Since most of the people who read this thing come here for scrapbook talk, not my incessant babbling about hiking, here are some layouts! Both of them are about JK and his, ehm, maturity level… ;)

This is from the dinosaur track discovery museum we stopped by in St. George, Utah on our way back from the Grand Canyon last year. JK was in heaven and it gave me an excuse to use these freakin’ adorable dinosaur products from BasicGrey:

…and this one is from my SoY entry last year. JK bought an RC chopper and regressed into childhood for about a day or so until the chopper crashed and broke:

Let’s all hope he never stops being a boy (*aaaaaaaaaawww*)!

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:

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

So Creating Keepsakes is getting a makeover, and they’re posting teasers every day this week. Today they showed the new cover (with the lovely Liz as the cover girl!) and I just love it. Especially the color scheme! So I had to sneak some time for a quick layout inspired by the colors on the cover.

Huh. I just realized I’ve finally stopped writing color with a ‘u’. I guess I’ve lived in the U.S. long enough to let go of my British tendencies now.

Anyway, here’s is the cover and my layout:

Speaking of magazines, I got my copy of the Norwegian scrapbooking magazine Vi Scrapper in the mail on Saturday (thank you girls!!) and I loved it as usual. Heh, for this issue they interviewed me about the SoY contest, and look at the article opener they made – that’s hilarious!

…and speaking of SoY, The Dreaded Interview was posted on SiSTV today…fortunately it is not as embarrassing to watch as I had feared, so I’ll even give you the link. I think you have to register/log in to watch it: video #53.

…and speaking of..ehm..scrapbooking? Here is a mini sneak peek of the new Label Tulip kit (sorry about the grain, it’s dark in here!):

Ugh, I’ve had a really bad week, headache-wise. I get these really evil migraines that just last for days on end so I basically can’t do anything even remotely productive. I’ve spent the whole week sleeping and listening to podcasts. Seriously. Ugh.

Anyway, I cranked out a couple of quick layouts tonight while watching The Office. The first one is for Lain Ehmann’s Thirty-Minute Thursday challenge – this is the third one I’ve participated in and I love them. This week’s thaang is to use old photos, so I found these shots of my brother and I – I love the first one; it is so descriptive of how little sisters always look up to their big brothers. So I wrote about that.

The layout itself is borderline fugly, but I had fun :o)

The next one is a remake of one of my SoY-layouts – the photos and journaling were printed wrong on the version I sent in and I didn’t have time to fix it, so I decided to print it out again today and add some new paper. And journaling spots. And handwriting. And a new title. But the general idea is the same. Heh.

(You’ll see that I am still going strong on that one sheet of BasicGrey letter stickers…this means I still haven’t moved the rest of my stash out of storage. Because I’m lazy like that.)

I’m going to bed now, but here’s a little nugget for the Bobby fans out there (so basically it’s just for Siv Katrine :D) -this is what he sounds like when he wants attention. Do you see what I have to put up with?? Gosh.

Camilla asked if I could show my SoY entry, so I’ve uploaded part of it here. We had to submit 20 layouts (12 of them had to be brand new and couldn’t have been posted on teh intarwebs before) plus a one-page essay describing our “ideal day”. I am keeping most of the layouts private for now in case I want to submit some of them for publishing (and there are a couple that I’m not happy with and want to touch up – since I made eleven of the twelve new layouts in three days, there are some fugly ones in there! Heh.), but here are six of the ones I’m sure I’m not going to ever submit to a magazine.

One thing I noticed as I was sorting through these now was that the ones I want to submit are the ones with multiple photos (and several spreads) and descriptive journaling. I think I’m really over the single-photo-no-real-journaling layouts. When I looked through my albums this summer, those layouts just seemed so boring compared to the ones that really tell a story. Anyhoo, here goes:

Hmm, there seems to be a bit of a pink/green/brown color scheme going on here.

I guess I can post my essay as well – I wrote this at four in the morning so I could make it before the deadline, so be kind! :D

My ideal day would be what most people would consider very mundane; basically I would be able to do exactly what “most people” do. I would not be (for fear of sounding overly dramatic) shackled by the chains of depression, I would wake up feeling ready to take on anything. In other words, I would feel like myself again.

Looking at this list, I realize that all of these things are either already happening or right at my fingertips (except for my husband being home with me all day – must remember to play the lottery soon!). I am not longing for any exotic, faraway countries or impossible dreams; I simply want my own ordinary life. I just want to feel free inside my soul as I am living it. I want to live without stopping myself, and I want to know that all this is within reach if I simply adjust my mind.

If I had written that essay a month later, it would just say “hiking hiking hiking”. Things change quickly, eh?