Scrapbook (Saturday) Sunday

I was very busy lazy today (well, Saturday, seeing as it’s officially Sunday now), and just didn’t feel like creating this sooner.  Luckily, Sunday starts with an “S” too, so Scrapbook Sunday it is this week!  :)

This may be the last of my OCMD vacation pictures I post.  I have more, and I like them, but I haven’t decided if they are really blogworthy and entertaining enough to really post on here.  Maybe, we’ll see.  If you’d like to see them, let me know!

Just a very simple page this week.  It’s late, my eyes are a little tired, and I unfortunately didn’t have a birthday kit in my digital scrapbook program I’m currently using.  It has been a tradition for us to go to a hibachi place for my hubby’s birthday every year since we moved to NJ and discovered this place there called “Nagasaki”.  We usually just went there, ordered the hibachi food, but only ever sat at regular tables because we didn’t know how the whole hibachi experience went.  Since we no longer live in NJ near Nagasaki, and we decided to take this sort of last minute trip to OCMD for the week of my hubby’s 30th birthday, he still wanted to go to a hibachi place for dinner on his birthday, so we found this place called “Sakura” in the outlets on the Coastal Gateway.  We had the true hibachi experience this time, no regular tables in this place (at least none that we saw)!  We sat at a table with a family who was there for the dance competition taking place that same week (we watched some of it the first full day there) and a mom and her son who lived very close to where I went to college.  The chef was very fun and entertaining – sadly I didn’t catch any scallops in my mouth, but hubby did!  He even got a special ice cream dessert for his birthday, which I didn’t manage to get a picture of, and I even got one too!  (coupon for a freebie was an excellent find amongst my many coupon booklets)

We would definitely go there again to eat whenever we end up taking a vacation in OCMD.  I highly recommend it for anyone who likes that kind of food and is going there or lives in the area.

…It was a little weird, though, to have a waitress dressed in a kimono who had an Irish (?) accent…talk about a culture clash!

Catching Up

Wow, I am finally all caught up on my Google Reader for the blogs I follow!  My vacation at the end of July put me severely behind on my reading, and posting – I have finally gone from 300+ unread posts to 0! 

My weeks have either been really busy or really lazy since returning too.  The busy weeks didn’t allow me much or any time to post, and the lazy weeks were just that – LAZY!  I didn’t feel like doing anything at all, and in most instances, I didn’t.  I’m hoping to finally get back on track with things now.

I started a private dance lesson with a new student the week after coming back from vacation.  If I refer to her by “name”, it will only be “K” since this is a public blog and I do not have her parents permission to use her real name or anything else personal on here.  K lives in a not-so-great area of the city, which makes me nervous, and parking has been a real pain, but I’ve had 3 lessons with her now, and it’s been going great!  She says she has fun, she’s outgoing, and a good listener for the most part.  :)  This month I stuck to summer and Hawaiian music, and we’ve even begun a real hula dance!  It has been fun for me so far, and I look forward to hopefully continuing lessons for a long while.

My cousin also contacted me to ask if he could have a family get together here at our house (which happened on the 15th), since we all live all over the place and he was coming up from Florida that week to visit.  I agreed, as long as our backyard wasn’t under construction for our patio, since I planned to keep everyone outdoors for the entire time, or at least as many people outside for as long as possible.  My patio hasn’t been started yet, and unfortunately it rained – and poured – that day, so everyone was stuck inside.  I had spent the entire week before that cleaning my house from top to bottom.  It was time to do all the cleaning anyway, but I also care about how my house looks to other people, and I knew there would be family wanting to see it all for the first time, so I wanted it looking perfect.  I expected people in and out for the bathroom, a tour of the house, etc., but I didn’t expect to end up with 19 people crammed into 3 rooms, tracking mud, grass, and food all over my floors.  I was very stressed about the whole thing, and the only person from my cousin’s bunch that said a sincere thank you and related to how stressed I was was my other cousin’s wife.  The cousin that asked me to have it here, and his parents, brother and SIL (other cousin and wife mentioned above) showed up 2 hours late and stressed me out even more.  The cousin that asked to have it here decided it would be fun to joke around that he spilled red wine on my white carpet (he really did not, but thought it was hilarious to joke about it).  I also did not provide the wine, as I didn’t really want any alcohol here with the mix of family that came, but one of my aunt’s brought it because my cousin told people to bring whatever they wanted, never got a list of what people were bringing, and didn’t tell me that he told the rest of the family to bring stuff.  Long story shortened, I was kind of mad at that part of the family, happy to see other parts of the family, and have learned my lesson to never offer my house as the gathering location for something like that ever again!

My friend had her second baby last week and I’m excited to meet him and visit with her.  She teaches baton in the group I’m involved in too, but with having the baby and the week before having the baby, she hasn’t been at practice.  I’ve seen pictures, but I’m hoping to get to meet him in person this week and deliver her baby gifts!   :)

We haven’t gotten our patio started yet, but they have now marked the whole property where utilities are located under ground.  We are set to begin work anytime after tomorrow, so now it’s just up to the landscaper to get started – I’m very anxious for that!  I can’t wait to have that done and hopefully enjoy it as much as possible before the fall turns too cold.

So, that’s my catch up for now.  I finally took pictures of my new jewelry set I made before vacation, so I would like to do a post with those, and I definitely have more vacation fun to share.  :)

Sorry for my absence…

If you read my blog, thank you for sticking around in my absence! I just realized (literally 30 seconds ago) that I have only done my Favorite Kitty Pic Friday Post for the last 2 weeks. I have been extremely busy distracted by a week long vacation to Ocean City, MD, a day trip to Bethany Beach, DE for a baton performance, and starting my first private lesson student for dance. I got the call for these lessons a few days before we went on the vacation, so as soon as we got back I had to get to form creating, lesson planning, and music. I felt very frazzled last week because I had a lot to do and not enough time to do it, plus I was nervous about the lesson. The lesson turned out pretty well – the little girl said she had fun and she was enjoyable to teach. I’m not fond of the area they live in, as the city of Reading makes me very nervous, but overall it went well with no problems.

Since we got back from vacation, I have been very tired too. I haven’t felt like doing much. And if I was tired before, this week is really going to kick my butt. I created a cleaning to-do chart for myself, that I have decided to do the first week of every month in order to keep a clean, orderly house and make the cleaning less miserable of a chore, since it will be done more often. Since I didn’t accomplish that last week due the the day trip, lesson planning and jewelry making I had to get done, I will be tackling it starting tomorrow. I have a shorter to-do list for every single day of the week in order to break up the chores and make it a little less daunting. It works out that this is the cleaning week now anyway, because I will be hosting a family gathering this Sunday. My cousin called and asked if he could have a gathering here of everyone that would come from my dad’s side of the family…I said OK…what have I gotten myself into? He managed to pull off a miracle and get all the aunts and uncles to come, and already we are looking at a total of 22 people! That’s only including a couple of the cousins, so imagine if they all came with their spouses and kids, we’d probably end up having to rent a location! So, I’m feeling stressed about that. My cousin keeps telling me not to worry about things, but it’s my house, I feel like the hostess (even though he is supposed to be handling most of it), and I care about how my house and my hosting skills are presented to whoever is here. I also was asked by hubby today if it’s ok if his parents come for a visit the weekend after that, so I said ok. Normally that frazzles me and gets me in a cleaning frenzy, but luckily all of that will be done already, and I’m feeling like that will be a breeze of a visit compared to one afternoon with my dad’s side of the family.

So, I apologize again for my absence and thank you for sticking around. I do have more to share with you, such as vacation posts, my new jewelry set, and I’m sure after next Sunday there will be more, but I have been busy, distracted, tired, and stressed out, and the next week might be more of the same. I will try my best to get at least one other post in this week, if not more, but I felt the need to explain my absence a little more and ask you continue to bear with me and continue following.

Have a great week – hopefully I make it through the week and next weekend with my sanity!

Vacation and Motivation

So, hubby has a lot of vacation time, not including the days he can carry over into next year, and has been told he better start figuring out when to take it. His birthday is coming up in about 2.5 weeks, and he has been saying he needs a vacation. The problem with this is in order for it to be a real, relaxing, fun vacation, we actually should go somewhere – hubby works from home now, so just taking a week off and sitting around the house isn’t much of a true vacation. We’re missing out on a beach vacation this year that we would have taken in August, since the twirling group I teach with isn’t doing their annual performance trip to Wildwood this year, and even though neither of us are much of a beach-goer, I was a little disappointed that I wouldn’t get to take that trip this year. So, I thought about trying to find a beach destination that would have enough other stuff for us to be occupied with, that was affordable, and that we could book for the week of his birthday, which is very fast approaching now. We’ve pretty much settled on Ocean City, MD, since there is also Assateague nearby and the town has free activities almost nightly. I have never been there before though, since I missed my senior week trip in high school for my dance recital, so I don’t know anything about the area, the hotels, the boardwalk, the dining, etc. I think I might have found a good hotel deal, but looking at all the different available hotels and packages offered, I feel overwhelmed! So, I’m hoping to get this all booked within the next two days – have any of you been there, have any recommendations, tips, info about parking, dining, etc.? Feel free to comment and let me know!

I also went to a craft show on Saturday to see my friend who was set up selling her handmade bags, purses, pillows, and other sewing crafts (she doesn’t have a website yet, but is looking into it now with some suggestions from me (: ). I did buy a purse from her (very cute little hand tote that’s blue and white striped with some silver sequin accents – sorry no picture at this time), and after walking around, got a few other ideas for some new crafts to add to my craft menagerie (don’t know if I used an appropriate term there, but it sounds great to me!). I also realized that I’ve been in a craft slump lately, and haven’t started or finished any projects in weeks! This prompted some motivation to get things done and accomplished this week. I have a very puny collection for sale on my Artfire site, and even though I have yet to sell an item, I have a few projects already started, a few that need starting, a few projects that I was asked to make as gifts for people (no income though – just materials reimbursed or given for free) and lots of new ideas that I’d love to buy supplies for and get started, and I’d love to add to my shop on there. I wanted to start a “Scrapbook Saturday” post to motivate myself to work on my personal scrapbooks that have to be finished, and haven’t done that yet either. Overall, last week was pretty blah I guess – I didn’t do much of anything, and I didn’t even post much of anything on here. Now I’m motivated to get things done this week – here’s hoping for some productivity! I’ll try to update on my progress this week!

Frazzled Excitement

So, I have a long to-do list this week, and all of it is stuff I really want to do (not like cleaning or other chores), and sometimes I get the motivation to do this stuff, but I don’t know where to begin, or I feel really scattered with it.  This is my frazzled excitement. 

So far, I’ve at least started a few things.  As you can see, I added yet another new page to this blog – Photography.  There’s only four photos in it right now, but I definitely plan on adding more as I continue to watermark them.  There’s just a lot I want to add, so it will take me some time, but at least I have four to share with you so far.  Go peek at them, you know you’ve been waiting for it!   ;)  Well, I know you haven’t really been, but I hope you enjoy them anyway.   :)

I got my time and abilities sheet from my church a while back.  This is the sheet where you sign up for all the stuff you want to volunteer for.  I never fill mine out and send it back, especially considering I lived in NJ for 3 years, and the church is in PA (but they were still sending me stuff in NJ!).  I haven’t been to church at all since, let me think…my wedding day!  That was 3 years ago, and wasn’t even a church service.  I’m surprised they still send me stuff and haven’t ex-communicated me yet, lol.  But all kidding aside, I’m not an extremely religious person.  I do believe in God and Heaven and all that, but I don’t necessarily feel you have to go to a church every week, and give all your money to them (after all – God isn’t the one needing my money) in order to have your beliefs.  I apologize if I offended anyone here.  To each his own.  This time, however, instead of just throwing the form away, something made me look it over.  Now I’m thinking of signing up for a couple things.  I love working with kids – they are looking for vacation Bible school helpers (and I even just told my hubby the other night how much I used to like Bible school).  And who ever knew my church has or is starting a dance group?!  Obviously I love dance, I’m even trying to start my own dance business (which I offered classes to the church’s preschool, but was sadly declined), so definite check mark on that one!  However, in typical fashion of me, I am late in returning it.  So now I have to write a note to add to it apologizing for my tardiness, and find out what that dance stuff is all about.  Really?  Dance group in a church?  It also got me thinking maybe I should go to church more often, especially if I’m volunteering.  I’m not a morning person though, and I am not a fan of the long, drawn out services on a Sunday morning, so I’m thinking of attending some of the Saturday evening services.  Maybe I’ll go with my Grandmom.  Anyway, I filled out the sheet, now I just need to write the note, send it back, and see where to go from there.

We have new members to Thunderbolts, and I have been working with them a little.  I have been wanting to work on a routine or at least help out and collaborate with another instructor on one, and I mentioned this to the director.  I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes in the group, since they’ve been around all this time, and I went away for 3 years.  But last night I got asked to get together with one of the instructors to work on the new routine.  YAY!   :D  So I’m excited about that.  I even stayed up way too late last night listening to music and trying to find some good ideas with that twirling ear of mine.

I am thinking about starting a “Scrapbook Saturday” post on here.  It might not be every single week, since some Saturdays get busy with other activities.  I have a TON of scrapbooking stuff to work on from the wedding, bridal shower, honeymoon, etc., that I bought but then never got around to completing.  It’s still all here, and all of those events were 3 years ago!  It’s about time I get to it, and I thought some motivation might be to do a post on here.  I would plan to create at least one page (more if the creativity and time allows), and post it on here every Saturday (or every possible Saturday).  So, hopefully I’ll get started on that this week and you’ll see something by Saturday night (or “Scrapbook Sunday” if I only work on it Saturday and finish late).

So those are a few of the major things I’ve been thinking about, trying to start, or need to work on.  But those things, along with a never-ending to-do list of other things, makes me feel all frazzled.  I just don’t know where to begin, or I want to work on 3 different things at the same time because I’m excited to, and I get all “aaaahhhhh!”.  Ever feel like this?  I’m sure all you moms have…