Tuesday, December 29, 2009

I'm alive!

It's been so long since I blogged, I need to catch up! I'm hoping this can be sort of a cathartic experience - processing the last several months preparing to move into the future. It seems like I've been in a funk recently. There have been lots of good things, but a couple of big things that are stressing me out. We'll focus on the good things.

The Tempest went well. We were inside one night, so my set piece got used once. I'm glad it was used period. It was hard moving inside and then back out, as an actress. I thought it was going to be tough being outside. Because of weather, we only got to rehearse once outside before we opened, and then did four of the five performances out there. We were all a little stressed, but everyone transferred well, and, to me at least, it was hard moving back inside once we got settled out there!

The fall semester is over - classes went well for both me and the hubby. I ended up picking up a night class, Education as a Profession, to explore the possibility of getting certified to teach. I really enjoyed my Shakespeare class - getting back into the "student" mode. It, along with becoming involved with the choir, helped me to make connections with some students on campus.

I still haven't completely finished my first online class - Learn Something New Every Day - that I did in September. I finished the album pages, but haven't quite gotten the pictures onto the pages yet. I, of course, have grand plans of doing that. In the meantime, I thought it would be a good idea to pick up another scrapbooking class - a December Daily class that encourages you to scrap about each day in December leading up to Christmas. I really should learn better about myself. I am not a daily scrapbooker - I scrapbook events. So, it turned more into a scrapbooking of December events, which is fine. I'll try to get some of those pages posted up here, I'm pretty pleased with them. I explored digital scrapbooking with this class, using Adobe Photoshop Elements. I like it a lot, though it is very different from paper scrapbooking. It's probably a good way for me to get a lot of pages done, and I really like that I can scrapbook anywhere that I can take my computer (i.e. in-laws' house and my living room without taking over the coffee table!) The downside is I'm using the Free 30-day trial of PE, and it's going to expire probably sometime this week, and I don't really have the money to buy the full program. So, this may be the end of my digital scrapbooking experience, for awhile, at least.

Hmm...what else. Well, Christmas was last week. We had an awesome Christmas. We hit the highlights - Mark's extended and immediate family, my immediate and some extended family. We were blessed with great gifts and great company. My sister passed on her Wii to us as a present - awesome! She got it last year and enjoyed having it for awhile, but I think the newness had worn off, so it's come to live at our house. We haven't turned it on yet, but I'm looking forward to playing some tennis - I think it might be my favorite of the games that we now have. Oh, and I'm definitely going to have to check out some Harry Potter games. Some other things we got were additional chairs for our table (now I can invite more than 2 people over for dinner!) and Mark got a Kitchenaid Stand Mixer (been on his wish list for awhile, now).

Alright, is that enough of an update? I make no promises to blog more, for anyone who's reading along. Actually... if you are reading, would you let me know? Comment or something, just to let me know you're out there. I usually hate bloggers who ask for comments or beg for feedback. But, think of it as a survey. The 2010 Census is coming up, so we'll call it a census of my blog. Really, it's just to let me know if I should feel guilty for not posting for... 4 months. Gulp. I feel guilty whether there's anyone out there or not.