It's My Half Birthday!

I’ve never made it a secret that I’m not a fan of winter. In fact I’ve done a pretty good job of painting myself a an anti-fan of winter. So what’s an optimist to do to keep from falling into winter blues? Well, as a child of the summer, I celebrate my Half-Birthday! I’m not looking outside at Mother Nature’s gag-gift this year; in 6 months it will be the heart of Leo entering into the dog days of summer when even cats find shady spots if they are outdoors. (which is only acceptable if they are rural barn cats, a little safer from traffic than urban cats on the streets and cats and dogs on the farm should always have access to clean water!)

Now my half birthday isn’t celebrated as a festival and I usually just do something special for myself. I might order a pizza today; I discover a thin crust pizza with white sauce, bacon and veggies at Marcos. I add green olives and banana peppers to it for a little sour bite and it’s SO good! And it’s only 18 points for half a small. Of course since David doesn’t do pizza, it would end up being dinner tomorrow too since I can’t reheat on my own. Unless I didn’t refrigerate overnight. I like cold pizza fine but I don’t care for it chilled. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll just ask David if he’d drive trough and bring me home a McLatte.

One fun thing I did for myself for my half birthday this year is a 2-page scrapbook layout. I had a kit that was a set of journal cards that I really wanted to play with for a while. According to the dates on the files, it was May last year that I got the kit Hello! by Scrumptiously. I wanted to do a pocket-page type layout and I knew I wanted to do a totally narcissistic layout about myself. I’ve said before that scrapbooking is both a loving and giving hobby and a totally selfish hobby all in one. It’s saving your, memories to share with other people but it’s also putting yourself as the keeper of history. You get to be the dictator of the future by directing the past. I actually think that’s fine as long as you aren’t blatantly lying about the resent it’s a wonderful series of family heirlooms for generations to come. I also think that selfishness manifests itself in vanity. Too many scrapbookers don’t include their own completely separate from others in the family thoughts or photographs in their books. Generations later relations and even family friends will wonder about the person who assembled the books. What did she or he look like, what were they doing? That’s just my little scrapping soapbox.

Of course, there’s plenty of me in my scrapbooks because I do think that way. I try to be vain for everyone and use flattering photos of us all so generations down the line multiple greats of nieces and nephews will marvel at what an attractive lot we were. But I want my scrapbooks to hold memories, lot of them, but I want my character and sense of humor to be in them too. I want to look back at my books and remember how much fun being me has always been. Oh yeah, and how attractive we’ve always looked too!

Also my half-birthday 2-pager uses those journal cards and prompts to put a time-capsule bubble around my brain at 48-1/2 years old. Making “right here, right now” ordinary day a time capsule page every now and then is fun too!

 

Credits: Hello!  by Scrumptiously and other papers from my stash

The pages are full-resolution if you want to enlarge them and read on the pages, but if you want to read what they say in simple written form, the contents of the cards are right here:

So there’s my self-indulgent answer to the winter blues. For my birthday festival I encourage everyone to have ice cream to celebrate and last year it was to buy ice cream for a kid. So if you want to celebrate my half birthday with me have a cookie. That’s nice to go with hot cocoa to shake a winter frown away. If you like the snow and ice, go enjoy it! And have a hot cocoa for me when you get in because if I was there, you know that’s where I’d be!

Find the happy, everyone!