Scrapbook Sunday

Yesterday was busy with yard work, then we ate dinner with my parents, grandmother and uncle.  Then I was just very tired, and didn’t feel like doing this post yesterday.  At least I did one this weekend!   :)

Hubby in front of our first ever fire outside on the patio!  Plus I managed to snap this really cool picture of the fire itself, even though being in that little frame does it no justice.  I used a premade template, but got rid of a few things and added in some of my own touches (fire frame included – that one was from a Halloween kit).

Hope you all have a safe and Happy Halloween today!  Enjoy your trick or treating or any parties left to go to.  It’s quite chilly here today, so hopefully it’s warmer wherever you are or you are able to keep warm tonight!

Scrapbook Saturday

I didn’t get to do a Scrapbook Saturday post last week.  Honestly, I don’t even know what happened to my day last weekend.  I think I was just lazy and not on the computer much on Saturday, so I was going to do it Sunday, and then didn’t get the chance to then because we were at my grandmother’s a good portion of the morning/afternoon.  But anyway, here’s my page for this week:

I used a premade template, but I changed the background color and added the light blue elements, along with the text.  I’m still learning how to do things with that program.  These photos are from my long time friend’s wedding.  Her colors were a light blue and a light green, so I tried to incorporate the closest matches.  You have me and her in one photo, the items she had on the tables in the other photo, and me trying to be all artsy with one of the centerpieces in the third photo.  Her dress was beautiful, and it was so nice to see her so happy!  We have been friends since we were very young, since her grandmother is my grandmother’s hairdresser, and we were in the same grade at school.  Even our birthdays are only 3 days apart!  I also got to see another old high school friend there that I haven’t seen pretty much since high school.  It was a nice day.   :)

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!

Scrapbook Saturday

I hope you all are enjoying your Saturday and are having just as beautiful weather as we’ve been having here.  I am at a yard sale until 2ish today, dealing with crazies and thieves (we actually had someone steal something once, right out from under our noses!). 

Back to the beach with this post.  I wanted to share more photos from our vacation to OCMD.

The top picture is one my hubby took with his cell phone camera.  We took a boat ride called the Assateague Adventure, and it took us over to the shoreline of Assateague, where it let us off for a short while to walk the shoreline and collect shells and such.  All I kept getting were rocks, and the shells I managed to find contained snails, so they had to get thrown back.  In retrospect, I should have left all my junk back on the boat instead of trying to carry it. 

The second picture is of the Ocean City beach from where we were sitting the first day we went to relax on the beach.  We went a little late that day, but it was nice because it was cooler and a lot less crowded.

The third picture is a tiny baby clam I managed to get a hold of down at the water’s edge.  Hubby saw something that looked like a shell when the wave pulled back to the ocean, but when he reached to grab it, it buried itself into the sand!  I managed to snag one before it could bury again, and it turned out to be the tiniest clam I’ve ever seen!  I did put it back in it’s home, but just had to snap that photo first.

I miss that vacation – it was so nice.  I especially want my daytrip to Ocean City, NJ now!  We go every year after Labor Day, so I’m hoping to get there soon!

Favorite Kitty Pic Friday/Scrapbook Saturday

I’m cheating a little here.  I know it’s not Friday, I totally missed doing my “Favorite Kitty Pic Friday!” post yesterday, and I was very busy today, so I’m late in the day with my Scrapbook Saturday post too.  So, I’m combining them both right now and I created a kitty digital scrapbook page for today!  :)
I think this picture of him is just too funny!  I caught him laying like this on my computer desk chair today, and it made me think to use this picture of him laying the same way on our couch back at our old apartment.  It just strikes me as funny because he’s laying there like, “Woe is me!” or like he’s playing dead.  I’m still learning how to use this program, so this is mostly a pre-made template with his name, the word lazy, and the paw print tag added in.  Be prepared for some less interesting/busy scrapbook pages when I finally start trying to create one from complete scratch.  Digital is still very different for me and I have to definitely get used to it.
In other news, our patio is “finished” (yay!) but we have a couple issues making it not quite finished (boo!).  I will do a whole patio post later, progress pictures and all.  We did buy some plants and bulbs today for the area around it where we are landscaping, but more on them at a later time too.
I hope you all are enjoying your Labor Day weekend!  No special plans here, since the patio isn’t 100% yet and the rest of the backyard is a mess now.  Just relaxing, maybe some crafting, probably some video game playing…   :)

Scrapbook Saturday

  I created my very first digital scrapbook page!   :)   I got this free program (Sarif Digital Scrapbook Artist) from Amazon yesterday, thanks to Fab Steals and Deals (link is to post that contained the link for the free program download – I do not know if this free download is still available today), so I thought I would give it a try, since I said a long time ago that I would try to do a Scrapbook Saturday post.  So now I at least have a program to create a page digitally if I have not been able to create a paper page, and hopefully I will be able to start to make this a regular post!  This post also gives you another photo viewing of some of our vacation for hubby’s birthday.  The big picture was taken on the beach of the bay behind our hotel, and from left to right:  hubby and I on the speedboat ride, a heart hubby drew in the sand for me (awww), and hubby relaxing on the beach. 

I can’t wait to try out this program some more and really figure it out.  Hopefully I’ll be able to start creating more elaborate pages, and maybe even make myself a new blog design!   :)

We are attending our first block party today!  Hopefully you all have something fun planned too!   :)

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…