Odds and Ends

It's Been One of Those Weeks

You know the kind - when everything gets away from you and before you know it it's gone right on by. In my case without even 1 blog entry since a week ago Friday. I'm behind on blog and e-mail reading too but at least I'm caught up on replying to comments made on here. I won't even talk about the courses I'm supposed to be taking this month but there is always this coming week. I at least have started one of them and now even have my own font.

So what do I have to show for the week - absolutely nothing. :) Well I did do a lot of cooking - the nice comforting food we love to have in winter. Made a few soups too. I did manage to pop out 3 times during the week for some much needed tea/chai and crossword time with my friend Jean (the most we've done that in months I think as usually it's just once or twice a week because of other things going on. I did manage to get my Project Life Week 2 done (I'll share that in a wee bit) but I don't know what I'm going to do about week 3 as there were hardly any pictures taken that are worth putting in there. :)

Now as for those who wished me well while coping with shingles, thanks so very much for your thoughts and I'm happy to say that the pain seems to have gone (knock on wood). Guess getting right on to those meds as quickly as I did was definitely a good thing.

We've had about 4 inches of snow since Thursday morning and I'm hoping to get out there today and get some pictures - course it would have been better to do it while it was still fresh and white but that just didn't happen for some reason.

Ok, Project Life. I finally finished week 2 on Thursday when we had the 3 inches of snow and just got around to getting decent pictures of it today. :)

As you can see, a lot of week 2 had to do with getting all the Christmas decorations down and put away till 2013 (we're supposed to be on a cruise Christmas of 2012, keeping fingers crossed about that).  A note of explanation - all those liquor boxes piled up at the front door - we make our own wine and had just bottled 4 batches.   My cross-stitch lady is one of my on going projects - I'm working away at finishing off the bead work on her.

Project Life 2012 - Week 1

Edited the picture/layout sharing from original post.

Well here it is almost the end of week 2 and I've just finished week 1 of Project Life.   :)   Don't know what I'm going to do about week 2 as not many pictures have been taken what with hardly going out at all - guess I could go down & take a picture of the Walk In Clinic.   :) 

I found it hard getting pictures of my week 1 side by side.  I'd be interested in knowing how others that aren't doing the digital version managed to share theirs.  Maybe the meds are frying my brain but I just can't think how to do it today.  :)

NB:  After a good night's sleep it came to me - PSE.

 

 

It got super cold one day that week and I just had to take a picture of our indoor/outdoor thermometer that we've got set for Fahrenheit to remind us just how cold it got.  (Hmmm, might be an idea to occasionally put some weather stuff in there).

The top right picture in the last layout is some of the tree decorations being sorted out for packing away for another year.

I'm trying to use up all the Creative Memories number stickers I've got from eons ago so that's what I'm using for the week numbers.

I can just see myself tomorrow changing these pictures of the 2 pages after I've thought about them. 

Yep - changed them!  :)

 

Project Life 2012 - Title Page

I'd been hearing for ages it seems about something called Project Life by Becky Higgins.  I looked into it and discovered that it was pretty difficult to get the supplies up here in Canada but then late last fall I heard/read that there was now a Canadian distributor.  Back in November, I think it was, I debated and debated on whether or not to do it.   Finally I decided to.    I thought it would be a good way to document our life (not in a daily fashion but weekly) in this year of changes.  So I ordered the kit (the turquoise version seeing as I'm a nut for blue) with the "A" Photo Pocket Pages along with the Big Variety Pack Photo Pocket Pages, dividers and the Big Envelope Pages. They arrived in no time from British Columbia and I put them aside until I was ready to use them.

Fast forward to this week when I put the basics of my album together and decided what I wanted to do with my title page. I'm ever so slightly changing it from what they have suggested as a possibility. I'm using all the cards they suggested and where they suggested them but I've put the year on the top left one (old, very old leftover Creative Memories number stickers) and then I'm going to put a new picture of the 2 of us on part of the top right card. The picture has to be taken yet so that's why it's not there. :)

So here's what it's looking like without the picture.

I've now discovered that I have to find someplace different to take these pictures - somehow the ironing board just doesn't work but it was handy and available.  :)

 

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.

Was There A Full Moon Last Night?

Right now I'm in the midst of re-creating my Picasa file of all my digi supplies.  UGH.   All the information was there on Thursday but when I opened it up this morning there was absolutely nothing.   Now of course its backed up so I thought no problem.  Wrong!   The external HD that the backup is on for some reason is not working.   My computer is not recognizing it at all.  Everything on there had keywords applied to them (whether it was cardstock, patterned paper, colour, where I got it, etc.) so that it was easy for me to find things and also credit where I got it from.  Well it seems as it is being recreated a lot of that is missing.   I'm just hoping that maybe I can get that HD to work on J's laptop and then sit & copy it onto mine.  That sounds like way too much work.   It's beyond me why the file disappeared since Thursday.  Ok enough of that. 

The whole reason I was wanting to use the Picasa file was I actually was scrapbooking this morning.  With what's been going on with me lately I've realized the importance of getting this backlog of scrapping done.  So I've gone back to an album I had started months ago - maybe even last year.   It's of a trip we took in April/May 2003 to Las Vegas & Southern California.   I've decided that what this album is going to need is the KISS method.    So Thursday I went through my 2003 Storage Binder (a Library of Memories/Photo Freedom thing) and pulled pictures for 3 layouts.   The first one is now done -  it's of the gardens in behind the Flamingo Hilton where some friends of ours were staying (they'd come down from their home up by Lake Tahoe to surprise us).   It was unreal in the gardens - they actually had flamingos (of course) and penguins - in the desert!   Made me wonder - what do they do with them in the horrendous heat of the Las Vegas summers.

Template is from Biograffiti - Focus, background paper is from the Cre8-Mini kit I got from a Jessica Sprague class (sorry that one is one where the info is missing but at least I've got that much).

Speaking of Biograffiti, I went nuts yesterday and bought tons of her templates.   She's going out of business and everything is on sale at her store for $25.00 total until the 16th of this month.  You can find out more about the sale at Oscraps.

LSNED Day 1

If you read yesterday's post you will have noticed that I had put my scrapbooking tool kit in a safe place that was so safe I couldn't find it.  :)  But I found it this morning. I'd put it away in a drawer in the dresser. Of course I remembered that in the middle of the night. :) So with my basic tools (knife, scissors, tape etc) I could finally get to work on doing the first layout for my first LSNED album. I've got a 6x6 album that hadn't been used for anything else so I thought - why not use it and with it being September, I decided to have a fall look running throughout the album but now I'm thinking hmmmm  not sure if I like that idea. I think that is because I need to get out and get more stash (embellishment-wise that is). Although if I totally finished organizing all the "stuff" I do have I might have a better idea of what I have. :)

This is the layout for September 1 when I discovered what happens to me when I totally skip breakfast.

The colours aren't quite true - everything is much brighter than how they came out in the picture.   I think I'm having the same problem Sian was having - different light in September than during the summer so I'll need to find someplace else to take the layout pictures..

Leaf punches are I think Martha Stewart - they don't say but I'm pretty sure that's where I got them from and they are punched from scraps that I had so don't know whose papers they were.   The tag and background paper are both from  a Deja Views Sharon Ann collection called Home for the Harvest that I've had for eons.
 
It's pretty KISS (keep it simple stupid) as a friend of mine would have said.

Learn Something New Every Day

Shimelle (of shimelle.com) has a class running this month called Learn Something New Every Day that I decided to sign up for. Evidently she runs it every September but this is the first time I've taken it.

I haven't decided yet what format my scrapbooking for it will take but I have been writing things down every day, except for last Friday and Saturday when for the life of me I know I learned something but can't remember what. Hopefully they will come back to me. Most of the stuff is pretty mundane and some of it is re-learning but there is the odd really good thing.

We're now almost at the end of the second week and I thought maybe I better post about how things are going with LSNED. So here's how the first week went.

The month started out with me learning how vitally important it is that I have breakfast. Now that doesn't sound like a big thing but since I've recently been diagnosed as being pre-diabetic it is. I discovered this while driving home from the grocery store when all of a sudden I was having issues with my eyesight - not a good thing when you're driving. Luckily nothing happened and I got home safe & sound.

Day 3 found me finally learning what a hashtag was. I kept hearing the term and finally decided to find out what it was. I also found out, klutz that I am, that I need to wear shoes in my scrapping room after painfully stubbing toes on both feet on the feet of my chair. DUH!

Day 4 had me relearning that I need to come up with a system to know just exactly what is in the spare fridge after discovering strawberries in there that one of us had put there. By the time I found them they were fit for the compost bin. Lesson learned!

Day 5 had me discovering that I really need to keep up with class prompts and handouts after discovering purely accidentally that I'd missed out on some digital templates in last year's Library of Memories class I took. They're no longer available so I now know to at least read the prompts everyday that they come out so that I don't miss out on anything else.

On day 6 I learned that until the car dealership service department finally figures out what is wrong with the Mustang and the vibration at highway speed that I better not make plans for the day until the last minute as they are tending to get changed so that I can take it in yet again.

Day 7 was one of the super mundane things - I learned of a quicker way of getting to the car dealership. Pretty lame but I didn't know of it before. :)

After writing this I came up with an idea of how I wanted to do my scrapbooking for it and immediately set to work - oh oh - where is my tool box? The last time I saw it was when the kiddos were coming to visit and I put it away someplace safe so that they couldn't get hurt if they came across it. Now to just remember where the someplace safe is. :)

 

YEAH! The Past Year's Dream is Coming True

For the past year I've had a dream of converting what we call "the ironing room" into my scrapbooking/knitting "studio".   Today it came one major step closer to coming true.

This past week we had my niece's family visiting and it made us clean up (major de-cluttering) the "ironing room" so the 4 1/2 year old & the 1 1/2 year old could sleep in it.  Who knew you could clean up something so quickly.  :)   After they left I told J about a "rather cheap" table I'd seen in the latest Ikea catalog.   So we did something really "dumb" today - we went to Ikea on a Sunday afternoon when it's all about back to school time - UGH!  

I drove around and around and around until finally we saw the 15 minute parking by the loading area.  I grabbed a spot knowing that we knew exactly what we were buying and btw it took us practically the whole 15 minutes thanks to the horrible check out (they're converting to self check-out and no one knew what they were doing).  But now I have my table (5 feet long by 2 feet wide) and it's all set up in my new "studio".  Now I just have to move everything else in.  :)  

As you can see J's REF unit is still there but it's not being used for books (at least not now) and he's said I can use it for my scrapbooking "stuff".  Oh yeah, the pile of papers on the new Ikea (made in China btw) table/desk are class notes that I have to sort/punch/file (that's tomorrow's job).

I still have to move my wishblade and old laptop over there and then I'll be all set.   BTW, this setup is going to be for my traditional scrapbooking, my digital stuff will still be done on this computer setup.

So here`s a few pics of my new setup.

 

 

 
Can you tell I'm really tickled   Sorry I have somehow changed my keyboard to I do not know what & can not use apostrophes, question marks or basically anything else that is out of the ordinary.  Something for me to figure out in the morning I guess.  :)