Christmas 2009

What a lovely week we had this Christmas.  My mother arrived from California on Friday evening.  We spent the weekend doing some shopping and getting ready for the arrival of Nichole, Noah and Adam on Tuesday.  This is the first Christmas we have actually spent together as a family here at home in quite a few years.  Usually we are all together before or after the big day.  But this year we were very blessed to all be together.  Noah was a joy to watch and we only lost one ornament and one Christmas glass.  So all in all Christmas was a success. 

My gifts were several Panodora beads to go onto my second bracelet and an external hard drive.  I know, a hard drive???? But seriously, since I started digital scrapbooking my disk space is filling up quickly.  Matt even got me the special edition piano black with chrome trim.  This will truly come in handy when I take my digital organization class so that I can store all my embellishments, brushes, papers, trims and templates.

Hope your Christmas was a wonderful one as well.

Happy New Year. May you all have a very healthy and prosperous 2010.

Thanksgiving 2009

Who doesn't just love Thanksgiving?  All the wonderful food, family and of course football.  Our Thanksgiving this year was very quiet compared to last year.  Only Meghan, Matt and Jessica were here to celebrate with Mitch and I.  It was so nice to have no pressure to make the meal perfect.  However, the sweet potato casserole was probably the best I've ever made.  The recipe was given to me from a friend back in 1991. I've made it every year since then.  This year I made it the day before and let it sit in the refrigerator until 1/2 hour before cooking it.  Just wonderful.  The topping was so crunchy and really set off those canned sweet potatoes. Even Connie wants the recipe as she said no Thanksgiving dinner is complete without it.

As usual we did join the Schneiders for their annual Thanksgiving dessert gathering.  It is so nice to go visit with friends we don't see often. Not to mention the desserts really rock.  This year I made a wonderful chocolate cake to share with everyone.  It tasted fabulous.  My friend Pam would be so proud of me!

Here are two pictures of our lovely day.

Missing Car

Seriously, you cannot make up the stuff that happens to my family. This morning as I was leaving I didn't see Jessica's car. So I asked Mitch where she was. He said he didn't know.  So I called Jessica to see where she had spent the night. Turns out that Jessica was upstairs sleeping. So then I asked her where her car was. She said that it was parked in the driveway. No little VW bug in the driveway. I totally started to panic. Looked in the neighbor's yard to see if it had rolled down the hill. No car. By this time Jessica had gotten up and she was so panicked that she fell as she was running down the stairs. She swore she drove it home and parked in the driveway.  Finally after the fog of sleep had liften Jessica remembered that she had left it at Brandon's house and he drove her home.   Mitch and I were so ready to call the police.  Convertibles are easy to steal due to the fact that the alarm won't go off if the roof is split.  Thank goodness the car was safe over at Brandon's.

New Header

Well, well, well, I just spent 2 hours making the new blog header.  Again, I can thank Jessica Sprague for helping me to learn some new tricks.  Her video's are so helpful and informative. Her classes are very easy and straightforward.  They are all done via video and you can pause, rewind fast forward and play them over and over again.  The screenshots of Photoshop Elements are very helpful and it's easy to see where you should be making adjustments to the tools and layers etc.

Today on Jessica's blog she mentioned how addicting her classes are.  And honestly to me they have been.  I want to take every single one of them and look forward to the new year and new classes.

Making this new header was really fun.  Being creative is such a good outlet for me and very relaxing. This weekend I'll be diving into a new class that I picked up off of Jessica's web for one dollar.

Rounded Photo Corners

As I was catching up reading some blogs, I came across Pioneer Woman's weekly photo challenge. This week's challenge was creating rounded corners on your photos in PSE or Photoshop. They were pretty easy and since I was feeling creative I added a texture as well. Here is the finished project.

Halloween Project

Last year Scarlet Lime Kit Club offered a cute special project for Halloween. Unfortunately I missed out on picking up one of the kits. But this year I was able to pick up their kit project for Halloween. Using last year's directions and this year's kit ideas I was able to construct my own "Spooky" banner. This project was super fun and I enjoyed just putting all the cute little embellishements onto the banner. I've attached a few (not so good) photos of my completed project.

Been a Long Time

Been a long time, Been a long lonely, lonely, lonely time . . .

These are familiar lyrics from a Led Zepplin song. This song came to mind tonight as I realized I haven't blogged in almost a month. Honestly, I was never really consistent with it, but a month between posts is ridiculous.

The new job is very, very busy and that keeps me tied up most of the day. My new digital scrapbooking hobby is also taking quite a bit of time. I love it and enjoy the time I'm spending creating pages and learning new techniques.

Today was a beautiful sunny day in Georgia. Not sure how long it's been since the sun has been out. So we decided to drive up to Dahlonega and visit Matt and his girlfriend Jennifer and go to Gold Rush Days. The festival was nice and it was great to see so many people. Mitch, Meghan and I were able to meet a lot of Matt's friends as they all were enjoying the nice Fall weather too.

The photo of Matt and I was taken on Matt's deck outside his house that he is renting with 3 other guys. They are having a blast and enjoy the house. It sits right above the river and they tube down the river and walk up the deck stairs to their pool. The other photos are the view from the deck up the river and the pool. The house is actually built into the cliff and there are huge rocks along the back side of the deck. It's quite the setup.

Hope you enjoy the photos. Make sure you enjoy the beautiful weather for as long as it's here. It will be winter before we know it.

Happy Fall!