What Are You Wearing?

After a false alarm on my new chair, I haven't been bright and chipper me lately. The chair visited here last week and I sat in it, even drove it a little. The steering is just awesome and I can't wait to get out to a nice even parking lot or even the mall on a slow day so I can try out tilt-a-whirling with it! The seating system it's going to take some serious learning of the new controller but it seems like it's going to be really great to. Unfortunately the ability to actually sit up straight needs adjusting. There's no way that I could eat or drink and hope to swallow without choking in the angle it leaves me at in the totally upright position. It had to go back into be adjusted. I'm waiting now to find out how long that's going to take.

Well I didn't get to go to Indianapolis last weekend Tori texted me the link to watch both the baccalaureate on Saturday in the commencement ceremony on Sunday online. Upon seeing the seating area the truth is I probably had a better view than I would've had in person. I certainly wouldn't have been able to get this:

VERY proud Nana we'll be dragging out her chauffeur, AKA Uncle David, to visit Tori and take her out to dinner very soon after the new chair comes in to stay.


In the meantime I've been in a little low and without enthusiastic desire to do a lot. That includes reading and writing. I've been very slow about the book I'm reading, even though it's a good book, and when I've read blogs, I'm somehow without the creativity or energy to comment much. Of course I haven't been up to writing a blog much either, except well, I guess I'm writing a blog right now. *smile*


I present 5 questions to wake up my mood and mojo. Please feel free to share your answers in comments or on your own blog!

Life Inventory:

1. What are you wearing?

Knee-length cotton dorm shirt with donuts print.

2. What's the last thing you ate?

The last of my daily carrot and celery munchie bowl. Yes, I finally got David to pick out celery for me to go with my carrots. He does a great job!


3. What are the first three songs on your music playlist? (or your current favorite 3 songs)

The first three currently on my iTunes, starting with what’s playing now:

Say It’s Not True - Lionel Cartwright
Ho Hey - The Lumineers
Fall - Clay Walker


4. What is the last purchase you made that was something you wanted, not something you needed?

I spent three months’ saved scrap budget at Ginger Scraps to kick off interNational Scrapbook Day weekend at the beginning of the month. (Great sales!)


5. What's your favorite electronic game? (phone, computer or game console)

I've been playing Toy Blast often lately but my favorite is really Jigsaw Bug. I love jigsaw puzzles on my tablet because no pieces get lost! (or become cat toys)

100 Things I Love

It’s not an original idea of mine. I’m riding coattails! Marvi Marti posted the first ten things on her list today. She initially got the prompt from Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online. The list is done in tens, Marti did her first ten today, so now I am too.


Okay, let’s get this love-fest started!

10 Activities I Love

1.  Baseball Games - I love baseball and I don’t really think there was a time I didn’t.. I’ve told the story about Mom dancing with me when the Tigers won the 1968 World Series and how much I loved following the Tigers and Reds as a kid. I saw a game in the 1984 World Series and watched the final game in an all ages club on the big screen with my parents. I was allowed to TRY to watch the Reds World Series games in the 70s, but my single-digit aged self couldn’t make it.

Last year, David and I tied my season high of 21 games seen, finishing it with a Division Series Tigers game. Would have broken the record if the Tigers had made it to the World Series. We had tickets.

My current dream is to be in Cincinnati on Opening Day


2. Train Chasing - It’s funny. When I finished trade school, I had firmly decided I was moving to Atlanta. My first interview was with Green Frog Productions, a railroad video company in Marietta, Georgia. I loved trains and the entire thought of chasing trains and videotaping them was just an incredible idea to me. Alas, I didn’t get the job and while my Mom went with me to museums and on tourist trains, she wasn’t going to go chase freight trains so I could photograph them and there wasn’t anyone else who would even go to the museums with me.

14 years later I replied to an email inviting me to a presentation at a Mensa event. I had no idea who the man was that was inviting me, but the presentation was trains he’d photographed, his hobby. This man did that I had wanted to do so many years ago. When I emailed back and said, “Trains, I’ll definitely be there,” it led to a few emails exchanged, an invitation to a baseball game for a first date and, well, we’ve been married 3 years now. We still love to chase trains together!


3. Scrapbooking – My scrapbooking is both the pictorial record of my life and an art, my self-expression. It’s evolved from photo albums from high school, most of the photos with no names or places, to photos with captions, hand-written, raped on paper strips. Then it became pages with ephemeris and typed and cut out captions and title on magnetic pages, followed by actual paper scrap pages and after a short while of printing the photos from my first digital camera, I started digital scrapping. That was 2007 and I was scrapping 2005. It was a couple years of “can’t afford to print the photos,” that put me behind. I’m catching up now.


4. Baking – I love kitchen stuff in general, I come from a long line of great cooks and I grew up with the kitchen gadgets in several drawers and a utensil pot next to the stove. That’s why the obsession with my future kitchen. I designed it in my mind and my storage is full of boxes of peach and greed gadgets, dishes and calicos. I have a green calico kitchen cat and a kitchen pig wand. The pig want removes the calories when you wave it over the food. :)

I’ve made my own recipes for many things from scratch or by doctoring up ready-made things, but I love baking the most of all the kitchen-crafts. Baking allows my culinary gifts to really shine and while a good meal makes people feel satisfied and they enjoy it, something baked and sweet always make everyone smile!



5. Board Games – I love games night with friends, I love just playing Yahtzee or Qwirkle at home with David. Games give your brain some good exercise and they aren’t like concerts or other activities you do outside someone’s home because it’s quieter. It allows for conversation and quality time with the other people of your choice.


6. Having Coffee – Coffee is not just a drink. To me “Having Coffee” is being with a friend of two for conversation. The act of having coffee with someone is much more intimate than just a beverage. I used to have coffee with my great grandmother every Tuesday once I started driving, I had coffee with Grandma on the phone on Mondays and I make a point of having coffee with friends in Michigan at least once or twice a month.



7. Aunting – Kids just get cooler and cooler as they get older! I truly enjoyed the time spent with Tori and Rina when they were little, helping them learn and learning from them too. As they got older and could learn at a higher level, it was fun watching them figure things out and then form their own opinions about things. Now they drive when they are over and we share many things we have in common and can debate, in a civilized way, they things we see differently. I mean, last mouth I had a political discussion with the baby I comforted when she had a tummy ache. How cool is that?


8. Reading – Since getting my Kindle, the old one with the grey background and black writing, I’m enjoying reading with a new vigor. You see that darker background has solved whatever conditions cause my dyslexia and I read much more comfortably and faster. I LOVE my murder mysteries!


9. Coin Collecting – this is something I started doing with Grandma, who did it with her uncle. My biggest passion in coins is pennies. I collect both American and Canadian pennies. My oldest Canadians are 1920 something and the oldest American ones are Indian heads!


10. Cleaning and Organizing – I think I would have to say I love this in the same way any addict loves getting their fix. Once I got started cleaning and organizing in the annex, I found myself in that addict spot. I can not pick up something when I’m near it. It’s a healthy obsession!



Whew! Okay, I see why it needs to be broken up into segments! Net ten will be…soon!

Links

Marvi Marti

Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online.

Vintage Turkey Thursday

Many of us who participate in Vintage Thingie Thursday are posting our vintage treasures early this week because tomorrow is a Vintage Day and we’ll be reminiscing some and spending time with some of the most valuable treasures we have – our people, the friends and relatives who have played a huge part in the memories we scrap, journal, photo or blog about.
I made cranberry relish this afternoon and French Macarons for the first time tonight. I’ve done the relish for many years, so no problem there. The macarons? Well, they’re very tasty, but not as pretty as I wish they were. Still tasty, though! I’m kinda bummed that that’s all I have to do. David had the day after Thanksgiving off last year and took a long weekend trip. I think maybe that’s how I lost Thanksgiving dinner! Dad and Aunt Judy host and do all the cooking now. I offered the cranberry relish after Pop told me I didn’t have to bring anything because they were doing it all. I kinda felt left out and sorta begged to be able to bring the relish.

Thanksgiving dinner was Mom’s dinner to host while I was growing up. We had a much bigger dinner when I was a kid because we had both sides of my family there. Mom and Grandma were both only children, so it was just Grandma and Papa and Mums, my great grandmother, as far back as I recall for Thanksgiving, so when Mom married Pop the families kinda married too! After Mom died, Grandma and I took over. I had been doing a lot of the dinner with Mom and Grandma already. We did dinner at Grandma’s after Papa died, but Mom cooked it, I usually went up to Grandma’s early and we did all the shopping so that as soon as Mom got there the night before she could make the stuffing and get the turkey ready for the oven in the morning. After mom’s passing, I became the cook for Thanksgiving. I was so glad that I got Mom to sit down with me and step by step the stuffing recipe so I could write it out!

Ah that stuffing! Mom’s stuffing was something I only ate once a year, but I always ate plenty of it! I usually had some with leftovers and some with the turkey soup she made on Thanksgiving night. An hour or so after my Dad left to go home because he had to work in the morning. Mom had the day after off and I usually arranged my comp time at work to have a few days before off too for a mini vacation at Grandma’s,Thanksgiving night was games time! We’d usually played Dominoes or Yahtzee, sometimes Mom brought Boggle with her too, but Grandma wasn’t fond of that one, so we’d play that just us on Friday afternoon.


Mom liked garage sales and often brought home little presents for everyone. She brought me home this game.

Sentence Scrabble

I’d never heard of Sentence Scrabble before! The copyright on the game is 1971 and we guessed it didn’t really sell well.

We played it a few times. You can make some pretty funny sentences, but the quirkiness doesn’t last forever. I haven’t played it in at least 8 years because I never played it except with Mom. I think the sentence- building scared people, but you don't have to know what part of the sentence each word is! Maybe I should see if David wants to try it for a laugh?


I hope everyone in the US has a wonderful Thanksgiving tomorrow with good food, good people and traditions that wrap you and yours in love and memories of family anchored in the vintage world of Thanksgivings past.

Is My Marriage Is In Trouble?

The very definition of a toxic relationship is codependency and addiction. When the hopelessly addicted user rolls up the spouses sleeve and gives them their introduction. There is no sleep, only the incoherent, euphoric feel of the rush in your veins. It happened yesterday to me.

Oh it was innocent at first. I hadn’t heard of the drug and asked my husband what it was. This is the man I trust, forsaking all others, for richer, for poorer, in good health, in the dark despair of sickness, of addiction. I asked and he introduced me to the fix.

So the online version of Mah-Jong is now bookmarked in the games file, with Skee Ball! It’s ancient Chinese solitaire and I’m hooked! I need to get a laptop so we can sit together and play side by side like a couple of junkies! hehe.

I actually finished a board today at lunch. Not easy to do, woo hoo for me!


We were the guest of the team last night at the Mud Hens game. We talked to our sales rep about the reception in July and checked out the party area. It’s PERFECT! There is a decent view of the field, the picnic area is covered and semi private. It’s on the main level and close to the left field gate, how appropriate for David and me. But even better, I was telling Grandma on the phone tonight, Dad can drop her off and it’s a really short walk from the street to sitting at the table in the party area and the rest rooms are right there too. I’m telling ya, this is going to be my dream reception!

I’ve never been conventional in that way. When I was in high school and girlfriends talked about the someday weddings, I never had much to add to the talk. I figured if I ever met and fell in love with the one who was right for me, we’d get married. I mean I never thought about a wedding, just if you were in love and wanted to be together it was no big deal. We’d just get married. David and I did that, as matter-of-factly as I’d pictured it would be. Yes, it was a big deal, but a very personal big deal. It was all of the romance and perfection I thought it might be way back when.

Now, we’re doing the summer reception. My dream party would definitely be a baseball party. I’m going to have the hat with a veil and David in his tux tee-shirt, our family and close friends and a double header with fireworks. Dream reception! I know if David could do a dream wedding reception, he’d have good food in an air conditioned restaurant at high noon, when the light is not good for pictures. The restaurant would be track side of tracks with plenty of trains passing by and there would be train chasing before after dinner with family and friends, including a “posse” of our close railfan friends. That’s going to be Sunday after the baseball game!

A marriage that starts as a yearlong fantasy is a sign of one that has a solid future. As for our shared “addictions?” The ones like Yahtzee, Mah-Jong, baseball, trains and each other...We can quit any time we want. We just don’t ever want to!

Play Mah-Jong online

Tid Bits From Tuesday

Well, I got a little bit of scrapping time last night and this evening. Imagine that. Time to scrap. Between getting things in order to go back to school, daily job hunting grief and starting the planning for our reception, it’s been a busy couple of weeks. Now I have a huge inbox of designing stuff to get done. Hey, at least I‘ve got it planned! I’m also trying to get a layout in here and there. Still in 2006, but the layouts I did early this morning and the one I did this evening were 2009.

My alarm is set to go off at 7 and 8 AM. The workday starts at 9 and David leaves for work at 10, so everything sort of weaves in and out first thing in the morning. I turn on the work browser at 9 and go through email. If I cook breakfast and we eat together, I’ll finish the email after he leaves. If I feel like getting up at 7, I get 2 hours of Nani time, usually to scrap or blog. This morning I did the week 14 of Patch 365. I used an Eight Days A Week quick page, so it was easy to do in very little time. I like how it turned out!

Credits: Eight Days A Week quick page set, page 3 by Digitalegacies Designs,
green alpha from Eight Days A Week by Digitalegacies Designs

The next layout is a challenge layout. It fits a few challenges, but the important one is Darlene’s Quote challenge at Scrap Bird! I ask my CT members to do my challenge as part of their monthly commitment and I’ve always considered that part of my responsibilities as a CT member. Plus, I had a great opportunity to use a Shakespeare quote on a baseball layout, 2 of my favorite things!

Credits: Boylicious by Darlene Haughin,
baseball from A Perfect Summer Day by Digitalegacies Designs

The layout is scenes from our first ball game of the season last weekend in Fort Wayne, Indiana. We saw The Dayton Dragons at the new stadium for the former Ft. Wayne Wizards, now the Ft. Wayne Tin Caps. The Tin Caps won in extra innings. First game and free baseball, are we living large or what? Hehehe

Not a happy night for the Reds tonight. They dropped one 7-2 in Chicago. Darned Cubbies! And yes, I can hear Mom giving me raspberries from beyond, but the Reds or Braves against the Cubs or Pirates was always Mom and me jeering each other. I blame Fox Sports for it. I turned on the TV and the Cavaliers were on. Feh, basketball. I ended up watching the game on WGN and the Cubbies bias was very distracting for channeling my fan energy to my team.


Interesting and Odd...

Sign of the times, I was browsing a site for a possible sponsorship. There is a page for maternity wedding gowns. Imagine seeing THAT in a catalog 30 years ago! They come in ivory or white. Now, David commented that people have gotten married because a baby was on they way for years and years. I agreed. But those were usually shotgun or at least small private weddings, no opulent dress required and definitely not a white one!

Oh but another find! A wonderful and addictive find! Online Skee Ball!!!

(See link at bottom!!)

I played a few games last night. It’s bookmarked as my unwind before bed site. I love Skee Ball!


Wednesday night, in honor of Earth Day, The Toledo Mud Hens are giving away reusable grocery bags! Very cool! We have 2 Meijer ones, a Trader Joe's a Rite Aid that I keep in my tote bag and the freezer bag from Hershey last summer, so we don’t NEED Mud Hens grocery bags. It’s also going to be 36 degrees for a low temperature. So you know what that means!

We’re in section 114. :)

Toledo Mud Hens official site
Skee Ball online!

Football Skills Not Mandatory

Have you ever head of the game, Cornhole? I think I remember my brother mentioning it, but never really got into finding out more. Now I saw a site that explains the game with pictures. I’m a very visual person.

Cornhole is like a cross between horseshoes and Skee Ball from my research. Only no metal parts. The game’s origins are a little foggy, but it became popular as a tailgate game before Cincinnati Bengals games and the growth as a backyard game spread out from there.

Like horseshoes or lawn darts, you’re throwing something at a target. In Cornhole, That target is a wooden platform with a hole in it and you throw corn hole bags into it, This is where I see the similarity to Skee Ball, throwing things into the hole, I LOVE skee ball, so this looks very appealing! Like horseshoes, lawn darts ot Italian bocce ball or Canadian curling, you get points for how close you come to the target (Except unlike bocce or curling, you don’t knock your opponents out).

It is just a fun for all ages type thing, family picnic fun. I even suggested to David that it might be a fun afternoon game for our reception weekend this summer. Oh yeah, there is an executive tabletop version too! You gotta check out this neat game!

Nani The Orange Marble

What a great break in the day! I took a few minutes to play as a guest at MagNext . Yeah, if you go there it says “Kids Zone.” Let’s be optimistic and call it “Inner Kid Zone.”

You know I’m always on the lookout for things that might be entertaining and new for when Tori and Rina visit. MagNext looks pretty cool. You are a ball. If you sign up you can dress your ball and stuff, so, since it was free, I signed up to be a marbled orange ball. Oh, and if you see a moneybag, click on it! You’ll get a free gift! I found that out by clicking and I got a free hanger, so I can be a Christmas ball now. It’s a Flash game, so the graphics are really cool. One of the classes available for my certificate is Flash, so there is a point of personal interest in checking it out too.

In this outer space-type virtual world there are cool games to play. I tried iCoaster. In iCoaster, you, or me, the marbled orange ball, travels on a roller coaster rail. Fun! But wait! It is a game after all and not just the fun of watching yourself as a ball ride the coaster! As you are cruising along there are pieces of the rail missing! Your mission is to select pieces from the menu and put them in place. I get the game, but I also have that think-quick and mouse ability of an adult who spends her computer time writing or slowly and carefully placing pieces in PhotoShop. I bet Rina or Tori could do a better job of not falling off the rail and meeting their doom. Hey, maybe they can teach me? I did a much better job of getting the hang of the car races. I even earned some mags to put towards buying a hat, but you won’t see my ID on the top scores any time in the next 20 years!

The more people you know in the game, the more fun it can be. If you have a game lovin’ kid in your world, they’ll lover this, and they might even teach you how to play!

Nani The Dragon-Slaying Artist

You all know that I have a very healthy inner child. You also know that I have a couple of twin teens that visit us from time to time. So ORIGINALLY I was checking this site out for them. I thought they might enjoy it because they spend so much time fighting over the their Game Boys. Well, I got a little, ahem, into my research.

MEGA Brands Kids Zone just has some really cool stuff! It’s an online games site. Seriously, I’d so much rather the girls were playing games that made them have to think at least a little online than have them drone in front of the TV watching reruns for the twentieth time and pretending it’s cool. So, I had the chance to check out a site with a variety of games and, well, try some of them out myself. How else do you now if you are actually using your brain to play it?

Rina likes dragons, so I decided to try Dragons Crystal Warrior. I was az knight with an ax. My mission was to run around the castle grounds killing other knights and get power bricks to try to get the dragon krystal. Work with me here. I was a cute little knight that kinda moved like a jogging robot. Where I got into trouble, is you don’t get any points for killing the dragoons. I killed two. They were breathing fire at me! I got points from the gold bricks for the two flaming-arrow-shooting other knights I offed, but bupkis for the dragons. Yet in the end, since he wasn’t worth points, I left him alone and it was the dragon who I DIDN’T slay that turned me into charcoal.

There is also a calmer game that lets you color. Oh, it reiterated why I manipulate shapes as a designer instead of freeform drawing in PhotoShop, but it was neat. They also have backgrounds you can color that sorta look like those velvet and mare kits. I had so many of them at my place when the girls were little. They just loved them! As I recall, I had a few of them hanging on my office wall too. Maybe that’s why so many coworkers from the other departments thought I had kids. I did a black velvet butterfly painting. You should give this a try. It’s a good place to practice for the Picaso challenge at SAS!

It was a fun site and yeah, took more strategizing or creative brain power than watching iCarly...AGAIN! So, yeah, I think I’ll bookmark the site...for the girls when they vist...really!

Photoblog Wednesday

Welcoming in 2009

We played Cubbies Yahtzee! Our rule - when you got Yahtzee with 5 Cubs logos, you yelled "HOLY COW"

Everyone's A Critic

This is just a fun site to check out. EverHYPE is a site where real people get to be the resident experts, the critics, for movies, music and games!

It’s simple. You go to the site and select the entertainment you’re interested in. Imagine, get real Movie Reviews from people paying the same ticket prices you do to see them. That’s what I think is great. I don’t want to read reviews from professional movie critics who see the movies for free and look for things to be unimpressed with. I want to read reviews from people like me. There have been a lot of times I have definitely disagreed with the professional critics and when we’re talking a movie, that’s money and increments of my life I can’t reclaim if they are wasted!

My first stop at EverHYPE was the Action Movie Reviews category. I needed to see if anyone had hyped the new Punisher movie. I absolutely love movies made of comic books. Now, I don't read the comic books so much, but the stories in the comics seem to make the best movies! I bought the last Punisher movie, starring Thomas Jane, and I don’t but many movies, so I am naturally a little hesitant to run out and spend my meager earnings on the new one which does NOT include Jane and Frank Castle!

The review I read was favorable, but I take that with a grain of salt since the reviewer was less impressed with Thomas Jane than I was. I think, perhaps in the world of my current personal economy, I may just wait for the DVD release and rent first. But it’s also free to sign up to BE a critic and I know I’ll be at the new Harry Potter movie in 2009! So maybe I’ll spread a little...a little more, of my opinion around cyber-space!

Check out EverHYPE and revel in the glory of your inner critic!

Seek and Know

Now, there's more than one way to get this kit!

Because my blog needs some attention... ;)

Try your luck on “The Chronicles of Nani Seek and Know.” All of the answers are in the Blogger Chronicles of Nani. If you get 90% or better, 9 or 10 out of 10, email me at chroniclesofnani@gmail.com with the name you used to take the quiz and I’ll send you the link for “A Perfect Summer Day”

Chronicles of Nani Seek and Know 1) Under what name does Nani do Digital Scrapbook Designing? Digital Legacy Nani Scraps Digitalegacies Designs The Chronicles of Nani

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A Little of This, A Little of That (2/8/08)

For those of you who are new to The Chronicles of Nani, I have a habit of collecting ideas for short blogs on my desktop and every now and then will do a "multi blog" with a few of them. As a rule I don't b log at work, which includes that while I am not working right now, I am a 9-5 job seeker. That has its own frustrations that I usually unload on my personal journal. Something about putting pencil to paper that is great for vaporizing negative energy!
I will sometimes blog at lunch when I'm home though. Part of controlling that frustration is making sure I take normal breaks, eat a balanced diet at normal intervals and put the whole thing, frustration and all away at the end of the day. That does a lot to keep the peace at home too!

So here is the current smattering of little things that have been on my mind and my desktop!

QBz

Thanks to Skunk Studios for the wonderful method of honing my multi-platform skills! Many evenings you can find this Mac girl typing away on a Windows-driven PC! It's not what you may think, though!

I am not a "Mac-Nazi." I am a realist in the platform wars. One has to know their way around a windows system in the larger percentage of jobs in the professional world. IBM beat Apple to the finish line. I remember the line at the end of The Pirates of Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs says to Bill Gates, commenting about his taking shortcuts to get his platform to production, "ours is better though, it's a better OS". Gates replies, "It doesn't matter Steve, it just doesn't matter!"

That's still true today, Gates won the argument and the meat of the market, American business. If you are going to be in business, you have to know Windows, unless you are in graphics. That's the main user difference between the two. Macs make better graphics and artsy stuff. Windows is better for gamin, especially online gaming. Kinda like Macs make 'em, Windows play 'em. I advise friends who are in the market, that if they are into gaming, go windows, but make sure the virus software is kept up to date!
Mac is a more solid platform. I don't spend money constantly updating virus software and the only Mac I've ever known to get a virus has been one that my Mom had. She opened on email in Softy Windows and it infected the whole Windows side of her partitioned hard drive. When she rebuilt, it was without the Windows program. My Grandma uses her computer for email, instant messaging and looking at photo intense web sites for quilting. She uses a Mac. That only makes sense! Besides, Macs are much more user friendly. Mac was a lot easier to learn how to use when she got her computer in her late 70s!

But this blurb wasn't supposed to be about Mac vs. Windows! This is supposed to be about QBz! So, QBz means I get some Windows time at home. I'm usually using Word or Firefox because QBz is on the Mac!! Although Windows are better for games, QBz plays fine on the Mac and David's older computer is too slow to keep up with the game. Of course, I can't do scrapbooking or make a movie on his computer and R2D2, my space heater, is next to the Mac, so I get cold, BUT David is a QBZ addict! I'm serious, he plays the "Game of the Day," competing with other peoples scores that are automatically posted online. It brings out the competitive animal in him!! He'll sit in front of my computer, finish 4 rounds of a ten round game and start over because he didn't get a bonus for a round. It's a sad disease. But, I have to support him on it. I HAVE to. It's my computer, my game. What's worse, we only discover the "Game of the Day" when I rebuilt my hard drive last week. It made him MORE competitive with the global high scores. I am his enabler, his pusher. I'm so ashamed. ;)

But, I get to learn new things about windows that I can chat up recruiters about!

Dark Peanut M&Ms

My new favorite pick-it-up-at-the-gas-station candy! This started at Christmas. When I was shopping for candy for the Fabulous Dessert Bar, of course, anyone that knows me or has read any of my blogs knows I HAD to have M&Ms! My favorite is…was…almond. I have loved the almond M&Ms since they first came out. This past Christmas, I bought dark chocolate peanut to add some variety to the M&M bowl which had milk chocolate and almond as well. (I put the mint ones separate in glass cups)

My goodness, what a GREAT choice to mix things up! I'd tried the plain dark chocolate ones, but I'm more of a milk chocolate fan. But the dark chocolate peanut M&Ms are AMAZING! You can find them in the Valentines Day colors, in big bags or in regular M&Ms bags. This may very well mean they are NOT a limited time deal, like the purple M&Ms were. So I'm not going to say, "Get them while they last." I'm encouraging everyone to get them SO they last!


Scrapbook Pages
I'm going to start showing off an occasional scrapbook page. I do the Mug Shot every Monday, Photoblog Wednesday and Friday By Request if I get a request, so I really don't want to schedule a "Scrapbook Day." I will make a point to post layouts that I'm proud of.

My friend Barb, from the Yahoo 360 Chronicles got me started on this. She has been doing her scrapbooking in the digital format for quite a while. In 2006, she did a page with a picture David took of me in New York. She really liked the photo and she did such a nice layout for me. I was honored that she chose that photo and put it on her blog!

Last summer, I got into it. My large bookshelf has photo albums and scrapbooks on it. The first couple shelves are straight photo albums. I started adding headings and caption handwritten on scraps of paper and they slowly morphed into scrapbooks. Now my paper scrapbooks have morphed into digital ones.

One of my 2008 goals is to get my scrapbooks caught up. At the end of last year I had JUST met this guy named David! Yeah, that David, the guy who shares his address with me. I'm a little behind. Well, I started this year going digital with my 39th birthday, July 2005. Kaline wasn't even born yet! I'm now done until just before Thanksgiving. I am 39 years old. I've admitted to David that I had fallen in love with him, we found Kaline, we've taken Rina to see her first up-close train and David's met my Aunt from Italy!

Shutterfly will print 12X12 scrapbooks up to 100 pages. The cool thing is, I can use kits I already have and do challenges in the cyber-crop clubs to earn more for free. So, with my digital camera, I can keep working on the books and store them in my hard dive until I'm back to work and can afford to get the books printed. I can NOT afford scrapbook supplies and printing costs for the paper books right now! I also think that the pages I do on the computer look better than the ones I do by hand. Well, I have a background doing graphics for TV and I flunked scissors in kindergarten. The digi-cropping is more in my nature!

So here are a couple of my latest layouts:

This layout is called “Why I Scrap,” I know, ingenious title! The kit I used is called “Flyin’ High” by RCMama Designs. RCMama is Sherrie and she is my boss of sorts. I am on hr creative team! Being on a creative team is basically making a number of layouts using your designer's kits and you receive them for free. It saves you a couple bucks and makes the designer a few more sales, hopefully. If your designs are good ones they promote the kit! Right now, Sherrie’s designs are freebies as she is just getting started as a designer. It’s also my very first creative team spot, so we are helping each other build a reputation! There are 4 total artists on her team. Ideally, in the future this relationship will mean she can begin to sell her kits a and I could join additional creative teams and get a few of those 5-10 dollar kits a month. You have to apply for the CT spots just like you do for a job, so I’m building up my portfolio! :)

I do know I enjoy the creative challenge and the challenge of meeting deadlines (Oh, God, I miss working a real job!) But, I also know that RCMama Designs are some really great products for digital scrapbooking and I love that I can be part of the promoting team at the ground level. If you do digital scrapbooking or if you know someone who does, check out Sherri’s blog for some incredible freebies...while you can still get them for free!

My second layout today is called “Who’s On The Button?” No kit on this one, it’s all my design and David’s inspiration.

I’m not a fan of buttons as scrapbooking elements, paper or digital. That’s just my personal preference. I don’t use them. Well, there was an element challenge with a nice freebie for a prize for posting at Digital Freebies, the site where all of my layouts are posted first. I’ve been there the longest and have participated n the most challenges there. For the element challenge last month, it was “use big buttons in your layout.” ARGHHH!!!

David takes a moderate interest in my hobby, well a supportive interest. He is not a scrapbooking fan like I am a railfan, but the very fact that my man is casually interested in my scrapbooking is as widely admired by the scrapping gals as his railfan girlfriend is by the train guys! When I voiced my stress at having to use buttons in a layout, he asked if they had to be a particular kind of button or could I use an interpretation of button? I have such a great man! He suggested The Button, as in poker, and even let me scan his chips and card for the layout. The result was a great layout that gathered lots of positive feedback at the site!