Ok, so the charger thingy for my laptop melted. That’s right, it melted. I’ve spent a couple of weeks without My Beloved, but yesterday a replacement charger arrived from Hong Kong and HUZZAH! I can play on the internets again!
Christmas = excellent. Will write more when I get the photos transferred.
Visit from my family also = excellent, apart from the fact that the weather was total crap the whole time my brother was here. He spent ten days here and couldn’t even catch one glimpse of Mt. Rainier! My parents are still here though, so I’m crossing my fingers for some clear skies…ugh, they’re going to go home thinking that all the talk about rain in Seattle is actually true (ahem)! Speaking of Rainier:
Journaling: I remember it like it was yesterday - our plane landed at SeaTac Airport and I finally got to see our new home. It was a beautiful clear day, and as we drove from the airport I saw Mount Rainier for the first time. My jaw literally dropped. Towering majestically over everything else in sight was this huge, beautiful volcano. Since that day, whenever I see Rainier, I feel at home. The ultimate experience so far was watching the sunrise from Noble Knob. I had spent a sleepless night in the tent and was experiencing some, ahem, fear-of-heights issues, but seeing Mount Rainier bathed in that early morning glow was like getting an injection of pure serotonin. Getting a glimpse of her is the highlight of any hike! | 10.02.07
(Two corrections: the correct date is 09.02.07 - oops - and calling Rainier “her” just seems wrong to me now…I get a more masculine feeling from Rainier. Anyway…)
Seriously, I’m obsessed with this mountain. It is just so beautiful. Whenever I catch a glimpse of him (heh) I let out a little involuntary “aaah”. After reading Bruce Barcott’s The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier, I’m relieved to learn that I am not the only one to harbor such weird and intense feelings for this volcano.
Random bits of information:
1) Not scrapbooking drives me crazy. Therefore I am signing up for Lain’s January’s Layout-a-Day Challenge, and you should too (it’s free and there will be priiiizes!)
2)Dan in Real Life is a bloody great movie, and not just because Sondre Lerche made the soundtrack.
3) If you live in the Seattle area but haven’t taken the underground tour at Pioneer Square yet, get your bum over there ASAP - we went today and it was so cool :D
4) My personal soundtrack these days, not that you care:
Eddie Vedder - No Ceiling
KT Tunstall - Change
Paolo Nutini - Alloway Grove
Rufus Wainwright - Tiergarten
Eddie Vedder - Long Nights
Willy Mason - Oxygen
Gorillaz - Last Living Souls
Eddie Vedder - Guaranteed
Sondre Lerche - Modern Nature
Nick Drake - Northern Sky
BigBang - To the Mountains
5) I need to get some sleep. G’night and Happy New Year!
The Label Tulip kit is up! This is my favorite one so far - especially the add-on with the clear mini book! Here’s some of my stuff this month:
This is just about Tom being all cool and Gollum-like (hmm, a contradiction in terms, perhaps?) by the creek at Shi Shi.
I found it fitting to use Leonard Cohen lyrics on this page about Dagfinn and Marianne dancing…but I do so expecting to be ridiculed, since every time I ask them about the meaning of Cohen lyrics I like, they end up being about death or the Holocaust.
I used the clear album to make a sort of goal journal for 2008. Looking forward to filling this one out :)
…so, last time the stress and lack of sleep really got to me and I had a mini-meltdown of sorts. Luckily I have JK, so we canceled our plans and spent the night baking cookies and relaxing. I really needed that…we also decided to not make and send out Christmas cards after all (it would basically be too late anyway), and to just breathe and enjoy the holiday. I’ve been stressed out a lot this fall and I don’t want to slip into some sort of evil depression again.
Alright, enough about that. Now, cookies!
We made dog-safe gingerbread cookies for Bobby again this year - he loves them (well, he also loves used ear plugs). We couldn’t find the recipe, but luckily I was smart enough to take a photo of it when we made them last year. Thank you to The Bark magazine :)
I am really behind on emails and everything - I’ll catch up when I get some energy back..
…but there’s really no reason for me to be. The house is reasonably parent-ready for when my mom, dad and brother are coming next week and most of my Christmas shopping is over and done with (except some stuff I have to make, gaah). Still, I’ve been freaking out. Usually I’m pretty laid-back, but when my to-do list starts getting a bit long, I get such an idiotic stress-response - I’ll get a migraine so I can’t do anything at all. It is totally psychosomatic (but still *there*, so I don’t know what to do) and it’s a lovely remnant of my depression days…anyway, I’m trying to relax now by drinking some Christmas tea and blogging.
1 Can the stress/migraine thing be the first one? Why yes it can.
2 I think I might have mentioned this before, but I absolutely despise socks. I’ll only wear them for hiking or if they’re some sort of novelty Christmas socks.
3 I think I’m physically addicted to ketchup.
4 You would never know by looking at me now, but I used to study sports science in college.
5 My family lived in New Jersey for two years when I was in elementary school.
6 I have short, gnome-like fingers. Playing handball was a bitch.
7 Sometimes I’ll sniff Bobby’s ears, they smell really good. He’s my cocaine.
Alrighty, JK came home so we have to make some sort of dinner. But first: Label Tulip sneaks!
…and an older layout that was in Vi Scrapper:
This is about how insanely over-sensitive Bobby is and how he’ll freak out the second we so much as raise our voices.
…the good thing is that when I don’t blog, it usually means I’m actually out doing something. Also known as “living” - I tend to forget that sometimes. :)
We had a great weekend spending time with our friends, mainly eating, drinking and getting hooked on sweet, nerdy board games.
And just because I really love the new Starbucks commercial:
My brother is coming in just one week! :D :D Hmm, must get the scrapbook room ready so he’ll have somewhere to sleep…and we really need to get the rest of the presents soon. Gaah.
…you really have to see the layout on your screen before you see what’s missing. I went to bed after blogging last night, then got up again five minutes later to do this:
A little bit of pen goes a long way…and I deserve some sort of medal for not reaching for the hydrangeas! ;)
(I still think it needs some more green, but I’m letting it go. This is why I’m such a slow scrapbooker…)
(Hmm, the non-scrapbookers who read this blog must think I am absolutely insane…but if they do read this blog they probably already know me and should not be surprised.)
(also, listening to too many old Ricky Gervais XFM shows -> excessive use of the word “grim”)
The weather is crap but I really can’t complain when I see the situation others not too far from here are in. So I’ll shut up and stop whinging now. Anyways, I tried to scrapbook today as a little mood booster, but after staring at this page (how cute are those photos of my dad) for over an hour (sadly, I’m not exaggerating) trying to figure out what’s missing, I gave up. I keep forgetting the whole “imperfection is perfect” thing ;)
I *know* that a couple of cleverly placed, dirty-green Prima flowers would solve the problem, but I’m trying to resist. I’ll probably cave tomorrow though…
Here’s a layout I made with the November Label Tulip kit. Just because.
Alright, this is so cool - the girls over at Minneriket asked me to supply a photo, title and journaling for the finale of All In, the big contest that’s been going on for months now. Usually I’m not a big fan of using the same photos etc in contests - photography, wording and personal stories are such a big part of scrapbooking for me - but since they requested a photo of Bobby I was over the moon :D
Go here (I think it will work even if you aren’t registered) to see the six finalists’ layouts featuring the deliciously sleazy Bobby…and here to congratulate the winner, Catrine! She has been such an inspiration to me ever since I started scrapbooking, so it was really cool to see her version of Bobs.
Time for bed. I am so going to get up tomorrow morning and add flowers to my layout. *sigh*
If you send enough nagging thoughts out there, the universe will eventually listen…that’s right, we got snow!
Unfortunately, when I got up Sunday morning with big plans of building a snow dog in the yard, most of the snow had already disappeared…and now it’s raining like mad and there’s a flood warning. Aah, such is life in the Northwest. At least we had the perfect backdrop for putting up our tree :)
As for the second huzzah…on Saturday we opened Scrappedugnad, the first Norwegian challenge blog! The blog was originally the brainchild of Christine and Mari, and then they gave Ania and me an offer we couldn’t refuse! ;) We needed a good Norwegian name for the blog, so I jokingly suggested dugnad. The name stuck and it ended up being the perfect fit for a challenge blog; it was voted the Norwegian national word and means voluntary communal work :D
Our first guest challenger is Kerry Lynn Yeary, an amazing scrapbooker the four of us got to meet in Stavanger at Papirfest. Here’s my take on her challenge:
I melted the sides of the transparency so it curled up (you can’t really see it here; I had to take this photo after dark) - originally I had made a Christmas bow from the Hambly but it was humongous and caught fire when I tried to melt the edges (lol), so I had to go with something simple instead.
