   I will be doing a right hand side page to go along with it once I figure out how to adapt the template.  :)

 Papers - blue -Jessica Sprague Beautiful You Kit, red - same kit, cream - Katie Pertiet of Designer Digitals Vintage Blooms kit, beige Jessica Sprague Grand Intentions kit.  Date Stamp from The Voyager Collection at Digital Scrapbook Page by Kristmess, font is Tahoma for both title & journaling.

I'm going to pretty scarce probably for the next few days.  My niece is coming down next Thursday and bringing P-Man (4 1/2) and Miss M (19 1/2 months) and our house is definitely not toddler/small child proof so guess what I'm going to be doing.  :)  

 

Lesson 2 Bonus Assignment Layout

 

So glad to have got this done today. I've been working at it off and on it seems like all week. The only things we had to do with this layout was use more than one picture - check, use a neutral paper - check and use something from the date brush set that was provided - check. The rest was up to me.

In the bonus assignment handout a link to a tutorial on photo collages was included. After watching it I decided that it would be the perfect way to include more than the 2 pictures I had wanted to include. I had fun looking for the perfect papers and embellishments and my collection of digital supplies most definitely increased this week. :)

 

Credits: Worn Paper (beige) – Crystal Wilkerson’s Neutral Paper Pack June 2009 Collection, Aqua Solid Paper – Jessica Sprague HAFH Kit, Word Art – ScrapGirls Happy Summer Kit, Date Stamp from iKari Designs, Title Font – Brush Script MT, Journaling Font – Cambria

 

 
 
And now we’re off to enjoy the long Victoria Day (explanation of what that is in the comment section) weekend. Hopefully the weather will stay like this for the whole thing but it looks like we’re going to have rain or thunderstorms for the fireworks on Monday night. Keeping fingers crossed.

PSE and Up and Running

Just finished with lesson 2 of Jessica Sprague’s Up and Running class.  Glad I took it to refresh my memory about PSE.   There’s definite changes to version 8 from what I was using before and I think short of buying a book on it that I would have been blundering my way through it but taking the class is really helping.  I’m looking forward to doing the bonus assignment for this lesson where we create a layout from scratch.   So far it’s been quick pages and templates.  

Lesson 2 was supposed to be 5 things we like about someone, using 3 pictures of that person.  But I decided instead to do 5 things I like about San Francisco and of course some of them had to be food related.    I changed the plan in a couple of other ways and instead used a different background paper than supplied (I have oodles of digital paper on my external hard drives so that definitely helped.   I also didn’t use either one of the embellishments supplied in the lesson package but again used an embellishment from my digital supplies on my external HDs.   Not keen on the heart or brush used but those tasks were part of the class so……..

 
 

Credits:  Background paper - Lynne Simmons World Traveler kit, Striped paper Jessica Sprague You & Me kit, Star - Oscraps Moonrise kit.  Balance of supplies provided in the class supplies.

The picture on the left is one John took as we were about to sail under the Golden Gate Bridge on our 2009 Alaska cruise, the middle picture is of Muir Woods (on the other side of the bridge) and the one on the right is Clam Chowder in a Sourdough bowl – Yummm! 

You know this has given me an idea for an album of 5 things I love.  Hmmm.

Something We've Never Done Before - Lots of Pictures

Our plans for Saturday kind of went out the window for 2 reasons.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I was up bright & early – in time to see some of the sunrise over Sea World.

John was up shortly after me and we headed down to the lounge for a continental breakfast which we were happy to see included things that John could have and if he had wanted cereal they even had soy milk – no lactose free milk though.

After breakfast we checked out the Field of Flowers website and were disappointed to see that the blooms were only at 20% so we decided to not do that this year.   With all the cold weather San Diego has been having this year, just like Joshua Tree NP, the blooms are behind.   The site said that hopefully next week they’ll be much better.   Figures, this trip has just been 1 week early it seems.     John went down and talked to the concierge about alternative things to see.  We’ve been to San Diego so many times that we’ve seen most of the sights and some more than once.   The one thing we hadn’t done was go see Balboa Park – we’ve done the zoo lots of times but never the park itself.   We decided we’d do that in the afternoon and headed out for a walk around the marina and some of Mission Bay.   Basically we were looking for somewhere that we could buy something to take to eat on the plane – but no luck.

The gardens at the hotel.

Looking back at the hotel and restaurant from the Bay shoreline.

The remains of last night S’mores bonfire.

After our walk it was time to have some lunch.  We decided to eat in the hotel’s restaurant and John ordered what he thought would be safe – a hamburger.   Well within 20 minutes he was in reaction mode again.   All we can figure is maybe there was butter on the grill that they did the bun on or the burger or the burger had MSG in it.  MSG hasn’t reared it’s ugly head in a year or so but….  This meant that we’d be delaying our trip to Balboa Park so that John could rest and get over the reaction.   Finally about 90 minutes to 2 hours later he felt that it was ok to go.   It didn’t leave us much time for exploring but that just means we’ve got something to do the next time we go back. 

Unfortunately we didn’t get to the Visitor’s Center till just after it closed but we did get a great parking spot, being late in the day on a Saturday sure helped I bet.  We just walked around and looked at the amazing architecture of the museums near the Visitor’s Center.  We decided next time we go we’ll check out the park on a week day.  John would really like to check out both their Science Museum and the Air & Space one while I want to check out the gardens, the Botanical building and the various museums of art.  Wait I think he wants to check those out too.    Most of the buildings in this area of the park were constructed for an exposition in 1915.

Reuben H Fleet Science Center

Natural History Museum

Museum of Art

The Old Globe

Alcazar Garden

Spreckels Organ Pavilion

Seems like in the city you are never far from the airport.

The Botanical Building and Lily Pond

By now we were getting hungry and decided we’d try Seaport Village for dinner but nothing there struck our fancy and we finally decided to go back to the Omni Hotel where we’d stayed a week ago.  We discovered something – don’t try and drive to downtown San Diego (Gastown area) on a Saturday night – thank heavens for valet parking.   We had a delicious dinner and the highlight of mine was the cup of chowder.  Yumm!

P-Man's First Birthday

So glad that our package to P-Man arrived yesterday - just in time for his First Birthday today.   WOW that year went by really fast.   Oh yeah and I even managed to get Lisa's scrapbook to her (just after their 4th wedding anniversary).   Hope she likes it.    P-Man's birthday reminds me a year ago today we were in the Panama Canal

As far as scrapbooking - I've got 15 pages done so far this year.  I think that's already half of what I did last year.   :)    I'll have to go check what I did last year.    Today I'm back working on our First Cruise album.  Let's see - we've done 3 more cruises since then  and we also had the big California trip right before it.   I need to get cracking as we've got the big London/St. Petersburg trip coming up in 4 months & 1 week.   That is if we go - J's expressing misgivings about it.   We'll have to make a decision this week I think.    Maybe looking at Cindy & John's pictures will help him decide. 

Boy some of the roads around here are super icy - I slid around a corner at a stop light this morning when I went out to meet Jean for tea.   Thankfully I was making a right turn and there was no traffic coming from that direction.   Once I realized I wasn't going to get stopped in time (and I was crawling) I did a quick look to see if anything was coming and continued on around.    I was glad to see when I got back that they had put salt down there.   Now if they would only do something about our street.   After the thaw yesterday and the quick freeze over night it's a disaster - very icy ruts with no pavement showing.   I'm not going to even attempt going down to the mailboxes as I can just imagine what they are like.