Seriously?

I don't know why I can't keep up with these blog posts for crying out loud. It's been over a month already again??? Yikes. Sorry, guys, it's just that nothing much exciting happens around here I guess. We are going through our daily routines of school, housework (if it can't be avoided) and all the little things of everyday. I changed my daily picture pages to Project Life, which to me is just another name for the same thing, it still  gives me the same results, but the supplies are so much cuter :) Katie created those amazing pocket pages, I just love them. There is such a nice variety and most of them are so cute,  I don't even want to change them up. Anyway, I am trying to keep up with all of that and so far I have been doing well. Sometimes they take me forever. Just getting the photos selected and fixed up takes a long time, plus everything else... maybe I am just lacking mojo lately.

Now, they are not in order, but you get the idea.

The weather around here has been wonderful! We have had summer temperatures in March, I just hope we won't suffer in May. My magnolia trees were in full bloom and then of course we got a night frost and they all turned to brown mush. I never have much luck with those in the spring. My peach trees are in full bloom, they don't seem to have suffered from the frost. I need to go out there with the girls and take some pictures in front of them. They are not being very cooperative...

The girls and I have been busy going to Zumba in the evenings. Last night Althea had her first class at Ace's. It was pretty crowded and lots of fun! That girl is really expanding her business, good for her! We certainly enjoy her classes. Saturday we will be part of a little Zumba demo at the Pasquerilla center downtown. We'll be on at 3 PM if anybody is interested :) Since I'm part of it I won't be able to get pictures, unless I step out for a minute. We'll see.

Got some more pages to show you

As you can see from the one page above, I have gotten into wine making :) It's only from kits right now, but my first batch turned out pretty darn good. Plus it's fun to go through the process. The finished product really reminds me of the country wine I used to buy in bulk and bottle myself when I lived in Italy. Those were the days LOL. Now I am making a Gewuerztraminer with a bit of apple flavor. I got to try it before I bought it. Not too sweet, just right. We'll see how that one will turn out. The only thing I don't like about the process is all the cleaning, that is so not up my alley :)

Gabrielle is getting closer to getting her driver's license. She has been putting in lots of hours driving and we just started practicing parallel parking, yikes! It's tough to convey that motion of turning the back of the car at the right moment... She'll get it eventually, she is getting pretty darn good on the road, needs a little more experience on the highway though, there is no room for error when you hit that ramp with traffic.

Poor thing injured her back last week so she had to lay off the Zumba, that is eating her alive! She was a major grump last night when she couldn't participate. At least she got to spend the hour with her Riley :) Those two have been dating for about 6 months now!

Michael discovered the part. The part in his hair that is! Wow! He looks 3 years older at least! Amazing what hair can do. You can see his picture on the second page I posted, I can't believe how much he has grown lately and how grown up he looks! Handsome little bugger. He has been going to football strengthening sessions on Mondays but I can still beat him at arm wrestling :) I'm sure that won't be for much longer!

Okay, I have to go and run a few errands, I'll try real hard to post more frequently for you people in Germany :) Keep in touch too!!!

of teeth and feasts :)

Phil had to have a tooth removed on Monday, it was done with conscious sedation and it all went well of course. Funny to see him afterward, kind of gives you an idea of what they will be like when they are old and feeble minded LOL. It was too funny! Anyway, we got over that hurdle well.

Yesterday was Valentine's Day of course and we got our red roses. I got a bunch, the girls got a single one with a little teddy and Michael got a football cup filled with candy, plus I got each of them chocolates, so they have nothing to complain about :) Gabrielle met with Riley and they went to dinner with his Mom. He gave her this cute teddy and adorable necklace, way too much! He is such a good kid, first love!! I am not looking forward to the heartbreak of the first breakup.

Today is my oldest sister's birthday, she turned 71! How can that even be???? I just got off the phone, I talked to her, my brother and my youngest sister, it's so good to hear their voices again. She was bugging me about coming for the class reunion that's being organized, it sure is tempting, but really hard....

I was just thinking how nice it is to have these few morning hours all to myself, but only because I know the crowd is going to be back later. How I would miss them if they weren't! I don't do change well I suppose, I am so dreading them going away to school in the future. And then hubby retiring, he'll be around all the time, yikes!!! I might have to get a job :)

Last week I found my little lovebird dead in his cage, that truly threw me for a loop! I was really attached to that little bugger, he would sit on my shoulder and give me kisses, I so miss him! He was dang cute!

I am all caught up with my weekly pages

and some more pages

I am trying to use the not-so-good photos I have also, they usually have a cute story that I want to remember, even if the picture is not that stellar. After all, that's what it's all about, right?

It's so funny, while I am here typing this I am chatting with an old friend in Germany, I am loving this communication bit we have today, the world is getting smaller all the time :)

Well, I am going to make myself a turkey sandwich and check on my Words with Friends (scrabble via iphone). Have a great day!

Old Friends

This is just the coolest thing! I have been contacted by some old classmates in Germany who are planning a 50 year reunion this year. I am just blown away by the memories that suddenly flood my brain. I have been sent pictures, shared memories with a few old friends and plan to stay in touch through Skype and Facetime. One of my friends just sent me the link for an Iphone App that allows me to listen to a Wuppertal Radio station, which is where I grew up. Just to hear them talk about my city is wonderful. I am all giddy about the whole thing. It saddened me to hear that one of my old friends passed away a few years ago.
The weather around here makes you wonder if we will ever have any kind of winter. We had sweater temperatures the last few days and then today we had some snow that didn't last long. Suits me just fine, it can stay away until March and then it can get warm again :)
I have been able to keep up with the weekly pages so far, here is last weeks:

I really enjoy using those pocketpages for the photos, they are such fun. There are so many cute little labels in the store now, that fit perfectly into the slots, or that can be resized easily.

I did get a few other pages done as well

As always, the credits can be found in my gallery, link on the right :) All Designer Digitals, of course.


We went to see Haywire last week, so confusing and unbelievable. it wasn't worth it. It was just good to get out without the kids for a change, so we still had a fun time.

I'm on the Parish Council and we were working on a new directory. Some people could not make it to the appointed place for the photos, so I offered my services to go to their homes and take a picture. Today I went to see this gentleman who is 87 years old, has been on crutches all his life for PostPolio but has never let that stop him. He used to be a photographer on the side, doing 50 weddings a year. He was amazed at what my camera could do when I told him I was not going to use any flash. He really liked his picture, which made me happy. Such an interesting man. He showed my some Christmas Cards he made before I was even born. He used cutouts of himself and placed them into these cool scenes. Stuff we can do easily in Photoshop today, but back then that was quite a challenge. Very cool stuff, cheesy but fun! I really enjoyed talking to him.

My sweet not so little daughter just had to come over and sit on my lap, leaning back against me, trying to crush my windpipe LOL. She is such a stinker, I don't know why she gets such a kick out of doing that. Michael is at a recruitment dinner for football. It's at the High School, they were serving them pizza and then they got to watch a game at the gym, not sure what kind, but he was all excited. Something to do with the guys! I was pretending to be getting ready to go with him and he almost flipped out. He tried to talk me out of it, telling me it was only for the kids and that he didn't like me going places with him and so on and so forth. Made me laugh but also made me sad. They are all growing up way too fast. Actually I was getting dressed up for an appreciation dinner at Church tonight. I took Helen with me, so she wouldn't have to go by herself. It was pretty nice, only offset by the fact that one of the older ladies didn't feel good and passed out. I believe she even stopped breathing there for a while, because somebody said that she was given CPR which made her throw up. They called the EMTs and she looked a lot better by the time they were getting her to the Hospital. I hope she'll be all right. She has always been such a lady, she used to come to School to read to the kids.

Here is a quick picture of my gang. It's on my Facebook Timeline. Every time I look at it, it makes me happy :)

Well, that was the update for the day. Have a great weekend!

Week three

I am really trying to stay with it this time around. Here is the third week all done :)

 

I'm happy I got that all done. It's a challenge to find a good photo for the full bleed section.

I also found some time to get lesson 3 for Jana Morton's class on blending done. I just love playing around with her, she is amazing!

 

I'll probably wind up doing a full bleed page opposite of this one, maybe one with Riley, using this photo

My sister has finally joined the facebook crazies! I loved getting her invitation. We don't get to talk too often with her being in Germany, so I am hoping that we will be able to catch up with each other more often once she figures out how to use it.

An other great thing I just discovered is Words With Friends. It's playing scrabble on your phone and you all probably already know about it. Seems like I am the babe in the woods when it comes to games, which I usually don't get into. I don't have enough time as it is. This is really fun though, I love it!

Today is Riley's birthday and we ordered him a cake to make into a Star Wars theme with little figurines we bought. Gabrielle came up with the idea and she was so excited about it. I hope he liked it. She is up there now celebrating after having missed him earlier to go bowling. Oh well, we did Zumba instead, which is always great! In fact, I am heading for the shower right now, it's badly needed after an hour of jumping around! Have a wonderful evening everybody!

Still here

I don't even know what happened, but this poor blog just got away from me. Resolution for the New Year is to keep it up-to-date! (well, one of the resolutions anyway :))
Where to even begin... life has just been running along, the kids make everything busy and I don't mean that in a bad way. There is just always something going on. Then there were photo shoots to edit, the kids had pictures they wanted, the house needs tended to, Christmas was looming, just everything.... Well, I am still here, everybody is doing well, Christmas was very nice and so was New Years and now things are finally going back to somewhat normal!
The girls just had their Winter Formal at school and of course that was a big event with the dresses and all the other stuff that's part of it. I have pictures :) :)

 

 Rachel did her own hair, which I thought was quite awesome, it came out great!

Gabrielle took her boyfriend Riley of course, I should have a picture of the two of them too

 

There were a bunch of girls waiting in line to have their pictures taken, so we never got around to do group shots, oh well!

Last month Gabby went to Riley's Formal, she was so cute, her first Formal with a boy and he made it special with the corsage and just the whole thing.

 

I am not going to bore you with all the pages I have done since the last post. You can find them all in my gallery, except for my 365 pages, which I didn't post there, since they were made with Anna Aspnes templates. I finished the book, got it done at Persnickety.com and can't wait to see what it looks like! It's a big book, but I really loved the way it came out! Once I have it, I will take a picture.

The weather around here has been kind of silly, we have hardly had any winter and that is just fine with me. Now we finally had some snow and it's pretty cold, but in a couple of days it's supposed to warm up again. It's almost February, just a few more weeks and it will be spring! Yeah!!!

I haven't been back to Karate, I do feel bad about it, but I don't know where to fit that in right now. We are doing Zumba and I still love it! No pressure, just fun and exercise!

Here are the pages I am making for this year's project 366 (:)). I really love the large photo on one side, I was even tempted to just do a page per day, but that book would have been gigantic and I don't have a stellar photo for each day. I want to keep the photos relevant for the day too, so it's not always easy to come up with a shot that also looks good

 

Katie has those awesome pocketpages in the store just for this project and they are so versatile, I just love them! A lot of people are doing the project hybrid and they are using them also. They look quite fabulous, but I am not a hands on person anymore, too messy :)

Have all of you checked out Pinterest yet? It's an awesome site where you can pin things you find on the web and put them in different categories. There is also a large community of people with whom you can share pins. Lots of awesome inspiration, it's a great site! I have found wonderful poses for my photography, clothing and recipes, all kinds of great stuff!

Well, this was just a short update to let you know that I am still alive!

One last note, I will miss sweet Barb terribly! She was always the first one to leave me a comment on my posts and sadly she just passed a way a few weeks ago. I have truly lost a dear friend, even though I never met her in person! I am missing her a lot!

Well, have a great Sunday everybody!

Seriously?

I thought this was supposed to be fall?! Last week (as many of you know and experienced) we were surprised by a freak October snowstorm. It came down all day long, this wet and heavy snow. There were power outages in many places, we were lucky in that regard. My poor lilac tree is flattened, I didn't get out there to inspect the degree of damage yet. Other than that, it was just yucky and inconvenient. But of course I went out the next day and caught some shots that made me create this page

It sure is pretty to look at, but come on, this is way too early in the season!

The week before we went to a local farm, I read in the paper that they had a corn maze. I almost had to drag everybody out by force, but once we were there, it wasn't so bad. They had fun in the maze and we went on this "hayride" that dumped us in the pumpkin field. What a racket, but of course we did buy some :) Here are some pages from that day

I think I probably had the most fun, since I could take pictures :) WE wound up at Applebee's that evening, good thing because I barely made it to choir practice, even without having to cook.

Michael's class had to present a saint for Monday's All SAints mass. He was ST. Michael of course and I spent hours making his wings! I could not find anything in the store that he could have worn, everything was way too girly, so I wound up buying some foam board, drew a wing on one and cut it out. The cutting was the worst part! Here is a picture of just the wings after the cutting was done

I used a really easy method to put them together, a couple of holes and twist ties :) It worked like a charm. I used wire ribbon, looped it through the twist ties twice, so that I had 2 loops and those went around his arms. genious :) It was actually sturdy too. You can tell I am not a crafty person that it makes me so happy this worked out so well LOL!

Here is Michael, giving his presentation. I cropped him out of a large photo with his classmates and the photo was taken with high ISO and a zoom lens, so the quality leaves a lot to be desired, but hey, I still like it :)

He really did a good job too, he was easy to hear and understand and he never paused or made any mistake. So proud of him :)

Monday was Halloween of course and we had a little party at Zumba. It was fun, although dancing in a costume is not something I would like to do all the time. I sweat way too much!

This was taken by somebody there, otherwise you wouldn't see me :) Oh yeah, and it was before we started sweating!

Michael is on the basket ball team now, so there are games on the weekends and practices 3 times a week. Just what we needed, more running. He seems to enjoy it though and the season is fairly short (beginning of December). The team is pretty pityful, but with practice they should get better. This last game was actually better already, they didn't lose by as much as the week before LOL. Poor kids!

Here is my little guy in action :)

Ok and finally some more pages

Well, let me end this post by saying that it's a gorgeous day out there today, the sun is shining and it warmed up to the point where I won't need a sweater. I love it! Have a wonderful day!