Fire and Ice

A couple of days ago I went to my Monday evening crop and made a start on my new Disney album. Once again I return from a lovely trip with over 400 photos and I have all these big plans… but this time it’s different! I will not be repeating the mistake I made the last time when I worked on an 8x8 album: this time I’ve gone for a gorgeous 12x12 and I’m using the PDQ Bisous papers so little embellishment is needed. I’ve also become a lot more selective on photos and didn’t pick up tons of souvenir papers while away so I don’t need to fit in hundreds of menus, tickets, maps, etc. I spent an evening about 2 weeks ago sorting through it all, getting all the papers, the embellishments (some leftover from last album!), the photos themselves and all the souvenir stuff I collected. It all looks massive once together but it means that I can just grab the one bag and know that it is all there and I’m ready to go. So during the Monday crop I made 10 layouts. Ten in 3 hours – it’s good isn...

Why is it that scrappers feel that they must “have it all”? Not only do I mean “all” as in career, kids, etc but more like everything that is out there and available for sale in stash-land. You know, the papers, the embellishments, the tools, the bags, the cardstock… I know I keep talking about this but I just can’t bring myself to shop, shop, shop like nearly everyone else seems to. For one, I sometimes feel that scrapping stuff is quite over-priced (especially in the UK) so I have to really, really justify the purchase to myself before I commit. And I’m talking about justifying the purchase of a set of brads – not even something more expensive! The other thing is that I know that I won’t use some things. I don’t buy stash specifically for pages (that would be TOO organized) but I do know my style well enough to know that I will never really have any use for any die cutting machines. Or those enormous chipboard embellishments that are everywhere at the moment – gorgeous as they ...

The power of music is amazing, isn’t it? It can make me feel energized or relaxed; happy or quiet, proud or uncomfortable. I love music and definitely can’t live without it. I hadn’t actually realized just HOW powerful music can be until this weekend. I was in the gym, pounding on the treadmill and generally struggling. The past few marathon training sessions have been disappointing because I’ve got a cold and a really bad cough that I can’t shake. This means that I can’t train as hard as I’d like and I feel like I’m wasting time just having “easy” workouts. Very frustrating, and makes going to the gym feel like harder work than it should be. Anyway, there I was, about to start what I knew would be a tough session and put my Mp3 player on, headphones firmly in my ears. Unusually, I set it to play my Disney playlist (very valuable motivation in my case, preparing for the Disney marathon!) and off I went. I normally work out to a mixture of songs, from Pop to Barry Manilow going through ...

The power of music is amazing, isn’t it? It can make me feel energized or relaxed; happy or quiet, proud or uncomfortable. I love music and definitely can’t live without it. I hadn’t actually realized just HOW powerful music can be until this weekend. I was in the gym, pounding on the treadmill and generally struggling. The past few marathon training sessions have been disappointing because I’ve got a cold and a really bad cough that I can’t shake. This means that I can’t train as hard as I’d like and I feel like I’m wasting time just having “easy” workouts. Very frustrating, and makes going to the gym feel like harder work than it should be. Anyway, there I was, about to start what I knew would be a tough session and put my Mp3 player on, headphones firmly in my ears. Unusually, I set it to play my Disney playlist (very valuable motivation in my case, preparing for the Disney marathon!) and off I went. I normally work out to a mixture of songs, from Pop to Barry Manilow going through ...

After months of waiting, planning and research I finally bought a new home computer. Our old one (nearly 8 years old!) had served us sort of well but sometime in October last year it decided that it WAS NOT going to dial out to the internet. Yes, dial out, as in dial-up. Anyway, it developed cyber-agoraphobia and didn’t want anything to do with the outside world, no matter how much the cables, telephone and even modem coaxed it. No idea what is wrong and considering the thing is ancient, well it just had to go. After all, it only had 4.2 GB in the hard drive!! So we spent a few months doing the research, choosing features that would make our lives easier and finding a nice compromise between function and price. So we finally found it and then waited for the end of the financial year of the company we bought from, hoping for last minute discounts and offers. The upside to all this is that, somehow, I will be getting a PC with Vista on it. I must admit it wasn’t by choice, and thankfully...

We’ve all made them, right? We all wish to lose the weight, eat better, sort our finances, scrap all our backlog, give more generously, that sort of thing. Another resolution is the wish to be a better person – to eliminate all those nasty habits that don’t help us become the best we can be. I was thinking about this when I was reading one of the popular scrapping forums out there and it struck me how many women were proud of deceiving their husbands. Ladies up and down the land were shopping to their heart’s content and then lying about how much they spent, lying about the amount of stash they’d purchased or even hiding purchases from their husbands so that he doesn’t know. I’m sure that it isn’t just scrappers that do this but lots of women shop til they drop and then lie about it to their husband/partner/significant other. In some cases I know that they hold separate accounts so perhaps it really doesn’t matter as each has their own money... but I do know of cases where the woman do...

very year I make the same resolution and inevitably break it by about February (once I made it all the way to March!). I really do need to lose weight and it is really annoying me now. But how can I make sure that this time I go the distance and reach my goal? By doing something drastic, like aiming to run a marathon in early 2008. Yes, this is my novel way of sticking with it and keep focused on the task. In fact, you might have noticed that the goal isn’t directly to lose weight, but this should follow as a result of all the training I’ll have to do. So I can keep focused on the marathon training and the weight loss should follow. Why a marathon? Why not, say, a half marathon? Or something less exhausting? Well, to be honest it is because I am a huge Disney fan and I really want to run in next year’s Disney marathon. It is in Florida and the course takes runners through all four Disney parks, which is motivating all on its own. Also, Florida is pretty flat and the weather is not humi...