guess where we are!

cool, huh?! :)

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.

delinquent

yes, I've been delinquent about blogging... I didn't realize it had been so long! I hate to admit this on my poor dear blog (LOL), but Facebook has become my new fave medium for sharing my life, at least little blips and pieces of it. :-)

I'm still searching for a job, getting frustrated. But thank goodness we have a financial cushion to fall back upon. Many people do not have that. My heart goes out to all of them.

Other than that - my current attempt to lose weight and get in shape has good and bad days. I've actually been VERY good on my South Beach diet, but without my usual quick weight loss, so that's a bummer. But it'll come... I have GREAT days for exercise, and some not so good. My goal is cardio six times a week, and weights/resistance 2-3 times. Still working on that.

And NO vacations in sight. omg, what a horrid thought. LOL

BUT - the girls came over Halloween weekend for scrapping, and it was fun fun fun as always. Love those ladies! This past weekend we enjoyed a wonderful meal and great company at some neighbor friends. And tomorrow I'm going to see my MOM, yay! - my bro Donnie and I are riding up together.

So life isn't all dismal diet and job search. There is still fun out there - just gotta grab it and run!

finally

did a little more scrapping.

I made a mini-accordion scrapbook for my cousins Jeneanne and Russ. They're the ones whose place we stayed at when we were visiting the family in Oregon. They spent a lot of time with us, which we really enjoyed. So this is a little something that I hope they enjoy...

been a while

I'm slacking on this blog thing now... I've been way too wrapped up in Facebook. And btw, no, I have NOT gotten involved in the total time-wasters, such as the farm, apartment decorating, "gambling," etc. But it is just so cool chatting with friends, some that I haven't seen since High School! And I am not excluding my current friends - always nice to chat with them too. ;-)

I've also been working hard on downloading tunes and making playlists for my ipod. LOVE that thing! Greg got me a 120 gig hard drive ipod for Christmas last year, and I'm trying super hard to fill it up, but that'll be the day. Right now my music is up to 18 gig.

I'm also trying to figure out which photos to enlarge and frame for display in the house. I love so many of my pics, more for sentimental reasons than that they're really all that good. LOL I want a series of five for the stair wall, five for a different wall downstairs, and then four for the big family / rec room downstairs. If you want to help out, check out my album on Facebook, pick your faves and leave a comment!

fall colors

We led some of the "bike gang" on a color ride today. The day was cool, 50-55 degrees, and overcast, we had a little mist here and there. But it was still a great day. The folks in the club are fun, love seeing them. And we had quite a few join us who aren't "regulars" - and we hadn't seen them in a while. So that was very cool! Here are a few pics:

this last one is Holy Hill. because it was overcast, the pictures didn't turn out quite as beautiful as they could have... oh well!

almost forgot

for those of you who haven't seen the surprise gift I made for G, here's a link: gift

you should be able to click on the button "View photo book" which is below the picture. And then it should do a page by page slideshow. There's a spot marked Full Screen - if you click on that, well, doh, the picture gets bigger. If you want to thumb thru yourself, you can click on the pause button, then use the arrows or even just click and drag the pages back and forth. It's actually kinda cool.

what a week...

I gave up waiting for my company to find a client for me, and have started seeking out a job on my own. I really hate this stuff... resumes, cover letters... and I haven't even started interviewing yet! I have spent SO many hours redoing my resume over and over, and then my basic cover letter. And then of course I need to modify them at least a bit for each company I apply to. Once I got the basics done I was thinking it was going to get easier. bwahahahaha Most companies have you apply online, which means filling out their website's online form. Even when I can upload my resume, most of the time their system does funky stuff with the formatting, so I have to go through and fix all that. So THAT is actually way more time consuming that customizing the documents.

But one good thing has come of this job search.

I decided to finally join LinkedIn. That's a website that's more or less for networking. Then I decided I might as well join Facebook too. omg, unbelievable! I have been in contact with folks I haven't seen or talked to since HIGH SCHOOL! It is so rockin' cool!

slowly catching up

and do I mean slowly!! It's taken me a few days to do this layout. Of course, I spend way more time watching tv than scrapping, shame on me. But you know... some things are worth waiting for. LOL

anyway, this is about my third and last CKU, Creating Keepsakes University, a scrapbook school. It was in Nashville in 2007. Our dorm (um, a group of like-minded gals) performed in front of hundreds of screaming wild women - only 3 dorms out of many are chosen for that, so it's quite an honor. The pics by page: dorm stuff, scrapbook "celebs," opryland hotel, and local Nashville sights.

I used my rockin' cool die cut machine, a Cricut Expression, to cut the letters for the title and to cut the orange/red/yellow swirlies. I only had one piece of that beautiful colorful paper, and the Cricut made it super easy for me to include some on all four pages of my layout. There's no way on earth I would have attempted to hand cut all of those letters, nonetheless the flourishes!

For those of you who have a Cricut - Be sure to check out the latest Cricut Promotion, The Great Gypsy Escape! Purchase one of 4 new Cricut catridges for a chance to win a new Gyspy (handheld design studio for Cricut), $2,000 travel vouchers and even a $30,000 trip to one of 5 fabulous locations!

scrap gal

Last week I did a couple more one-pagers. Nothing major, both are pretty simple.

The butt burner LO is pretty lumpy/bumpy, with buttons (which I like never use) and big brads, and those blue letters that are hard plastic or acrylic or something like that. Oh, and the sweet little paper clips that lead your eye into and out of the page - just a nice little touch.

I really like a few things about the concert LO: the colors pull from all three photos, which can be hard to do, the patterned paper looks kind of like it's pointing to the photos, and the black rub-on between the blue and the patterned papers looks kinda like a roughed up musical score.

I also like the fact that the colors in these two LOs are complementary, since they will be facing each other in the 2006 album. Yep, I'm still working on 2006, but I'm also working on 2007, 2008 and 2009 simultaneously! There was a year or two that I did a lot of work on mini albums, and didn't do much on my annual albums, so I'm "catching up."

lovin' this free time

I've been organizing photos, getting lots of pics printed, etc., and I have actually spent a little time scrapbooking too. Imagine that! LOL

Here are pics of some recent work:



The LO below is created using Little Yellow Bicycle products. Love their stuff - beautiful designs and colors, lots of cool embellishments. In this case, the frame and the Noel are hard transparencies with glitter, the left page is foil paper (the ornaments are reflective foil), the top red ornament, the green snowflake center on the right, and some other snowflakes are epoxy stickers. Their collections make it SO easy to pull a layout together!

margaritaville

We finally went to a Jimmy Buffett concert. We've talked about it before, but never gone - I think maybe we usually are out and about that weekend each summer. I had no clue that it was a tailgating kind of event... I figured there would be drinking and stuff, but whoa - you would not believe some of the setups these folks had. And some of the interesting entertainment too! Terry and Lori joined us, which was great - I think this type of event kinda requires folks to go in groups, to egg each other on into trouble. hehe

which way to go?

spin the wheel

wow - check out those barbies (and parrot and fins)

Lori rubbed the genie's bottle to see if her wish would be granted

holy honkin' huge drink! where do you find a straw THAT long?!

huge fin at the flip flop repair shop

omg, G looks rather crazed, don't ya think?!

the prize at this limbo contest was a shot out of a super soaker!

this dude had toggle switches near the bottom of the hoses so folks could turn the bongs on/off at will - nice touch.

this guy was giving away ding dongs, but you had to go get 'em - we thought he'd enjoy a twofer.

new project

Tuesday and Wednesday I worked frantically on a present for Greg. And since he occasionally looks at my blog, I can't post a link until he receives his gift. I think he has an idea that I was doing "something" for him, but I don't think he has any idea as to what it really is.

The reason for the "frantic" speedy work - there was a quick turnaround deadline to get a significantly reduced price. In fact, I probably would never have done this project if it weren't for the discount.

I hope that the present is good quality and well received by Greg. And after he sees it, I'll either post the link here or perhaps even try to post pictures directly.

Hope you are all having a fantastic week!

oink oink

We had our pig roast this past weekend. NUM!! The roaster dudes showed up around 11am to start the piggy. And yep, the piggy looks a bit skinny, but we weren't expecting huge crowds - maybe around 75 folks.

The roaster dudes, Tim and Bud, are neighbors of G's folks - they don't do pig roasts for a living, it's just something they do on the side for friends, family, etc.

Mmmm... pig looks much better roasted, don't ya think?

Gotta take piggy off/out of the spit to cut him up.

These two have it down - Tim cut while Bud prepped the machinery to be hauled back home.

Hmm... not so appealing anymore. But oh, so tasty. We had lots of comments on how good the pork was. yay!

This first shot of the party was a little early yet. It was funny, even though there were tables with chairs, lots of lawn space... just about everyone stood/sat on the patio before din din. It's kinda like an inside party where everyone hangs around the kitchen. I guess I'm thinking that if we modify the patio for the pergola that Greg wants, perhaps we should enlarge the patio at the same time!

Oh, and you can see part of the bar area. We brought down most of our stuff, which was added to significantly by our guests. We had asked guests to bring either a dish to pass or a beverage to share, and folks were quite generous, gotta love that - THANKS EVERYONE! We also had borrowed three margarita blenders for the event, of which two were used consistently throughout the party - I'm really loving those things, I had mudslides and pina coladas, and the regular and strawberry 'ritas were also a hit.

Dinner time... besides the pig, we had lots of wonderful food items brought by guests.

Overall, a really fun day. I think, I hope, that our guests enjoyed themselves as well. I apologize to those whom I didn't get to talk to much; even with a "small" group of this size (I'm guessing we ended up with 65 guests throughout the day), it's still hard to get around to everyone, plus give house and RV tours, help people as needed, etc.

Special thanks to Tom and Donna, who were the 'rita makers extraordinaire, to Ginny, who made coffee numerous times and setup the food table, among other things, and to Dick, Bob and Diana, Bob and Ginny, Chuck, Brian and Sue, Dean and Karen, who provided tables, chairs, coolers, 'rita makers, etc. - vital things for a party!