Other creative ventures

I've been scrapping, but I have a couple pages that require computer journaling sitting around--you know how that makes me feel--so I took a break from scrapping to take on other creative ventures.

• I finished Audition, Barbara Walters' book. Pretty good. Quite dishy.
• Rowan was his first grade class' Star student this week, so I helped him make a poster for it. We used leftover photos that had never been scrapped. I also let him play with my scraps and my punches, to his delight. And to the best of my ability, I resisted the urge to organize those punched stars in a visual triangle. He put them on in any order he pleased.
• I visited with some college friends over the weekend and enjoyed talking with them. I also enjoyed learning we have Saturday afternoons free and may be able to make those conversations a habit.
• I went sledding with the boys. Wow, did they have fun. Now that I scrapped.
• I celebrated my not-yet-fortieth birthday and enjoyed dinner at Buca's, some scrappy goodness from the fam*, and a lovely Hobbit teapot from my MIL. Now I just need to learn how to brew tea the old-fashioned way.

Especially since I finished the book, which was due at the library today (guiltguiltguilt), I now feel energized enough to go back and do some scrapping, particularly finishing the computer journaling.

*My big guilt involves those scrappy birthday gifts. I didn't buy them, so I haven't really borken my New-year's res to make 100 layouts before buying new supplies. Still, should I hold off on using them until I make the remaining layouts? Decisions...

Delightful holiday

I hope all of your holidays were memorable. Ours began a little melancholy: when the UPS guy rang the bell with our last Christmas package Thursday, no barking. And every time I dropped food on the floor, I automatically called, "Roswell!" That may become a family joke.

Still, Christmas day was wonderful. The boys were delighted with the gifts, Derick loved his sherry-cask aged scotch and his remote control R2-D2 the best, and I got two of these. I returned one and got supplies to go with it, along with some of the luscious new Basic Grey, Origins. Working with it makes me feel like I am in a spa.

We couldn't go sledding Christmas day because we were in the middle of a big three-day storm of soaking wet snow. "Soaking wet" means "heavier than a bowling ball with each shovelful," and the fact that we had to shovel three times made it infinitely more difficult. It was a big snow, though, evidenced by our being on the national news. Since most of that news is located on the East Coast, the stories were precious: "Midwest Gets Big Snow" for a few paragraphs, then a connection to what would happen on the East Coast. (Insert eye roll.)

Because of the frequent wet snow, we went sledding the day after Christmas, along with a healthy number of families from town. We go here for the free sledding (not the pay inner tube hill), and the sledding hill is HUGE, with many bumps. Not that any of us cared:

Speaking of bumps, here's the final injury checklist:

• three clocked heads
• two pulled-back fingernails
• one strained neck
• one sprained wrist
• two sore backs

As I mentally tallied that list, I got an idea for a layout: my favorite photos of each of us, plus the list under the title, "Extreme Sledding." Either that or "Going Downhill."

* Note: I finished the Jessica Sprague class Good-to-Great Workflow. I practiced on these photos in this post. I think they turned out very nice, considering it was cloudy and (of course) snowing at the time.