I've just turned this in to a very 'boyish' looking blog.

A New Thing Learned, Finally

I want black and white pictures sometimes. I know it's not that hard to do, but I want REAL black and white pictures. Up until recently I have had what I thought were black and white, but are really sepia. What's been happening is that I print my own pictures and never thought to set the printer to "GREYSCALE" when doing black and white printing, and thanks to Yolanda's help I've figured that out. What bothers me is that my Canon i9900 came with a great photo printing program, Easy-PhotoPrint, and printing in greyscale isn't an option. So when I want blank and white, I have to use Microsoft Picture Manager and it just doesn't have the same size options as Easy-Photo. So my lesson learned...don't print b&w in Easy-Photo.

Today's the day...8 12 year olds at Scandia for 3 hours. What was I thinking? Although this is 100% better than them coming to our house. I could see 8 12 year olds crying because of one or more of the following reasons...
Linus...
ate my cake
ate my present
bit me
scratched me
sat on me
stepped on my present
farted on me
licked my mouth
stepped on my cake
licked my cake
farted on my present
or
stepped on my mouth while eating my cake and farting on me.

We took Emily to Taki for her birthday dinner. I'm sure the people at the next table thought we were freaks, and I'm sure Tara was thinking that the sushi wasn't worth the public humiliation. Kerry and my dad have a gangster hand gesture, it's an R. For Rutland.
Only in Rutland can you find the best bang for your buck when it comes to Japanese food. Only in Rutland would you find someone actually taking this picture.



My dad took my Watching Emily Grow book home to show my mom. They loved seeing her grow up in pictures. Emily got a kick out of it too. I have to say, I really like the cover!

12 years in a mini book

I made this little coaster book today, from scanning and printing the pictures to taking pictures of the finished project, it took less than 3 hours. I cut the covers with a pattern I made using my Silhouette. Today, I love it, ask me again tomorrow.
I used Autumn Leaves papers from Target and Walmart, cardstock from SU, stamps from Fontwerks, SU and Inkadinkadoo. The pictures are Emily from about 5 months to now.
She must be something, because I just ordered the most expensive birthday cake ever, and it's not even fancy.

Bittersweet?

Don't you just hate it when...
I was very excited to get this picture. This is from our deck using my big lens, I can't find the box so I'm guessing at this(also too lazy to go and get it), I think it's 80-200, f4.5, anyway, it's the long one with some zoom. I heard some birds making a ruckus and just happened to have my camera ready. This bird took the 'thing' from the other bird and the other bird left. I snapped a few pictures. I think it's a sparrow hawk, only because I think that's what Kerry called it. I realized later that it is a dead animal in his talons.
What makes this bittersweet is "yay" for me I got a decent shot of a bird. But then when I went out with the dogs, I saw feathers all over the yard and thought "oh, crap, it's not a mouse, it's a bird in my picture" and then to make it even worse, upon looking at the picture I see it's a chickadee, probaby one of the 2 that were feeding in my yard and that I told Yolanda about. Waaaaahhhhaaaaaa...I killed a chickadee! Stupid chickadee hawk.

Happy 12th Emily!!!

it's hard to believe my baby is 12 years old today. I can remember when she was born, but I can't remember when my Kerri Smith book is, or what it was callled.
Anyway, back to the main subject...Emily. She's really grown up in the last year. Pays way more attention to what she wears, loves What Not to Wear and quotes Stacy and Clinton all the time.
Last night, we were watching a mockumentary, A Mighty Wind, by the same people that did Best in Show. I commented on 'mockumentary' and she said it's part of our GENRE now. I didn't know what that meant until last week. GEESH!!! That kid!
When we were eating cake my parents were discussing something in their funny bickering way and my mom said to my dad "why do you even open your mouth?" to which Emily replied "To eat and breath!" And everyone burst out laughing.
Happy Birthday you smart cookie!

I could go on and on about how much I love my camera...

but I won't.


But then that might be boring, at least for me.


I charged the battery, packed the camera, tripod, water, kleenex and like sardines in a tin, Kerry, Linus, Sally and I packed ourselves into the truck. Think clown car and you have a pretty good idea how our trip went.

It was worth it. I'm still figuring out the lighting, speed, and such, but I got a few good shots, considering it's pretty dark in the trees, and not such a bright day. The main concern was Linus,(say it like Seinfeld says NEWMAN). This was his first 'ride' and he isn't quite sure where to run...in front of Kerry, behind him, beside him or should he stand and watch/wait in the middle of the trail. He found out pretty quick the last one isn't the right one. I will show you, because I can, because that handy dandy burst function is the best thing since digital cameras were invented.

Look Mom! Here comes Dad! He's so fast!!! (keep an eye on Linus's ears)
Wow! I have a front row seat! Here he comes! Oh Crap! Here he comes!

Oh crap! Look out! (no dogs were injured in this photo shoot)

Thank goodness for brakes.

My dad built these rides. Those are his crutches.

Some tired pooches!
I'm itchy, there's mosquitos in the woods. Who knew?

Birthday/Week

Birthdays are always a drawn out affair at our house. We have the cake and celebration with the family, grandparents and grown-up friends, and then we have the actual day which is usually on an inconvenient day, so we have the birthday party on another day. This happens for most of our family members. We're okay with it. Just means more celebratory food. Tonight, ice cream cake and a log, because DQ didn't have much in the way of cakes, and not enough to feed the group we're expecting. Monday, we will probably have something along the lines of Emily's favourite meal. The college restaurant is closed Mondays so we will have to find her something else or go another night. Wednesday, it's Scandia, mini golf and pizza and of course, more cake. I don't see it as lots of calories, I see lots of photo ops.

So Glad It's Finally Here - Friday

A six word sentence to describe today.

Yesterday was the big day! We got our Urban Harvest bin and I can't believe how fresh and nice the veggies are. Should have taken a picture. I was worried that "organic" might mean blemishes and bugs. I was wrong. These are nicer than the organic things I have walked past in the store. Emily was excited to get somethign delivered to the door, Shaun was pretty impressed too.
Here's my list:
Garlic Greens
Onions
Mangos
Bananas
Apples
Strawberries
Oranges
Cucumber
Cilantro
Ginger
Red Leaf Lettuce
Mushrooms
Chives
Tomatoes
Chard
Asparagus
All that delivered to my door, every other week with recipes! It's clean, I know 13 other people didn't squeeze my tomotoes and it's better for us. Although I'm all for spray on my own trees, especially the cherries.
And we ate fruit for our snack! Fruit!
I'm happy and sad that sometime during the night before, aliens swapped my daughter for a fruit and veggie eating version. This new Emily came home from school, saw my baked potato and said "I want one too". After I got up off the floor from my dead faint, I made her one and she ate the whole darn thing, with parmasan cheese. She had carrots in her lunch, she ate 2 apples for snack and carrots at dinner. That's more veggies and fruit than she eats in a week. Look out bowels!

Here's what I've been doing, there's more too, but I didn't want anyone to think I have been taking speed or other performance inducing drugs. BWAAHaha.
Kind of dark picture, a reflector or flash would have helped, I'm over it. I do love my egg shots.
I added some MME rub-ons to this one.
My little dad book, little book not little dad. This is for a class. I used BG Cupcake, but only the manly papers.

Check out the pictures! The first one is one I took when I was about 5, nice hair! The second one was last summer, aren't they cute?

Last night was also our big night of tv. Why can't the networks spread it out? Now that we have digital cable, we can watch things a bit earlier. Our crazy line-up, hours of tv watching...I'm not proud of it, but I'm not ashamed either.
Scrubs
The Office(I laughed so hard last night, the football to the head almost made me cry)
My Name is Earl(we didn't actually watch it, got sacrificed for Lost)
Lost
Grey's Anatomy
CSI
ER
If you do the math, that's over 5 hours of couch potato-ness. Yup, it is. Good thing there's nothing good on tonigh!

Six-Word Memoir book preview from SMITHmag on Vimeo.

I found this on Cathy Z. blog. I love it. Love the song, the idea, I see many scrapbooking possibilities here.

6 words to sum things up.

Just coming up with one 6 word sentence is hard.

She's up, get her coffee quickly.
Never dreamed it would be wonderful.

I really liked the one in the video...
Without ME it is just AWESO...

Japanese Time Machine?

I got this from Photojojo this morning...I love saying that...Photojojo. If you watched the Powerpuff Girls, the villian is Mojo Jojo and I love saying that do. I don't like "I lost my Mojo", that's just sad. Anyway...
http://labs.wanokoto.jp/olds
check it out (I'm a lame linker so do it yourself)
When you get to the site, hit the BROWSE button, pick your picture, hit the blue button and wait. You and your picture will be magically transported to a time before you were born.
Have fun.

I was a scrapping machine yesterday, and I made a few layouts for me, not for classes. It was great. I was really trying to get some stuff organized for the crop coming up, but I was just to motivated. I have added some rub-ons to the layout since I made it but didn't take a new picture. Kerry didn't like the layout.

PW RAWKS!!!

I found some free PS actions on Pioneer Woman and played with them today. I really like the vignette look and could never get it just right by myself, but now I don't have to!
I find the black and white a bit harsh, but I can play around with it and adjust it to my liking.
This is my mug shot.

Emily with my belt on her head, but she can pull it off. If I went out like that Tara would ask "Why do you have a belt on your head?"

Random things

I have lots of little books, you know you like them too, little notebooks laying around not being used. So a couple days ago, E. said something funny...
and I grabbed on of these stratigically placed little books(really, I never clean up and they really are all over the house). And I wrote it down. Then Kerry said something funny and I wrote that down too. Who needs a memory when they can write things down? My mom did give me a voice recorder for Christmas because I'm so forgetful, but I put it somewhere and now can't find it, or did I tell you that already?

Anyhoo...I was vacuuming and Emily was watching Curious George. When I got to the living room, she starts turning the volume up and yells out "I can't hear my show! I'm trying to watch my stories!" Which made me laugh and I had to stop vacuuming. My stories! Ha Ha Ha.

Last night, after walkies, Linus was doing his business in the bushes of our yard. It was really dark and I said "I can't see him, is he pooping?" to which Kerry says "I can see him, he's right there (points) and that's why I could be an astronaut!"
What?
Then he launched a long monologue about how he saw on tv that astronauts aren't just good at seeing things, they can see tones, which is what you need to be able to do in space, and he can do that, and blah blah blah blah blah! Beam me up, Scotty!

I am so darned please with myself.

It took me a very long time, I said lots of swear words and probably stomped my feet a few times, but I finally got this BABY cut out using my Silhouette. I did hand cut the transparencies because I just couldn't handle another temper tantrum. I bound it with my Bind-It-All, I used retired SU papers, just incase it didn't turn out, and my lovely MM stickers.
I don't have any baby pictures {ahem} and had to use my cousin's baby Taya Puppy. I couldn't have done this without Emily's help, she thinks I should pay her in Pokemon video games. We'll see.

Monday-Tuesday

I had a good start to the day. Finished work in record time, met MS for a trip to Westbank and the scrapbook store. I hadn't been out there in months. Saw Cheryl, didn't get any hugs from her. Then MS and I went for lunch at De Dutch, I had the Abby Perogy and it's my new fav, not points friendly.
When I got home I decided to play with my Silhouette. I was playing nice, but it wasn't. It's pretty sad when I have to get Emily to help me outline things. But she showed me a little trick that works wonders. Unfortunately, I won't be asked for a good review on the Silhouette, I hate it today. I will post pictures later when I can stand to look at the stuff again. I wasted more paper than I think I should have, I only wanted 8 things cut out and I'm pretty sure that thing wrecked at least $10 in paper. It has a mind of it's own. It's really tricky when setting up the thickness of paper you are using. I can't ever get it right, and when it's set on 100 lb paper, I would think it should be able to cut through SU's cardstock, but I'm wrong. It better smarten up and start earning it's keep or it's moving out.
Getting my hair cut and coloured today, I so need it. It's not good to have more grey than your mom!
Speaking of moms, my Mom Album class went well, long but just about everyone finished, with 2 actually getting all their pictures in too. I'm working on baby and dad albums now.
Postman is here!!! POTP stuff!
And this is what he had for me. Lots and lots of stickers and other goodies. And the new Scrapbooks and Cards Today.

Making better choices

I just finalized my order at Urban Harvest. I'm not link savvy so check out www.urbanharvest.ca, if you are local. If not, there are probably similar programs in your area, I know the locals got the idea from the coast.
Anyway, M-R recommended it and KW(not me or Kerry) signed on too. I haven't been finding great produce lately and thought this might be a good idea. So we will get our first delivery of fresh, organic produce on Thursday! I'm really excited about this, for a couple reasons.
- it's good for us
- it's delivered to the door, people!
- you can swap out anything you want
- recipes for those 'exotic' things
- it's not any more money than what I am spending on veggies and fruit right now, and most of the time, I have to toss stuff out (like Costco lettuce) because it just doesn't have a great shelf live. (2 days)

And I can cancel at any time, or skip a week, which is great because in the summer we get most of our veggies from my Grandpa's garden.

How sad is it that I can't wait until Thursday!!!

Kerry and I did a bit of re-organizing of his bike room and my scrapspace, mostly stuff you can't see with the naked eye. Ha Ha, which really means we didn't do anything. But we did, I emptied out a whole drawer in the filing cabinet to make room for his bill organization, it only makes sense to have them in the filing cabinet. My large stash of envelopes can go somewhere else. I did lots of lable making too.

I woke up grumpy. Not hard to do when you can't ever get to sleep in. I just want one day to wake up later than 7. Yesterday, it was the phone. Today, it was the dogs because K. went for a bike ride. It's very hard to focus on the tasks at hand when you are trying to maintain your grumpiness. Just an hour! That's all I want. And maybe breakfast in bed, a maid and cheesecake.

I weighed in yesterday and am down! Thank goodness. I have an important weigh-in coming in May and need to get rid of a few pounds. I'm pretty sure WW is one of the only employers that will consider firing you because of your weight. I totally understand, we have to walk the talk, but it's harder than I thought it would be on the other side of the scale. Hurry up and get here, Thursday!

I thought time travel wasn't possible. I was wrong.

We've been transported back to mid-December. It's not pretty. It's downright infuriating. I'm worried about our fruit trees, especially the cherry. The blossoms were almost out and now they may be in jeopardy. My dafodils are not happy about the weight of the snow. My purple muscari just started to bloom, and now it's under inches of snow!
It's been snowing since before 5 am. The roads aren't bad, the snow's not sticking to them, but every one's yards are winterized. At least I don't have to shovel.
No yard work today, no car work. So I think I might read a few more pages of Photo Freedom, I'm reading slowly so that I can absorb and digest all the info. I do wish osmosis was possible, then I would put it under my pillow at night and wake up all ready to organize my pictures. I did delete a pile yesterday and freed up a few GB on the computer. I don't really need 4 billion pictures of the dogs noses or of them catching the frisbee from different angles, or 100 pictures of samosas.
M-R and I met for delicious sushi and tempura before our cropping last night. We figured out that we known each other for more than 3 years and have only been out socially 2 times. We see each other on average 4 times a month during classes, but never go out. We're going to change that. What's really funny is that she goes to fight night at my dad's. So after tonight, my dad and Kerry will have spent as much social time with her as I have.

Recipe for success?

This morning, I downloaded the free digital recipe card template that Creating Keepsakes has available on their site. I am in the very slow process of typing all my recipes on to the cards. I sure hope I'm not missing any key info when I'm typing. These will replace my nasty recipe cards. And I'm trusting my typing and reading skills and recycling the originals. I'm also tossing out the recipes I never use. I'm sure my hips will thank me.

Just some things

I'm scrapbooking and cardmaking today.
Photo Freedom looks like it might be liberating. And I got my CK magazine today, that's really early and it made me realize that I haven't gotten a Scrapbook Trends in awhile. OH, well, I can't possibly read all my magazines and books at once. And I almost bought a photography magazine the other day but stopped myself. Yay ME!!!


I had to put Sally's good bed on top of a Rubbermaid tote so that Linus couldn't get at it and continue his destruction on it. Last night, the grown ups and dogs had to sit in the basement to watch tv because boy kid was playing on the Wii. So Linus sat on the couch with us, it's the dog couch. And Sally couldn't fit, so she made lemon-aid out of her lemons. In a not so lady-like manner, she scaled the tote and climbed into her bed where she stayed for hours, even after everyone else went to bed. I think she wanted us to push the tote into the bedroom for her, but we have to draw the line somewhere and after I fluffed her pillows, she got in her nighttime bed.


I realized that after all the stress and hard work of renovating, I never posted any after pictures.
The blue living room.

The new rug with fancy four-legged shedding accessory/destroyer of all things nice.
This is the dining room after we removed the wall, phone counter and china cabinet thing.
These are the before pics of the dining room.

Kerry surveying his handy work.

My Name is Kelli...

and I am addicted to magazines, books and scrapbooking supplies, and maybe to taking pictures and blogging, but not to chocolate, or potatoes, no, I don't have a problem with those things. Check out my new book. I haven't even opened it yet. It's so purdy! And it's coil bound! LOVE IT! Very excited to have a day of relaxing and reading. Had to have these, they LOOK good.

I did the 'good' wife thing. Which was really, the "I'm on my way to the scrapbook store to spend money, do you want anything?" thing. I had a list of coffees to buy at Tim Horton's and after the '3 fr. vanillas' the girl says "Do you want a drink tray, that will be..." and I cut in and say "And I need a lg. 2 sug/1 cream, a lg. black, 1 lg. hot choc., 1 lg. green tea, 1 box of timbits, 1 fat free muffin and a breakfast sandwich." To which she replies "Is THAT everything?" and when I say I think so, she says "I'm just kidding". But between the 2 of us, we got the order right. And I went to the store guilt free!!!

I used the negative 'she' stuff from my Silhouette for this one.
Linus, doing the Frog. Love that tailless bum.
A 'purse' that I cased from Splitcoaststampers. There's a tutorial there.

I didn't take my allergy pill today, I'm finding that by 8 pm. I'm fast asleep and it's interfering with my tv watching. So I'm choosing to live my day itchy, and sneezy, and snotting and not sleepy and dopey and grumpy. At least I'm blaming the grumpiness on the pill.

And to make me grumpier, Kerry said we would NOT be going to Disneyland in December. At least not this year. He also said something about the carport needing to be re-roofed but it sounded muffled under the weight of my pillow.

My dad stopped by and said take some pictures of me and the dogs. Boy, was he sorry.
Everybody ready?
Linus: Bumpa, your butt's too big, oh, wait, that's my butt.

Sally: Get my good side, please.

Linus: Give me some sugar!
Sally: Thank goodness it's not me!

Bumpa: Gross!

Linus: Gross!

Sally: Gross! Tee Hee Hee.

Bumpa: Gross.

Linus: Is that cilantro? No, maybe it's parsley. I better have another taste.

Sally: Soooo glad it's not me. Snicker snicker. Bumpa: OMG Whose idea was this?

Linus: Bumpa, remember when I ate your other gold earring, I haven't pooped it out and I need a pair.

Sally: Thank Goodness it's not me!

Check this out...Sally's new do made me think I had seen that look before.