This & That

Do You Need Valentines??

In between a couple of sessions of watching Evan's kids last weekend, I broke out a card kit to work on some valentines. Now, I have all the valentines I need for this year, but the kit was so cute and festive, that it just made me happy. That, and I just couldn't face the photo mess yet again to try to find pictures to print. I'm really tired of the photo mess. I need it to be over....gone...magically. Somehow I think that's not going to happen.

So anyway, I was making these valentines and I'm thinking to myself, "You know, you really don't need these valentines. What in the world are you thinking??" 

But then I thought of YOU, and that maybe you could ease my making-unnecessary-projects guilt by taking a few of these off my hands. I have 6 or 7 cards...duplicates of the ones you see, plus a few I made last year that are taking up space, that I'm willing to part with....and Valentine's Day is coming up.

So if you want a chance at my little duplicates package of cards, leave a comment to this post by Tuesday night at 10 PM MST, February 2. I know it's not a long time, but I want to have time to mail them if I need to and get them to you before the holiday, so you can actually use them. I will use random.org's number picker to select a recipient. Giving credit where credit is due, the designs are pretty much copies of cards by (top to bottom) Yana Smakula, Nichole McGouirk, and Kristina Werner. There are video tutorials for all of them in the links provided.

ETA: I will post the recipient Wednesday morning....and *waving*, Hi, Ann! Glad you posted! It's always nice to "see" a new face. :) 

Around Here This Week

So around here this week, 

we woke up to a little skiff of snow yesterday.

I wish there had been more. Most of it disappeared in the rain that followed, including Ollie the Wonder Dog's footprints.

I got myself into a "give a mouse a cookie" organizing project. I winnowed down my monthly activity binders. It took several days, but it's done now.

I finished off another month of 2015 catch up. I got October done. Only 2 more to go. 

It was hot for a good share of the month, but toward the end things finally started to cool down, much to my delight.

There was a lot that went on with families coming and going, and Marc's family staying with us for a couple of months. James and Roger both had birthdays during the month.

And of course, Halloween at the end of the month.

From the kids and grandkids this week, I watched Evan's boys one afternoon and here was Roger, putting all the kitchen stuff into the cab of the dump truck. 

James enjoyed some Oreos.

I got this picture of Isaac yesterday on his birthday. His dad tells me that they weren't able to get to the zoo because it closes earlier in the winter and his nap ran a little long. He was also more interested in the ice cream than the birthday cake.

And from my daughter....apparently there's a place where she's going to school called The Puppy Barn, where you can go and cuddle puppies, just because. I got this picture with the text, "Can I keep him?"

I said no, and then she said, "Ok, how about this one?" Yeah. We don't need another dog. Ollie is doing just fine.

2 Years Old

It's a birthday today!

My grandson, Isaac, is two years old today.

And wow, that was fast! 

To go from here....

To here. It's so fun to watch these cute kiddos grow. Happy birthday to this fun boy! Rumor has it that he's going to the zoo and having chocolate birthday cake today.  Love you!

Daily Life and Heart-Shaped Lollipops

Sharing Week 4 from the Project Life app. Still loving it, and still current....go me. Becky Higgins mentioned on Instagram that photo book printing looked very likely for this coming spring. That would make me very happy. 

The left side. I ventured outside the 2016 kit that I'm using for all the "week" cards for those little snow filler and journaling cards, and I added the text in the Over app and saved it to my camera roll on the little snowy picture.

And the right side. I experimented with importing other digital files to my Dropbox and saving them to my camera roll to insert. The black "real life" card and the "yes to this" element are both from Ali Edwards. 

I found some little lollipops in the bulk section at my local Winco store and decided to use them for the little Valentine project I started last week for my church girls. They make me happy. These aren't very big...about 3x4 1/2". I cut the front with a Martha Stewart border punch. The patterned paper is old Basic Grey and the ticket came in some kit or other that I used recently. I stapled it to the front.

And the inside of the card. I didn't have enough tickets for of the cards, so I die cut a small tag for those and situated it the same way.

Target Is My Home Away From Home

I was introduced to Target when we lived in Minnesota for 3 years lo these many years ago. I loved it then and I love it now. Target came to our town a couple of years after we moved here and I watched the construction with bated breath. What do I love about it? That I can walk in and find virtually anything I need...well, maybe not groceries because ours isn't a full-fledged Super Target, but I can pretty much find most things....and almost always, several things I didn't know I needed. 

Like this pillow. OK, I'm a sucker for anything seasonal or holiday-related. I saw this last week and said, "Oh yes, please. Come and live at my house."

And then I went around the corner and saw this.

I mean come on...

I think I need to send these to Bryce at school, right?

And for those of you longing for spring and warmer weather, there's nothing like the promise of growing things to make you feel better. Target is my friend.

Southwestern Chicken Wraps

 It has been an interesting food week here. I'm still trying to figure out this cooking for two thing. I usually menu plan for the upcoming week sometime on Sunday, but it never fails that sometime during my week one or two of the dinners don't materialize because my husband will have a meeting he forgets to tell me about or whatever other reason. I'm still working the hot breakfast thing. I don't want to send the husband out to cut on people's eyeballs without a good breakfast....and neither would the people getting their eyeballs cut on, if they thought about it. My college kids are bemoaning my cereal stockpile, which is seriously depleted and now usually holds only the nuts and twigs my husband likes to eat. Note to self....get kid cereals before they come home next time. This week there were some dead bananas that got turned into buttermilk banana pancakes. I've discovered that these freeze well and I can bring out a couple at a time for the husband. There were also crock pot oats....a little tricky to do for one person, but we tried putting the leftovers in the fridge and reheating them for another day and that worked pretty well.

I had some leftovers from last Sunday's roast chicken to use up and tried this recipe. I found it here via Pinterest and have made it before, probably in the summertime when I can get better pictures of my dinner. Dark nights and indoor lighting aren't all that conducive to lovely food shots....not that I'm much of a food photographer under the best of conditions. So here's my dinner. Make sure you do make this ahead as the recipe suggests. It does make a difference. 

Southwest Chicken Wraps

2 cups cooked, shredded chicken
1 1/2 cups coleslaw (from the bag, not prepared coleslaw)
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 1/2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1/2 cup ranch dressing
1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1/2 cup grape tomatoes
6 tortillas

Roughly chop chicken and place in large mixing bowl. Quarter grape tomatoes and add to the bowl. Mix in coleslaw, chili powder, lime juice, ranch dressing, and cheddar cheese until all ingredients are well incorporated. Cover tightly and refrigerate 2 hours. Serve on warmed tortillas. Makes 6 generously sized wraps.

Around Here This Week

So around here this week it's still been winter.

That's not a surprise, I know. I'd really like to be able to get some snow to stick around for a while, but I'm not having much luck with that. I guess I'm going to have to be grateful for the little skiffs I can get.

The first part of the week didn't go very well since this was what my internet modem looked like. No internet. So I made an appointment for them to come out and fix it, then it magically fixed itself later in the day. I do not get technology sometimes, but I'm glad the gremlins decided to get their act together.

These arrived and were just so pretty. 

I spent some time here one morning. Nothing like a plastic model of skin layers to brighten up your day.

I had a little itchy, flaky spot on my arm frozen off and sent a picture of it all swollen up and ugly to my medical boys as a pop quiz. I'm sparing you that particular image, but I like to keep my boys on their toes. These are some of the responses I got from them.  

It was a productive paper week. I worked on some cards to send to my college/working church girls. Right now I'm in charge of touching base with the girls who are in that age group. These aren't quite finished. I'll be adding a little treat to them before I send them. 

I also managed to get my enough pictures and templates to play nicely together in Photoshop Elements to get September caught up in the monthly recaps I was doing last year.

Maybe it's hard to tell here, but each photo block is mounted on a sheet of white card stock. September was the big garden harvest and canning month here.

All the digital templates I used are http://www.cathyzielske.com.

It was kind of fun to go back and review the pictures I'd taken. Especially since I was able to get at least these pictures dragged into a place far, far away from Apple's stupid update place.

From the kids and grandkids this week, Collin was off work for the holiday on Monday, so his family went to the zoo...

...where James got to see the penguins.

  

He also sent me this video of James in the nicely-echoing state capitol building that they visited the week before. 

My daughter went to the Provo City Center Open House open house with some friends and sent me this picture. Yes, those boys are very tall.

Stuff I Know #13--Embracing Change

So let's discuss change today. We live in a changing world...some of it for the better and some of it.....not. How do you feel about change in your own life? 

Now that I've gotten to this stage of the game, I look back on my 50+ years and what strikes me is that life is made up of changes. I mean really, isn't it true that the only constant in life is that it changes? We might have periods of time where our lives seem mostly like "lather-rinse-repeat" or like we're the proverbial gerbil on a wheel...constantly running but never really getting anywhere. I remember distinctly feeling like that when I was the mother of lots of little kidlets at home, especially while we were going through my husband's long schooling adventure. I remember thinking that if we could just get to the next education milestone, things would be better. And you know what? There is always another milestone to wish for around the next corner, and if we spend our time always trying to look around the next corner, we might miss something along the way.

My daughter is wrestling with this just a little bit. During her freshman year of college, she was rooming with two of her best friends. They had the best time together. Now a year and half has passed and she's back in school with roommates she gets along fine with but doesn't really know, and most of her high school friends are in different places and situations and she's feeling just a little at odds with the situation. But life doesn't stand still. It moves right along, in spite of those periods of time when we're gerbils on the wheel. Look back at the first picture I posted in this entry. Can I tell you that I cried when I looked at it? I miss having my children at home with me, and sometimes I feel like I didn't appreciate that time of my life enough. But my life has changed...and it's OK because there are so many good things in it now, including DIL's and grandbabies.

What I'm trying to say, and I'm not sure I'm saying it very well, is that you need to try to find good things about each stage and situation you find yourself in (hard to do on no sleep and when you're dealing with diapers and/or the brain-dead teenage phase....I KNOW). I have found that there are positives and negatives about every age and stage of a family's growth and development, but please believe me when I tell you that the thing the older people you know always told you is absolutely true. You will look back on each of those stages and you will miss things about every, single one of them. Do I wish that I could be 20 again? Or 30? Or even 40? Maybe, and no. I loved things about each of those ages in my life....and there are things I'm really, really glad I don't have to relive.

Still, there is nothing any of us can do about time marching on and bringing with it the changes that come. "Society" tells us that we should forever be chasing eternal youth and beauty. I'm thinking what's on the inside is what we should be developing because, "Beauty fades, dumb is forever." That's one of my absolute favorite quotes in the world, and it's by Judge Judy. One of the things I'm trying to work on, personally, is this. I don't want to be approaching the next decade milestone in my life madly trying to backpedal and recapture some mythical unicorn age that no longer exists. I really want to try to find joy in the journey and take each stage gracefully as it comes. So I'll work on that, probably for the rest of my life because some changes are just harder to embrace than others....but we can do it....I think. :)

If You See a Broken Window....

Internet is totally down. The cable company can't deal with it until tomorrow afternoon sometime between one and five. If you see the broken window, the computers might be lying in the snow just beyond it.

Virtual Paper and the Real Thing

I realize that being about 3 weeks into the year and being current on my Project Life app isn't an amazing feat, but I'm giving myself a high five in any case. That, and I'm trying to get my friend Julie to jump in. I've already got my sister hooked by virtually singing the "family history I am doing it, my family his-tor-y...." song to her. And if any of you have served in Primary you now have that song stuck in your head. You're welcome. 

Here's the left side. It documents working on my daughter's mission album, my computer synching woes and the introduction of Evernote, cleaning around the place and organizing the freezers.

And the right side, which documents our off and on snow which makes me happy to bake, my husband and his duck calls, and the Sherlock and Downton Abbey watching he and I did over the weekend. Yes, my hunting husband watches Downton Abbey with me. The text exchange centers around a picture Marc sent of a book he found at his local library. He thought it might make a good sequel to "Sharknado."

Since last week was spent in my daughter's mission albums, I wanted to do some, well let's say "fluffy" paper playing, so I worked on the most recent Simon Says Stamp card kit. OK, these are really not papers that I would voluntarily pick up and buy. I was grateful that they were double sided and that while one side was definitely cutsie, the other side was a pattern I could look at without wanting to watch kid's programming while I was working on them. This was how I started out and these are pretty well straight from the project idea sheet included in the kit. The card on the right is for Frederick's birthday next month. He's very big into animals, although I'm not sure that extends to sort of fluffy looking baby animals. At this point I decided I just couldn't take the animals any more, so I moved on to a snow theme and made multiples of the following designs....

I found that as long as I was dealing with just the snow elements, I could work through it. You may be able to tell that some of the snowflakes are iridescent, which is kind of fun. I made several into holiday thank you cards I can use next year.

Not my favorite kit ever, but we can stretch and grow and make things work, right? I did like the silver glitter tape and the Doodlebug glitter dots.  Again, most of the base designs came from the project insert sheet. The design on the right here was Debby Hughes via Pinterest.