another layout

I finished up the last layout I worked on during the March crop. :) This is about an Iron Butt motorcycle run Greg did - around the Great Lakes (ALL of them!) in 4 days. Not one I wanted to do, that's for sure! LOL

These pictures do not in any way show the beauty of the colors of this paper - very muted yet still vibrant. The first picture shows Greg's starting mileage, and yes... the last picture shows his ending mileage! I used metal frames to highlight the mileage as well as other parts of the layout. As usual, a simple layout - emphasis on the pictures!

priorities

As busy folk know, sometimes it's hard to juggle priorities. OK... so most of you would look at my current life and say - gee, what're YOU doing? Not working, no kids to deal with, etc...

But somehow my days run away from me anyway. Most of my time has been working on my knee - doing exercises and stretches, and icing it. Last week I finally got to the point of being able to stand long enough to make REAL meals again - so I'm back on my South Beach diet - which requires more prep and cook time than just eating whatever is easiest! LOL I had been doing research on our upcoming trip - cruise excursions are booked (except for one port). I have some ideas for Savannah and Charleston, but nothing really in concrete. As much as Greg likes to have everything planned to the nth degree, I would like to leave this one more flexible. Just book our rooms, take lists of things to do in the areas, and create a few possible short bike rides, but wait until there and just be spontaneous. :-o Right now I really need to focus on getting a job again. I haven't heard anything about possible work from my company, and I need to start bring $$ in, so I need to look for a new job again, I guess. I had been on the search last fall/winter, but when I started working part time Dec-Mar, I let it slide. And since surgery, I've been focused elsewhere. So... back to it.

March weekend crop

The weekend before surgery I went to a weekend crop near Eau Claire. I had a great time! Again, I had a lot of help from friends and "new friends" since I couldn't get around easily. And I was a BAD girl... didn't listen to Bobi... didn't ice my knee... and I paid big time. Learned that lesson! ;) Anyway, here are some layouts I finished that weekend. There is one more that I worked on, a four pager, that I haven't finished yet.

Love this LO. The colors and the paper and the font and of course the pictures are just fun! This is about our motorcycle club's annual fundraiser - a murder mystery - this time a 50s theme. I added some fun bling with jewels, and the cool title was created on a cricut.


Never thought I'd be able to use flowered paper on a layout about Greg, but well... he asked for it by wearing a "Hawaiian" shirt. LOL Every year members of our bike club goto Door County for a weekend in September, and it's usually the weekend right before or after Greg's bday, so we celebrate that weekend. And yep, he turned the big 4-0 in 2008. The colors are actually quite vivid, and I added bling with a jeweled flower and some glitter (stickles) on the 40.

This layout is about an annual get together of our "other" bike club - a loose-knit group of folks who mostly ride the current Gold Wing model (1800). The group meets twice a year in the Dells to enjoy riding, inspecting all the goodies on others' bikes, and socializing. A simple looking layout, but it took a while to cut all those circles!

Greg does an annual bike trip down into Tennessee and North Carolina at the end of October, to enjoy the pretty fall colors and have fun on the twisty turny roads of the Smoky Mtns. I loved the series of photos of Greg taking a corner (taken by Greg's cohort), so I decided to line them up to make them look like movie stills.

Another Dells trip by our 1800 group. This was truly a simple layout, so I added a little more visual interest with the "lumpy" motorcycle and by raising the Vagabond sticker with pop dots, a thicker adhesive.

Most years (every year?) we participate in more than one bike tour. We bike to locations that are set up by the coordinator. This is done over a couple/few months, at your own pace. Sometimes I think we've been on every road in Wisconsin, particular the bottom half, but somehow we seem to find "new" roads to travel! I'm not sure I'm completely satisfied with this layout... hmmm....

Feb creativity

Thought I'd share more of my work. Or should I say play. LOL These three layouts I created during a day crop in Feb. I was only able to attend because I have a great husband and wonderful friends - they loaded and unloaded my car for me. Yep - this crop was after the skiing oops.

This layout is from the pig roast we hosted after we returned from our big RV/motorcycle vacation last year. Pig roasts remind me of Hawaiian luaus (even tho I've never been to one), so I chose this cool colorful paper that reminds me of a lei. The flowers and the circles on the orange borders are all glitter - appropriate for a party!

I got some new toys in 2008, so I thought I'd scrap the major ones. The first was my leap into the modern musical age - an mp3 player. I loved and still do love my little iriver clix. It's the tiniest little thing, with a big beautiful colorful screen. But it's only a 4 gb, so I ran out of space really quickly, and hated unloading some tunes so I could load others. ARGH! So Greg bought me a fab ipod for Christmas '08 that has a 120 gb - which I'll NEVER be able to fill with just music. Anyway.... I bought a new car shortly before our ill-fated motorcycle trip. And I absolutely LOVE my little Honda Civic. She handles oh so well, and fits into just about any parking spot. And most importantly, she fits me like a glove... as if she were tailored for petite folks. Then last but certainly not least - my cricut, a die cut system. It rocks. Not only can I use it for scrapbooking, I can use it for "practical" purposes, such as the directional sign I made for our pig roast - with our names in nice big bold letters.

This is a quick and relatively simple layout I did for one of our annual U.P. ski trips. The snowflakes on the bottom are from a precut glittered sheet of paper, I merely cut around the snowflakes to create a somewhat even border. I think my fave thing about this LO is the way I used epoxy (thick and shiny) stickers to create a border around the photos. :)

what up

well... guess I'll make this a relatively brief synopsis of the last few months.

My company had me working part time Dec - March. It was an interesting engagement, but didn't have anything to do with numbers. All these years I've thought I didn't like number crunching, but I discovered I missed it! LOL That does NOT mean I want to be an accountant per se, but I really do enjoy the challenges in analyzing financial data.

We did not go on a winter cruise as we have become accustomed to doing... and I really missed it!! January and February around here just really suck. ;)


We DID go on our annual ski trip up nort'. This year there were 21 of us. As we've done the past few years, we rent an entire floor of Davos, a slopeside chalet at Whitecap. As typical, there was lots of skiing, food, beverages and games, including wiiwii this year. Yep, we had two wii games going! However, this particular trip wasn't one of my best. On day one, Friday, right before lunch, I had an oops. I hit the ground, my body facing one way, and my left leg facing the other. I was taken back to the chalet on the medic snowmobile. Well, that was the end of my skiing for the weekend. :(


Greg and I also joined most of our bike club friends for a weekend in the Dells. This is an annual event where we hang out at a hotel where we have a "party room" that we commandeer for the entire weekend. We always have a great time - doing some "off the beaten path" tours, eating, drinking, and playing tons of sheepshead (a German card game).

Ok, so now the bad news about my ski trip fall... I tore my ACL (a main knee ligament) completely, had a grade 2 sprain of my LCL (another knee ligament), bruised a bone in my knee, as well as some other little stuff. The ACL provides stability in the knee, so that the knee does not "give out." Of course most of the issues were self-healing, but not the ACL. So I had to have surgery. It's actually quite fascinating - they took out the center third of my patellar (knee) tendon, along with a little bit of bone from each end. Then they cleaned out the old torn ACL, and screwed the patellar tendon into place as a graft to create a new ACL. Surgery was three weeks ago now. I'm going thru physical therapy - recovery timelines vary widely. I think my recovery is a bit slow, because I couldn't walk much for the month between the incident and my surgery, so my muscles aren't as strong or flexible as they were. But I'm managing. DH is awesome - helping me out so much!

Right now I'm planning for an upcoming vacation - part cruise, part motorcycle. I am SO looking forward to it!! Even though I haven't been working, I still feel a need to get away from home. ;) Gotta satisfy the vagabond in me.

So that's what's been up... a little fun, a little not-so-fun.