Layout about last week - 7-13 May

This layout is a paper layout using Stampin' Up! retired paper.  The chevrons are some photos I had printed off a couple of weeks ago to use in a layout but they were the wrong size to use, so I just saved them & punched the colourful leaves with the Stampin' Up! chevron punch.

I have decided that the two elements that I want to retain throughout this year's album will be the chevrons down in the right hand corner and the date label in the top right corner.

The journalling is mostly from blog posts this week, except for the 8 May journalling that is an extract from The Press about the decommisioning flights of the Iriquois helicopters that happened.

7 May journalling can be found here

8 May journalling is:

The distinctive sound of the Iroquois helicopter rang out over Christchurch for the last time on Thursday. 

Veterans of Vietnam and other missions where the iconic aircraft operated were invited to take a final flight on three of the choppers at Wigram, the RNZAF's first operational base, before the remaining 14 aircraft in the fleet are decommissioned on July 1.

The choppers were in service for 49 years.

As mentioned above that is courtesy of The Press.

I actually saw those helicopters on Friday 8 May so Thursday wasn't the last time the distinctive noise was heard, but I wanted to document the fact that were gettting decommissioned, because as I grew up I remember hearing those helicopters a lot when they were based at Wigram.

12 May journalling can be found here. 

There is no journalling for the other photo, the one of the TV.  On Saturday 9 May we bought a new tv.  There is a bit of a story to it, now I think about it so maybe I will actually do a layout on this new tv to be the facing page to this page.

FMS Photo a Day - Day 16 - Clean

Today's prompt was clean.  I love the look of the eucalptys trees when they have lost their bark.  They no longer look a stragly, moulty mess.  Underneath that old bark is beautiful clean, smooth bark, that looks so white from a distance.

Further to yesterday's photo of the stuffed toy in the swing, that toy still hasn't been claimed.  Today it has been moved from the swing to up a tree.  It's still in the same park, I wonder how long it will stay there.

FMS Photo a day - Day 15 - I Found..

Yesterday I went for a walk through our neighbourhood park to go to the bakery.  On the way through the park I found a stuffed toy left on the swing.  There was nobody else around so it must have been left behind by some child.  I only hope they come back and can claim it.

FMS Photo a day - Day 12 - Eyes

The photo prompt for Tuesday 12 May was eyes.

I am very lucky that when I am doing the dishes at my sink I have a flowering cherry tree out the window that I can look at.  It looks wonderful in spring, and now it is autumn the wax-eyes have come to get some insects off it.

FMS Photo a day - 7 May

The prompt for 7 May was key.

This key was always an interesting key to me because it was the key that unlocked my mother's jewellery box.  I loved looking through that box as a child but we didn't get to do that very often.  I now have the jewellery box but I find the actual tag attached to the key of more interest now.  It brings up questions about whether that box always was my mother's or did it get handed down to her, or given to her as a present?  The even more interesting is that the tag attached to it says it was my father's tag to get into the races.

While I was growing up we never went to the races and my father hated having anything to do with horses or "horsey people."  The fact that this tag was for him makes me wonder what happened after 1972.  I was born in 1969, my sister in 1972, was there no longer time for mum and him to go to the races?  When he was a member did he go to the races very often?  This is a part of my parents' life that I know nothing about. It is very easy to forget that they might have lived a different kind of life before kids, but why wouldn't have they, Scott & I certainly had a different lifestyle before we had children.

Now mum has died and dad has married again, he and his wife are regular horse racing attendees.  Is my father finally able to reclaim part of a life that my sister and I inadvertantly put a stop to? 

None of this I even thought about until May 7 when I was asked to take a photo of a key.

Scrapping Last Week - 30 April - 6 May

This layout is a digital one because there is a long panaroma photo on it.  It was nice getting to make a digital layout and trying to get used to using my new Photoshop Elements 13.  Previously I was using Photoshop Elements 8 and the difference is very noticeable.  So not only have I not used PSE for a few years and I'm rusty but this new version is different too.  I've decided I will have to spend some time creating more digital layouts to get used to PSE again.

I am pleased that I found a tutorial on how to round the photo corners and I figured out how to use some of the elements that were part of My Digital Studio (Stampin' Up!'s software to do digital work) in PSE.  The date label came in a MDS software and had coloured ends so I worked out how to remove the colours and make it transparent.  The chevrons was originally just one chevron & it was coloured.  I was very pleased to work out how to remove the colour, make it transparent & then create a group of 5 of them to form an element that I could then clip my background paper too.

The journalling this week is nearly all Facebook posts.

April 30 at 8:44am · Christchurch 
Yikes it's windy out there. Driving the boys to school this morning and there was a loud bang on the windscreen, apparently it was an acorn hitting it.

April 30 at 9:15am · Christchurch
James Criglington had his first badminton practice yesterday. Apparently it went well & he was told he's not too bad at badminton for a first timer. He's in the junior Christ's College team playing at number 4. He's really happy about it and I think he is enjoying doing a new sport that he has never done before. His first match will be next Wednesday so it will be interesting to hear what he thinks of it after having played a serious match.

April 30 at 9:20am · Christchurch
Brent Criglington is competing in the 48Hours film festival this weekend. He organised the wardrobe yesterday and will be involved in the filming on Saturday.

May 1 at 11am - Christchurch
Pedicure at Astonish Hair & Beauty
 

May 2 - Christchurch
We are back to having the laundry hanging inside so it can dry out overnight.  It’s starting to get dewy at night now.

May 3 - Christchurch
Scott cooked dinner.

May 4 at 11:38am - Christchurch
I ran 5.91 kilometers with RunKeeper

May 5 - Christchurch
The Kendal Ave shops have a new bakery, Mrs Dentons.

May 5 at 12:20pm - Christchurch
I walked 1.94 kilometers with RunKeeper

May 6 at 10:00am - Christchurch
Usually at 10am I am on my laptop catching up with emails.
.
May 6 at 11:19am - Christchurch
I ran 3.71 kilometers with RunKeeper

Mother's Day card

Sunday was mother's day so I made a card for my mother in law.  It's the first card I have made in a very long time.

The card is a swing z-fold card. When it is open the front panel is only attached to the left hand side of the card.

This card is made of all Stampin' Up! products.  It has some Dazzling Details Silver Sparkle (a liquid silver glitter) on the stamens of the Stippled Rose stamp.

Last week - 23 - 29 April 2015

Last night I was able to scrap a layout and this time I thought I would scrap current photos.  This layout is the result.

It has a mixture of cell phone photos (the smaller ones) along with two of my favourite photos of the autumn colours that I took earlier in the week on my camera. The journalling is my blog post from earlier this week, along with my facebook updates.

ANZAC day was part of this week so I made the poppy from two oval punches and a black circle punch.  I did buy a poppy but I got the Australian one which is made of fabric and will not squash nicely for a scrapbook.  We did not go to a ceremony but we saw the Harewood memorial on our ingressing trip of the weekend, there is actually a portal at it.

Scott and I did some ingressing over the long weekend at Riccarton Bush, it's lovely to see that Riccarton House looks really good from the outside and I can't see where or if any earthquake repairs have been done.

The boys started back at school, but I forgot to take a photo of them in their suits in the rush to get them and all their gear back to school.  They started back on Tuesday which is always a terrible day.  It starts off with me getting up at 5:30 to get James to swimming by 6am.  I then come back home make breakfast for Brent, myself and James and then take Brent with me to pick James up from swimming.  We then travel straight to school and James has his breakfast in the car.  So in actual fact it is quite difficult on a Tuesday morning to get a photo of the boys, it's dark when I take James to swimming and then they don't want to be seen with me taking photos of them at school.

It was while I was doing a pick up of the boys that I saw the tram. The journalling below the photo of the tram says that it is nice to see the trams running again after they had been stopped due to the earthquakes.  They only just started up again recently.  I know James thinks it's funny when he steps out of Christ's College to hear tram drivers talking about his school over the speaker system and saying that there is a Christ's College student, pointing him out.

I love that I can use whatever supplies I like to make these layouts, the restrictions in place when I was a Stampin' Up! demonstrator meant I could really only use Stampin' Up! products and because I was trying to make sales I had to use current product.  This layout uses mainly Stampin' Up! product (all except the little stamp of the tram which is a Club Scrap product) most of it retired.  It's nice to use up my old stash.

In other news last week I sent away 12 layouts to Artscow to get them printed.  They arrived yesterday!  They look great however they came in a tube so now they are sitting under my heaviest scrapbook album to lie flat.  Another job for me to do later today will be to actaully put them in their correct album.  I think I am going to have to keep a spreadsheet on file as to what I have scrapped and which album it is in.



 

A week in April 2012

Yippee! I have completed another layout.  This one is a paper based one using cardstock and embellishments from Club Scrap, the varsity kit.  There weren't many photos taken during the week of 15-21 April 2012 so I didn't use a pocket page.  Again it's a minimalist layout but at least it is memories scrapped.  The photos of the netball and the Westpac Arena are not mine, they were sourced from the internet.

 Journalling reads:
15 - watched the Tactix play the Steel at Westpac Arena.  Tactix lost 53-55
16 - went for a run
17 - went to lunch at North & South with Dad and Janet.
21 - James ran his first club cross country run for Christchurch Avon. It was the Hagley Memorial Relay.  It was 1.9km and he ran it in 8 minutes 15 and came 9th in his age group.

In other news I have just had a shipping notification from Artscow that my digital layouts have just been shipped out.  I have asked for them to be printed as 12x12inch size and the exciting thing is I even got a discount of 20%.  I was surprised because it said the discount would not apply to photo prints so I did wonder if it would apply to 12x12 layouts.  It did, so I am very pleased.  It will be nice to have some of the digital layouts I created years ago off my computer and safely stored in my scrapbook albums.

Speaking of scrapbook albums I went looking through them the other day and I have a lot of them plus about 25 pages that need to be put in albums. I think I might need to rethink my strategy for the boys albums.  At one stage I was keeping them with an album a year but with them getting older and not really being around all day everyday the photo opportunities are less.  I think that from now on their albums will be of their childhood.  Medbury started selling monogramed albums so I bought one for each of the boys so their Medbury photos can go in it.  From now on I think any photos of the boys that really have no story line can go in a yearly album.  The story photos (and there aren't many of those) I will create a photobook for.  I have used Artscow in the past for their 6x6" photobooks and they were really good, so I think I will create an ongoing photobook of each of the boys for their special moments.  That way it is not lots of huge albums for them which they may or may not ever want.  That will feed my need to be creative and get their photos in books while making it not so arduous for them later.

Getting my scrapping happening!

I am feeling really excited that finally I can get more time to scrap & get creative. I can also be free to use what ever product I like which makes decision making difficult but it is very nice to have the choice. 

For the last two days I have been working on a digital layout of the 9 course dinner Scott & I had to celebrate our wedding anniversary earlier this year.

This is the double page layout together.  I used a Club Scrap digital kit called Lotus Pond & based the layout from a card from the Club Scrap Idea Deck volume 2, called A Dozen Times over formula.

 This is the left hand page.

 Here is the right hand page.

Not much room for journalling but really the food spoke for itself that night, so I just added the white text of what each course was.

Loving the autumn colours

Wow, this year the colours of the trees down Memorial Ave look spectacular.  I am sure they look good every autumn but I wonder if because we haven't had a decent hard wind for a week or so if the leaves are staying on the trees for longer so I get more opportunities to see them.  Before the next nor' west arrives I took the opportunity to take a few photos.  I tried to pick a quiet time of day traffic wise but as usual it was still too busy for me to stand in the centre of the road and comfortably take a photo.  I drive along this road everyday and I think the trees look better from the road than from either the median strip or the footpath.  I would love to take a photo while driving but I need a willing particpant to do that.

All About the Toe

Towards the end of last term Brent was starting to get annoyed with me.  He felt that the only child I cared about was James because I was forever running around to either swimming or athletics because of James.  So needless to say when he started getting a sore toe he didn't tell me about it, "because you don't care mum!"  We went into Rebel Sport and tried on some new football boots for Brent.  We had to send Scott up the shop ladder to get the boots that were in the middle of a stack of boxes, up high above the display case.  We got our hands on the box and Brent tried on the boots and yippeee they fit!  I then tell him to take off his Christ's College football socks so that he can wear his normal shoes again and I noticed that he had worn another pair of socks underneath his football socks.  I queried him about it at the time and he said "because mum I wear shin pads & they have that thing that goes over your foot, so it will be the same as that."  The way he said that to me like I was some moron stopped me from questioning further so I left it at that.

Monday came round and it was time for football trials which Brent went to.  When I picked him up afterward he was in a very angry uncommunicative mood and wouldn't tell me much except he didn't want to play this sport anymore.  I asked him why and there was no response so instead of pushing the issue I let it be.  Wednesday came and again there were football trials and again when I picked him up he was in a foul mood.  I asked him what was wrong and he said he hated the team he has been put in.  He has been put in the 14th grade so he is with the boys that are in year 10, the same boys he played with last season and they lost every game.  Oh well I can't argue with the fact that that would annoy him.

Monday 30 March James finally told me that Brent's toe looked funny.  I asked what he meant and he wouldn't tell me, so I asked Brent what was funny about his toe.  At first Brent wouldn't tell me so I told him to take his socks off so I could see what's so funny about his toe.  Oh dear, that toe wasn't looking funny at all, it was a big, red, angry, bloody mess. I asked him how long it had looked like that and Brent's response was a couple of weeks and he didn't want to tell me because he thought I wouldn't care.  Lovely he gets sick but won't tell me, because he thinks I don't care. I need to read his mind to find out that he is sick to be able to show I care. It makes no sense.

Scott and Brent went to the afterhours doctors and eventually came back home with antibiotics and being told Brent was not allowed to do running or kicking (goodbye football for a while).  After a week of antibiotics the mess hadn't really cleared up so we went back to the doctors and got more antibiotics and while we were there the doctor rang the podiatrist and the podiatrist suggested that after that lot of antibiotics were finished we should go and see him.

A week ago we saw the podiatrist for the first time and he took a good look at the ugly toe.  He came to the decision that Brent had an ingrown toenail and that it will never get fixed unless he removed part of that toenail.

Yesterday was the procedure to remove part of the toenail.  It didn't take too long and luckily he gave Brent some local anaesthetic to numb up the whole toe.  Brent was then sent home with a huge bandage on his toe and told to rest for the rest of the day, which suited Brent just fine.

We went back to the podiatrist this morning and Brent has a smaller bandage on his toe now and strict instructions not to do any running or kicking for about 6-8 weeks while his skin mends itself around the left over toenail. He has to change his dressing every second day and wear the dressing until there is no more blodd, pus coming out, probably 6 weeks.

Brent was also told by the podiatrist that next time he should actually tell his mother when he gets sore toes because it would've been easier to fix earlier on.

Dear Brent I hope you learn just one thing from this. I love you dearly and will always be there for you no matter what, but I can't do that if you don't talk to me, I am not a mind reader!

A Day in my Life - 19 April 2015

The process of printing out my old blog entries has helped me realise the importance (in case of natural disaster) and the interest of how my life changes as the boys grow up.  My life changes around them, what I did in 2009 I don't always do now.  The sights I saw in 2009 have changed and some of them don't even exist anymore.  On reflection it was a good idea to have tried to take a photo a day, I never managed a full year but some of those mundane photos show a change between then & now that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.  I am no good at keeping a diary but I was pretty good at keeping up my blogs, so maybe it is time to take more everyday snapshots & see what has changed since 2009.  I hope to take a photo a day, but that may not always happen, this time I won't beat myself up about it because it doesn't matter because if I only have a few photos each month I am still documenting me & my family's life.

A good way to start I think is to take a snapshot of my daily life on the 19th of each month.  Why the 19th? Well it's as good a date as any other date and it will be interesting to see how I spend my birthday year. (Ha ha that's supposing that this venture lasts longer than a year!)

So 19 April 2015 was a Sunday and also school holidays.  While other schools start back on April 20 I am still looking at another week of school holidays.

I woke up at 6:20 & read my latest ebook that I have out from the library. (That's definitely something that has changed since 2009)

 Important part of my day is the weather.

 Scott brought me breakfast in bed.  A coffee & croissants with smoked salmon and cream cheese.

Checked out my newest app, that I absolutely love!

Changed the sheets on the bed.  This is one of the pillowcases I got from mum.  We cleaned out her wardrobe (once she had died) & there in a box still all wrapped up from her wedding day, unused, were these beautifully embroided pillowcases.  It made me think that there is no "best" time to use things. Yes I have "best" stuff to be used when guests are around but what is the point if you die and they never see the light of day? So I gladly use these pillowcases after all that is what they were for, to be used.

Sunday is always the day when I update my calendar on my phone, my paper diary and this magnetic calendar with what is happening this week.  The magnetic calendar I update with part of the next month so I have 4 weeks worth of events in front of me.

Of course there is always laundry to do.  Yesterday was a good drying day so I washed the sheets that had come off the beds.

Time to do a bit of quick ingressing for the day as well as a quick check on that weather.

The My Food Bag delivery arrived so that was unpacked & put away.

At about 5 o'clock I go and check what the recipe is that I am making for dinner & start the prep and get everything laid out ready to cook.

Tonight's dinner, what it is supposed to look like & how mine did.  We had no coriander so went without.

After dinner, I sat down & created the layout of Highlands & then worked out what year to tackle next.  I'm thinking I might do 2012 next, so I started researching what information I had for the week 15-21 April 2012.

All day everyday I wear a Polar Loop that registers how many hours I sleep, how many steps I do.  This was the activity for the day.

Another layout completed

This layout is also for Easter 2014.  It will be sitting in my 2014 Project Life scrapbook in it's full sized pager proctector.  I liked that it was taking scrapping back out of the pockets and putting it back on to 12x12 cardstock.  I've decided to use up as much of my old supplies as possible so this layout uses old Club Scrap cardstock (I think it was called Desert Beauty or something).  It was a layout that I had already made the base of, so I just needed to add my photos and journalling & the simple embellishment.  Funnily enough the journalling isn't about the racing it's about what happened to James' lunch:

On Easter Sunday we went to watch motor racing at Highlands in Cromwell. Unfortunately James didn't totally enjoy the experience because he threw his lunch away, twice!  His first lunch was sushi but a wasp came and sat on it when he opened the lid, that lunch was thrown on the ground with quite a yell.  Second time round he got a hot dog and a wasp came at him again.  This time the wrapper was thrown to the ground and James found somewhere else to eat it.

That is my week 15-21 April 2014 all documented.  I can now backup those photos & delete them from my hard drive.

I've done a couple of layouts

Pocket scrapbooking has always appealed to me as a quick way to get photos scrapped without having to spend time worrying too much about the details.  Even with this quick method of scrapping I never had the inclination or time to do any.  Lately I have been so busy being a taxi service for the boys, mainly James for his sports, that really I haven't had much time to myself.  I remember when I used to be able to sit down and scrap on a Saturday afternoon but those days have long gone.  I did however get to do just that yesterday afternoon & although my mojo isn't totally back it was just nice to get some photos printed, quick notes for the photos and call it done.  I decided to start by doing this time last year, so the following layouts are about this time last year, which was Easter time and we went down to Wanaka for some plane and car spotting.

 The above layout is a quick overview of what we saw and did during the week of 16th - 22nd April 2014.  We drove down to Wanaka on the 16th with our obligatory stop at Reflections at Lake Tekapo for lunch.  On the 18th we went down to the lake and watched a fly over by 6 biplanes.  On the 19th we were away pretty early, 9:15 by the car clock, yet we got into a long line of traffic heading towards the airshow.  On the 20th we went to Highlands Motorsport Park in Cromwell to watch the Festival of Speed racing.  On the 21st we went back home and as usual I had to have my photo of Aoraki Mt Cook, which was looking stunning that day.

Obviously there were more photos than those taken especially at the Warbirds over Wanaka and at the Festival of Speed.  I chose my best warbirds photos to put into another quick layout of their own.  There is the RNZAF NH90, the Hercules doing it's flare drop, the Anson and a few Harvards.  Not much journalling and no embellishments but it gets the photos scrapped and now I can delete them off my hard drive after backing them up to both the dvd and external hard drive.

Scarey movies

Blog Prompt: August 13 is Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday. In honor of his birthday, name the movie(s) that scare you the most.

I really don't like horror movies & have never watched a Hitchcock movie. A movie that has had a profound affect on me was The Fly. OMG watching that man turn into a fly just was too yucky for words & ever since I have a real aversion to flies.

Wow it's been such a long time

It's been such a long time that I have posted on this blog that I came back to find a big fat advert had taken over it.  What it did make me do is go back & start printing of the last 200 odd blog entries in case my blog should happen to disappear one day.  If anyone else has an advert like this taking over their blog take a look at the widgets on your sidebar.  I had a stat counter by neoworx as my stat counter & funnily enough it was a neoworx ad.

All I had to do was go into the blogger dashboard choose Layout & then look at my gadgets & remove the stat counter.

I hope that small piece of information helps someone else who has this problem.