*sneeze*

That’s right, I’m sick. I started feeling a bit off on Wednesday night, and by Thursday morning I was in fever hell. The annoying thing is that it just keeps getting worse. Aaargh.

Alright, enough whining. The good thing about being sick is that I had time to work on my photobook! Ali Edwards made this oh so cool template for Shutterfly to document your everyday life.

My original plan was to have my camera with me for one whole day and take photos of all the little things we do, but since I’m sick, this wouldn’t be very interesting - no one wants to look at a book full of photos of me surrounded by mountains of tissues and Sudafed…so I moved on to plan B, which was to look through my flickr and collect all the everyday photos I could find. Lesson learned? We don’t take enough everyday photos. Even so, I really like the finished book - it tells the story of how our little family has adapted to life here in Seattle! I also got to sneak in some of my all-time favorite photos.. ;)

Yay! I can’t wait ’til I get the actual book in the mail. Bobs will be so proud that he made the cover.. :)

I’ve found a new love - snowshoeing! I was getting depressed about hiking season being over, but snowshoeing is what will get me through the winter… I just need to get outside these days; it helps me so much. When I look at where I was a year ago, I’m amazed at how far I’ve come. Back then, there were days where I just didn’t even have the energy to go outside and get the mail. I feel so much better now :)

To give us a little taste of snowshoeing, Tom and Amy took us on a gorgeous little hike on Saturday.

We walked along Denny Creek to Franklin Falls, an amazing 70-foot waterfall. Our camera was too fogged up to get any good photos of the falls, but I’m hoping Tom got some good shots. I’ll probably get to see them sometime in 2011 when he’ll finally get around to posting them…

Monday was Martin Luther King Day, so JK, Amy and I drove to Paradise to snowshoe on Mt. Rainier. The weather was frickin’ amazing.

It was just one of those absolutely perfect days. I love that we live only two hours from the most beautiful place on earth :)

The first (of manymanymany) layouts from our little adventure:

The lyrics on the photo are from No Ceiling by Eddie Vedder. Not that I’m obsessed with his album or anything.

This layout was for Minnopol at Minneriket - we were supposed to make a layout about our ten least favorite things. I didn’t want to marinate in all the negativity, so I made a silly little page about Bobs instead. Doesn’t he look vicious?

Every month, Erin Lincoln puts together one of my favorite columns over at CKOnline - Start to Finish - where you get a peek into a scrapbooker’s creative process. This month it was my turn to ramble on about my layout, you can go here and see it!

I even used…shock! Horror! Jolee’s stickers! I’ve never used anything like that before, so I had a lot of fun. I think I’m getting into themed products…

I was reading about Staci’s adventures in Diet Coke addiction and thought I should mention my own little victory - I quit the evilness (aka Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi) cold turkey last week! I had two and a half days of absolutely bitching migraines (and visions of babies crawling across the ceiling), but now I don’t even have any cravings. And get this - I sleep through the night. Eh? Eh? Yeesh, I’m proud. I haven’t slept this well in years.

Now if only I could stop eating chocolate and potato chips…

Aaah, there’s nothing a little creative break, a holiday party (and too many Cosmopolitans, ugh) and some fresh air can’t fix. I feel much better now!

Alright, photo and layout time. My parents gave JK this hat for Christmas (well, he picked it out himself and everything), and I just love it. Men need to start wearing hats again!! Anyway, this is us before JK’s office holiday party - great night!

…and since the sun made an appearance on Sunday, we went back to Tiger Mountain again. I was regretting those extra Cosmos..

On to Label Tulip - this kit is sweeeet, the colors are just so cool! The little rub-on puppy made me think of Chester, and since I never got to take a photo of him, I used the rub-on instead. It was important for me to remember little Chester - our albums can’t just be about the happy things in life.

To get my journaling in a half-circle, I used Jessica Sprague’s template that you can download for free here.

This one looks much better in real life, I couldn’t get the colors or dimensions or anything right in the photo. Oh well!

This month’s Label Tulip challenge was to scrapbook a question or debate…so I chose to write about how I will know if we’re ever ready to have kids! The photo is of me with Karianne - she was days away from giving birth, and seeing her like that suddenly activated some sort of scary pregnancy hormone in my body! It’s calmed down since… ;)

This year for Ali’s word of the year challenge, I orginally chose UP. After thinking about it for a while, I ended up using CLIMB instead; it just sounds more proactive. I want to climb in 2008, both literally and figuratively :)

The thing about depression is that even when you feel you’ve been doing really well for a really long time, it will suddenly sneak up on you and just suck the life out of you all over again.

Bah.

I’m trying to hang in there by scrapbooking (usually the best therapy), but I seem to have come down with Reverse Midas Syndrome - everything I touch turns to crap. Therefore I’m posting some old stuff instead, starting with two layouts from my SoY entry. The first is one of the eight previously seen layouts:

…and this is one of the 12 new ones I made:

Both of them are from our honeymoon in India. I wanted to keep the India layouts cohesive, so I decided to use the same fonts (from Quickutz) throughout the whole album, as well as sticking to easy, simple designs (most of the time, heh). Some other double-spreads:

This is not a typo; we were looking forward to drinking coconut water but it tasted like arse:

I also make one-pagers for the album:

This is a lift of Rebecca Cooper:

Alright, that took all the energy I have right now. Off for some me-time.

We’ve spent the day (ok, at least the last couple of hours - first we spent several hours watching Bender’s Big Score, including a full length episode of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad. Heeeh.) cleaning the kitchen and stocking up on fruit and veg. Must be January.. ;)

I am still going strong in the layout-a-day challenge! The first one has been taking up space on my table as a half-finished mess for ages, so yesterday I finally assembled it and added a few extra touches (I love the little Heidi Grace tulip rubons!). It was all I could muster up the energy for whilst battling an Evil Headache:

…and today I went hybrid (for the non-scrappers: hybrid scrapbooking is where you combine digital scrapbooking with good old-fashioned paper) with this layout from Zion National Park:

Alrighty, I can’t think of anything else to say right now. Carry on!

…and answered by giving us amazing views that day after my whiny post. We took my parents up on Tiger Mountain and ate lunch in front of Rainier:

…and then spent New Year’s Day in Discovery Park looking at this:

My parents went back to Norway on Thursday and now the house feels really empty…so I’m really throwing myself into Lain’s Layout-a-day Challenge! The page I made the first day is too fugly to show here (methinks a remake is in order), so here’s day two, inspired by this page by Sara Dickey:

Day three:

…aaand day four (yes, I’m hooked on the Making Memories clips. And circles. And rounded corners. Yes, all my layouts look the same.):

A final note for the non-scrapbookers who read my blog (specifically the Norwegians; most Americans seem to have a good idea of what scrapbooking is) - when my parents were here I learned that even though they see almost all of the layouts I make online, they had no idea what I actually do with them. My dad thought I either put them up on the wall (our house would pretty much be wallpapered by now…) or just keep them on the computer. So, I’m here to tell you that all the crap I make is basically just a pimped out photo album. Here are two pages from my hiking/backpacking/whatnot-album:

Ok - the insane wind just cut off our electricity. Gaah! I’ll have to use the laptop as a flashlight and stumble up the stairs to go to bed. Wish me luck!