Well, it’s looking like the concert may not come to pass for me. 80% chance of snow this afternoon, 70% chance tomorrow. Does that suck or what? I mean, a)I don’t know if they’ll even have the show with the kind of snow it sounds like we’ll be getting. Will they even be able to get here? I need to check the schedule and see where the concert is the night before and how far they’ll be traveling. They do have a big bus, I guess they’re probably more likely to make the trip than I would be in my vehicle…which brings me to point b)Will I be able to get there? I do have a 4 wheel drive vehicle, but it’s a pretty long drive. I’d say I’ll try, no matter what…but what if I do have an accident? I can’t afford a big deductible to get my car fixed. That would probably be a pretty stupid and selfish decision to make if it really does snow like it sounds like they will. Talk about a disappointment. I bought the tickets in November, for crying out loud…and now, I may not get to use them. I wouldn’t ask for prayers on this, that would be a pretty ridiculous waste of such a thing, but hey, just keep your fingers crossed, okay?

So, here are some pages with my new collection, coming out at CHA…Coffee Break!  Here’s the catalog page that shows all of the items in the collection:

The girls on the Arctic Frog DT are amazing and I always enjoy looking at what they come up with…here are just a few of them.  The first two are from Mary Larson:

These are from Linda Harrison:

From Kelly Noel:

From Carrie George:

From Tonia Borrosch:

Last, but not least, from Leah Zion:

Even after Lisa Dorsey sent me hers AGAIN, I can’t find them!  I’m blaming it on the Mac, I think it ate them!  I’ve looked all through my inbox, in the folder I’ve been saving these in and in the trash for her message and it’s GONE!  I’m extremely uncomfortable right now, it seems as though our wireless router has died, so me and the laptop are in the spare bedroom hooked in to a different (not wireless) router so that I can get this done.  Those of you that lay on your tummy and type or scrap, I don’t know how you do it, this is KILLING me!

Okay, Mary sent me Lisa’s (THANKS!)

Here they are:

Okay, time to go to dinner, if I missed anyone, I’m SORRY!  I’ll try to get back and finish this tonight!

I have a love/hate relationhip with my hair…mostly hate, though. When it’s long enough, it’s constantly in a ponytail or clip.  So, I go with that for a few months, then get bored and start thinking about getting a cute haircut.  I find one in a book, looks simple enough, really.  I mean, I know I have straight hair, so I don’t pick out a curly cut.  I know I’m a low maintenance kind of gal so I don’t pick out something that requires alot of work to do.  Really.  I try my best to be realistic.  Then I get it cut.  For the first 15 minutes or so after it is styled, I love it…then it does what it always does…goes flat.  My hair refuses to hold any kind of curl at all whatsoever.  I’m not even asking for a lot of curl…really, more fluff than curl.  I just don’t want it to lay there, flat on my head…but that’s what it does.  So, I’ll keep it short for a while, a few months maybe, then I’ll decide I’m tired of it being flat and I’ll grow it out again…so I can wear it in a ponytail all the time.  Do we see the pattern here?

So, the question is why do I go through this ritual?  Why do I even consider that I might be able to pull off a true “hairstyle” when I know that my hair never cooperates?  I really don’t know.  Maybe it’s like childbirth.  You think while it’s happening that it’s awful and you’ll never do it again.  But then that memory fades with time and you do (well, if you’re fortunate enough to be able to, you do).  Like the hair…I know now that it was unrealistic to expect my hair to conform to the style I chose (well, any style, really), yet I went and got the haircut and had 15 minutes of bliss before reality set in.

Enough for now, I hope to be back later with pics of my new AF collection and some layouts from the design team.  My connection won’t cooperate with me long enough for me to upload them right now…and since I have a kid-free house today, I need to get off my butt and do some housework.

Happy Sunday!

I’ve been in organizing mode for the last few weeks, probably because I really think if I can ever get myself back into an organized state, I’ll be a much happier person. So, this weekend, it’s my kids’ clothes, the spare room and my computer(s). My son is horrible about dragging pretty much everything out of his drawer when he goes to look for his clothes to wear and is even worse at putting his clean clothes away. So, I’m going to think through and put into place a solution for that. My spare room is in a state of disarray since I cleaned out the closet in there, so that’s on the agenda, too. Last, I am copying all of my layouts and designing tools onto the new EHD that is hooked up to the Mac…so, you know what that means? I might actually design a little kit sometime this weekend . I have some photos I want to scrap and no kit that I think is just perfect for them so I’m going to try to make something. If I do, it’ll be up at the grand re-opening of Elemental Scraps on Monday.

Gotta hit the shower, we need to run to WalMart before the bad weather hits…oh, here’s one of the photos and you can see the colors in Casey’s shirt…those are what I want to work with. Enjoy your Saturday!

Figured I’d blog early in the morning, before anything had a chance to go wrong, LOL.  I should finish up this coffee and hit the shower, I’ll do that soon.  Meanwhile, my kids are watching “Trick My Truck”, DH is already gone to the office and I’m trying to decide exactly what I need to do in town this morning.

First order of business is dropping off my laptop.  The nice thing about it coming with school is if I have a problem with it, it’s not my problem, it’s theirs.  So, I drop it off and get a loaner and when I get it back, it’s fixed.  Now, we’re expecting snow this weekend, so I guess I should take a peek at the fridge/freezer/pantry and see if there’s anything we need.  I’m quite sure we’ll grab a couple of movies while we’re out, since we’ll be stuck inside all weekend.  Thankfully, we have nothing really to do.  I’ve been getting movies at Movie Gallery, which I like because they give me free ones alot, but it’s such a dang drive to take them back, I think I’m going to move to Blockbuster.  There are more locations and several drop boxes, too…and when you live where I live, you need options.  The biggest problem, though, is that we’ve seen just about all the good kid-friendly movies out there right now and DH and I just don’t watch movies without the kiddos much.  Well, the good thing about Blockbuster is that they have quite a selection of older movies, too, so maybe I can find something.  Feel free to make a suggestion or two!

In other news, I did get an iPod, but I didn’t get a RED one.  I decided since I really didn’t know how much I’d use it to get a refurb.  I got a nice little 2GB white one for $99 plus shipping and for now, it’s doing great.  If I outgrow it, I’m sure I can sell it and buy a bigger one, but since it seems that the only thing I listen to now is Continuum, I think I’ll be okay for a while.

I’ve been helping Joedee with the Elemental Scraps store, look for big news next week.  No, I didn’t make anything new, LOL…but maybe some of my other older stuff will end up in the store and the whole site will look AWESOME!  Joedee’s a sweetheart for putting my stuff up for me and I’ve enjoyed working on the store, so it’s working out wonderfully.  I do occasionally have an itch to create something, but then I go browse the galleries and decide that there’s no possible way I can create something that hasn’t been done before.  I think if I do create again, I’ll go more along the lines of the more popular kits now that have like 4 solids, 6 patterns, some basic elements and maybe a unique embie or two.  No more kits with 25 papers, ugh.  Seriously, people don’t need that.  Sell a great kit with a great color scheme, great textured papers and the basic elements for $5…sounds like a good plan to me.  Now, I just need some inspiration.  You know me, I love bright colors and fun patterns.  Have an idea?  Send it to me.  If I use it, I’ll give you the kit.

Okay, this coffee cup is empty and we have alot to do today so I’m getting up from here and heading to the shower.  Have a wonderful day, all!

Had a great post started, but lost it trying to put in an ordered list and, well, just don’t have time to do it all again.  I’m off to shower and work on the list I was trying to blog about, LOL.  Have a good weekend.

I have other stuff to post about, but don’t have time.  Just wanted to update and say that I have the Mac working okay now.  I got Photoshop installed, got all my photos into individual libraries in iPhoto and am thinking about how to organize my kits.  I’m thinking really seriously about letting my kids keep my PC right here so I can pull kits off of the 160GB internal drive, which is were all of my kits and most of what I’ve purchased/traded for/gotten for CT stuff lives.  I have it on a wireless network and really, it’s working well since it’s right here next to my Mac.  So, that’s the plan.  Now if I only had time to scrap!  But today, I have to move away from the computer, LOL.  Final and project due tonight so I really need to spend today studying and finishing everything up.  DH just left for Denver, he’ll be gone all week.  It’ll be the longest the kids have ever been away from him and I’m not sure who will have the harder time.  We had a little book that had a little tiny voice recorder in it and it’s fallen apart, but the recorder still works.  So, I had the kiddos say “I love you, Daddy” on it and he took it with him .

On another note, my stuff is still up at ES and I REALLY want a RED iPod, so do me a favor and go buy something, LOL!  As soon as I have enough in my Paypal account, that baby is MINE!  Off to study, now!

but I’m afraid it isn’t going to make it.  I have had nothing but problems with it.  Half the time it doesn’t see my external drives, it had some phantom problem that wouldn’t let me install PSCS2 (finally got it installed in safe mode), iPhoto is nothing but a headache.  I want so badly to love it, so many people do, but I just can’t.

I tried to scrap last night and had nothing.  I got a great kit from Ash, her All Star Kit, which is adorable, and I have some great photos of my kids with their first little Starbucks cups, had a great title in mind, all of it, but I just couldn’t get it going.  I am so used to being able to see my stuff and look at all of it at once and I have yet to figure out how to do that on this machine.  I am used to having an explorer window open and looking at everything in that window, then just dragging and dropping what I want to use into Photoshop.  That is a very clumsy process on the Mac as far as I can tell.  Anyway, maybe I was just mad at the computer and it was corrupting my thoughts and my mojo!  At any rate, please cross your fingers for me that the Apple place doesn’t screw me over too badly when I take it back.  I kept the box and the original packaging, but I did register it on Sunday and that was one of the things she said might be an issue for me.  None the less, even having to pay them a 15% restocking fee, I’ll get back $500 and that will go a long way towards either a new PC for me or just reworking mine.

Sorry mac users…I wanted to love it, I really did, but I don’t need something in my life to make it more complicated now.

So, I’ve decided to dig in my heels and figure this out.  With all the great girls at DST helping me out, I’m sure I’ll get through it.  I hope to find a good book while I’m in town to help me learn my way around the Mac a bit better.  The really funny thing is, I guess you just want what you can’t have.  I am so jonesing to play in Photoshop on this thing!  I am even feeling a tiny bit of mojo coursing through my veins!  I tried to install the trial version of PSCS2 on it and keep getting an error, so I’m extremely frustrated now.  Unless Adobe will help me figure that out, the only way I’ll get PS on here is to buy the upgrade at $169 and after buying this computer, things are pretty darn tight.  I’m going to see how much I’ve sold at ES and how far that will get me towards it.  I had said I didn’t want to buy it, but I look at it like this…if I do buy it and at least make the money to pay for it by designing, then it’s paid for itself and I can still upgrade to CS3 when it comes out.

Yes, I said designing.  I sort of had some revelations about that in the last few days.  I think part of my problem was that I was trying to make things that would sell, not things that I loved.  I was thinking too much about how to be a popular girl and not about how to make things that truly inspired me to scrap.  So, do I plan to try to crank out a kit a week?  No.  But, do I want to be able to create things I love, things I want to scrap with and enjoy?  Yes.  And the nice thing is, there’s really no pressure now.  I have a job.  I am making enough money to supplement our income to the point that we can at least make the two ends meet.  So, I can actually spend this money on things I want…like Photoshop CS2!  So, cross your fingers that Adobe will help me out and I can get the trial for 30 days, by which time hopefully I’ll have the money to buy it!

Okay, we have to work today, so I’m going to go take back some books if they’ll let me.  Some homeschooling books I bought.  I’ve come to a hard realization.  My kids are going to school.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t necessarily thing public schools are bad.  I think that if a parent stays involved, they can be good.  I spent some time talking to a friend who has two girls that are nearly grown and he said just that…it’s just like all other things with your kids, you get out of it what you put into it.  There are several reasons for the decision and there’s no reason to go into all of them, but for all of them, this is just the best decision for my family.  The good news is that I’ll be working for DH so I can take them to school and pick them up.  I can be homeroom mom when I need to be.  I can take them cupcakes on their birthday.  I can be there whenever I need to and I can be home with them in the Summer.  I know it’ll be fine.  I know it’s the right decision.  Though I may cry for days when they start, I’ll be fine and so will they.  It’s for the best and as long as I stay involved, we’ll all be fine.

Okay, going to call Adobe now and then get to work.  Have a great day!

Not sure, but at this point, I am not sure I did the right thing.  Maybe because I haven’t scrapped or designed with it, but all the things I’m used to about a PC, it’s hard to get used to them not working on this Mac.  I know they’re supposed to be better, I know I need to give it time, I will, of course.  But today, right now, if I could take it back and get ALL my money back, I’d give it some pretty hard thinking.

I’m busy getting the last pay reports done for DSD so I can say I’m completely finished with my work there.  Then I really need to study.  I have a final and a big project both due a week from today and I know I’m gonna wait ’til Sunday and be sorry I did.  But today, I’ve been cleaning house.  DH thought we needed to change the living room out to the big old playroom and leave the living room all nice and neat and clean for when we have company.  So, I’ve been moving and cleaning, some of which needed to be done regardless of the move, but I’m pooped!  And I still have to cook dinner and finish sweeping and mopping the kitchen, not to mention the other stuff I need to do!  That’s it, back to work.  Happy New Year (again!).