Learning How to Play Catch Up

The bad news: I haven't blogged since day two of learning something new. The good news, I have actually been journaling and scrapping! I think going into town this past weekend is what messed me up. I was too busy living life to scrap it. I'm okay with that!

So, here are four new pages for you to enjoy!

Thursday, I learned an important lesson about being married. Mark had had a really long day, and it was nice to be able to have dinner waiting for him when he got home. With both of us working so much this fall, we've been having a lot of fast food. It's nice when one of us has the time to cook! The picture of this page is a picture of the meal - Taco Ring, Mexican Rice, and chips and salsa!


On Friday, the most exciting thing happened... we paid off our debt!!! We've been working toward this for about 2 years now, and finally paid the last bit Friday! It was a great day, and we've been celebrating as much as we can! The pictures here are of me and Mark, and of Mark holding his diploma (his master's was the last thing we paid off).

Friday night, to celebrate, we went to Shakespeare on the Green in town and saw The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. It was a lot of fun. Having stage managed the show twice, I think I got more of the jokes than most people in the audience. But it was still a good time.

Saturday, we celebrated by going to a college football game. It was tons of fun. I wasn't really feeling good when we left, and didn't really want to be there, but when we actually got to the game, I had a blast! I learned that I really do like football games! The picture here is of me and Mark at the game, of course!


On Sunday, we got to go to our church, which we don't get to do a whole lot because we now live an hour and a half away. It was great to see everyone, and that night our Sunday school class had a Mystery Luau Dinner Party! It was so much fun getting to dress up and play the roles. I was Holly Day, and Mark was Les Baggs. Mark, of course, figured out who dunnit and pointed the finger at the right culprit. I couldn't have been more off the mark. ;-) It was still a great evening. I was reminded how much I love my friends, and how lucky we are to still have those connections, even after moving. Picture is of the whole group who was there for the party.


That's what I've got so far. I'm getting to the point where working without pictures is hindering me, so I think I'm going to print off a group of pictures and add them in to catch up. I can't wait to see it REALLY finished, with pictures and everything!

Learn Something New Day 2

So far I'm two for two! Here's the page:


And here's the picture for the day:


Background: I was trying to create my favorite Close To My Heart color (Garden Green) on my computer because somewhere along the way I received a file with the RGB color combinations for creating them on the computer. Thing was, I had the values, and my computer wanted percentages. I asked a designer friend of mine if she knew how to translate them from value to percentage, and she told me that they are out of 255. I had no idea! But, knowing that, I was able to use my mad algebra skills (sarcasm intended) to translate them into percentages, and you can see the result of my beautiful Garden Green font color above! I used the color to create the journaling blocks that I'm using throughout my book. A very exciting thing to learn!

'Til tomorrow...

Learn Something New Day 1

Okay, according to my clock, I have 18 minutes left in day 2, which means I have 18 minutes left to finish day 1's page. Good thing I'm done. :-)

First things first. I finished my cover today, too.

I'm quite pleased with it, for now. I may add some detail to it as the month progresses. But I do want to keep it simple. I have a hard time adding 3D elements to covers, they seem to get bent out of shape - literally.

Here's page 1:


It's very simple, too. My theory is that if I keep things simple, I'll have an easier time doing this each day. Just get the paper and a place for the picture down. (I'm taking pictures as the month goes along and will probably print them all off together at the end of the month, since I don't really have a way to print as I go without finding myself at the Wal-Mart Photo Department every day.) I've established a possible pattern with this first page. My book is 7x7.5, and with this page I've got a 6x6 square, 2.5x6 piece of patterned paper, the picture, and the journaling, plus the day and date. I may keep with this format, or I may not. I wanted to start with something easily reproducible yet flexible in case I need to come back to the ease of simplicity. But I may go crazy tomorrow!

Here's the picture that will go on today's page:


It's of me studying for my Shakespeare class. I really enjoyed reading, and even enjoyed the sense of excitement/fear if I was going to be able to keep up in class. I had nothing to worry about, at least that day!

Learn Something New Every Day

I'm hastily beginning to realize that this is going to be a very busy month. It will be such a nice change, as I think I've been feeling things getting fairly mundane lately. I just hope I won't have over-extended myself by the time the month is out!

There's so much going on, and I want to tell you about it all, but for now I'm going to start with one thing, because I'm excited about working out the tech details of how to tell it.


I'm taking my first online class! It's through Shimelle.com. Shimelle is a scrapbooker in the UK who's blog I follow. I've watched this class go by for several years now, and this year I decided was the year to join. I'm so excited about this class. The concept to keep a record of what you learn every day for a month. We all know how drastically poor my last "do something every day for x time period" worked out (see here and here if you're masochistic and just want to relive the fail... I did actually make it through the week, and took pictures every day, but before I scrapbooked them, or even printed them off, my HD crashed, and I lost them all.)

But this time I have no expectations whatsoever. I do have an album, an old stapled book I got at Barnes and Noble or something of the sort that's a bunch of pages stapled together. And I'm using a pack of paper that had no original reason for being bought other than that I liked it. I'm compiling from my current stash, with the plan to not buy anything (which has reason more in the financial side of things rather than the not needing more stuff, but more about that later). But no expectations. I'm going to take each day as it comes and see what happens. And I just may learn that I don't really have time to do any of it! But I hope I learn that life, my life in particular, really does have exciting things going for it.

So, go check out the class! I'd recommend it for anyone, even non-scrapbookers. Shimelle's instructions are so simple you can do it with just a pen and a journal, and, as she says, "this project can be considered complete and valuable without a single scrapbooking supply."

Here's to learning something new!