Happy Birthday to me!

Today is my 40th birthday. Can I get a "whoot! whoot!"?! :)

Love this!

You gotta try it.

Play the desktop blues

4-20-07 Photo Hunt: Steps

I searched the photos I had saved on my hard drive already for this week's Photo Hunt theme: Steps. All I could come up with was this photo taken about 7 years ago. It's the side of Woodlawn Manor, the historic site where I got married.

This week’s theme: Steps

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Visual DNA

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4-13-07 Photo Hunt: Hobby

This is a really BAD photo of me from 2003 at the Great American Scrapbook Convention. I'm pictured with a really nice, talented lady named Katherine Brooks who is the author of several scrapbooking and card making books, and we're holding a couple of cards I had just made in a workshop she taught. Paper crafting is one of my favorite hobbies.

This week’s theme: Hobby

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Paperkins (or "Putting stash to good use")

Anyone who scrapbooks (or who scrapbooked a few years ago) remembers Paperkins. The little paper doll templates that you could trace to make and dress paper dolls. Then they started selling little kits with pre-cut pieces you could modify and place in themed settings, etc. I'm not sure if they are even sold anymore.

Well, I bought several of these a few years back. My daughter loved them and put several together. The other kits joined my growing piles of stash in my closet (garage, basement, floor, etc.).

I decided to pull them out and turn some into cards for the sick children at the Hugs and Hope site. Alexis (now 8 yrs old) caught the fever, and she's putting several together, too. Here's my first. (I'm a little rusty with the glue stick!) Her official name is "Hang in Hilary".

Wheeze!

Ugh! I just cleaned the kids' guinea pig cage. It's been way too long since I/they cleaned it thoroughly, so I had a lot to clean. I have bad allergies, and my throat is itching, my chest is tight, and my eyes are watering and stinging.

But at least the cage is clean, the two little piggies are happy, and my family room is habitable again. LOL!

4-6-07 Photo Hunt: Clean

This week’s theme: Clean

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Do you ever feel like there’s not enough time for extra-curricular stuff?

I have four kids, but my stepsons are teenagers: one is away at college and the other is staying with his grandmother. My youngest two are 6 and 8, and they require a lot of my attention (is this the norm?).

I try to do some extra stuff: hobbies (scrapbooking and knitting for example), PTA (I built our first website and setup and maintain the Yahoo group), and sending happy mail to sick kids. I work full time at a job that is sometimes crazily busy and at other times not-so-much.

I just don’t seem to have time for it all. My house…well, I thought I would be a better housekeeper once we owned our own, or once the kids got old enough to help, or once…heck, it’s just not happening. What’s a person to do?

Advice welcome! :)

3-31-07 Photo Hunt: Water

This week’s theme: Water

My kids love the pool and beach, so I have a ton of water pics. I chose this one because I like how the water is in mid-air, and Christopher's face is squinched up in anticipation of being doused. (Click photo to see it larger.)

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Have you created lately?

I came across this great quote while blog surfing.

Have you created lately?

"The woman who works with her hands only
is a laborer.

The woman who works with her hands and her
head is a craftswoman.

The woman who works with her hands,
her head and her heart
is an artist."

---St. Francis of Assisi

Another butterfly dishcloth

I finished a different butterfly dishcloth today. I'll post a pic soon.

**ETA Here's the second butterfly dishcloth I made. Again, I scanned rather than take a photo, so the image quality isn't the best.



To get the pattern, you have to join the Knitted_Kitty_Dishcloths Yahoo group. Learn more about it here.

I need to get back to my Afghan KAL. Work is starting to get stressful (my job has peaks and valleys), so I think my new knitting hobby will help de-stress me. I love the meditative quality of knitting.

My son started getting sick last night and woke up with a sore throat. He felt a little better after meds, but then threw up. Then he felt even better. LOL Now my throat is starting to hurt, and I think my glands are swollen. Ugh, I don't have time to get sick!

Free Iced Coffee Day - March 21st

Dunkin' Donuts Puts Winter "On Ice" by Heralding First Day of Spring With First-Ever Nationwide "Free Iced Coffee Day"
Dunkin' Donuts Restaurants Across the Country to Offer Free Iced Coffee All Day on March 21

 

Another dishcloth

I whipped this one up yesterday. I scanned it (rather than take a pic), so I don't know how well you can actually see it.

It's a coffee cup. Can you tell?

Knitted Dishcloth

I posted this on my other (less fun and crafty) blog and wanted to share here. I finished my first knitted dishcloth on Friday. I learned a new stitch: the yarn over (yo). It creates a lacey effect by putting a hole in your knitting.

I made many mistakes and had to frog (undo) many rows many times and start the row(s) over. That usually happened within a row or two of the mistake, but when I was almost finished, I realized that I made a huge mistake about 30 rows earlier. Since this is my first dishcloth, and I'm still learning and practicing stitches, I decided to leave the mistake in.

Also, I didn't have size 7 needles when I started the cloth, so I used size 8, which makes it harder to see the pattern in the cloth. So, I've uploaded 3 photos: 1) the cloth, 2) the cloth with the butterfly pattern sketched on it, and 3) #2 again, with my "mistake rows" identified. On my mistake rows, I must have reversed the right and wrong side of the cloth, or either I repeated a row and garter stitched on both sides(???).

Here's the cloth. Kinda hard to see the butterfly since the stitches are so big:




So, I've outlined the butterfly LOL:




And here, in pink, you can see the rows that I knitted wrong (oops!). I think it just adds to the charm, don't you? ;)




Anyway, I'm glad to have completed it. Now onto something else!

Bridge to Terabithia (possible spoiler)

My husband and I took our kids (6 and 8) and their friend (7 yrs) to this movie last night. The commercials and the synopsis on moviefone.com led me to believe that this was a sorta light-weight Chronicles of Narnia movie.

NOT!

I would never have taken my kids to see this had I known the plot. My husband said it was so depressing. He was depressed for a while after the movie LOL. My kids liked it, except for the ... depressing part. My son (6) was afraid he'd have nightmares, though.

I guess they can't tell too much about the movie and twists in the commercials and trailers. It just seems like the advertising is so misleading. Even the Disney channel and the interviews and the million airings of the "Keep Your Mind Wide Open" video misrepresent the film. I'll have to be more careful in the future.

P.S. 7 yr old friend said that she had seen the movie before, but she hadn't. I thought that since her mother let her see it and she enjoyed it, that we would all like it. Oops!

I could do this all day...

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She left me in stitches

My 8 yr. old ran into a tree while sledding. She now has 8 stitches, a big swollen eye, some other scrapes and cuts, and corneal abrasions.

She's worried that the kids at school will not want to be around her because her eye is swollen. She's also worried that some kids will say mean things.

I'm not even sure she'll go to school tomorrow. I'll wait and see how she's feeling when she wakes up.

What an eventful President's Day!

Will it snow?

Will we get 1-2 inches of snow and 1/4" of ice? Or 4-6 inches of snow and 1 inch of ice? Or not too much of anything?

I vote for lots of snow and little or no ice (no fallen tree limbs or power lines downed by the weight of the ice).

It's just starting to flurry now, but we're forecasted to get a wintry mix over the next 2 days. Brrrrr I'll be in front of the fire tomorrow!

Snow day!

Even though we didn't get much snow, the schools were closed today. I imagine that other parts of the county got more snow than we did. As you can see, we didn't really get much. Here's a shot of my son's tracks through the backyard. He showed me which tracks were his and which belonged to "a deer or a rabbit".



Even though I didn't see him make these tracks, I can totally see him making a lap around the house and leaving his 'mark'. ;-)