MiniBullyMom's Musings

I know that Valentine's Day has come and gone already. But I just can't resist talking about Twisted Convoy's Valentines Convoy. I spend an afternoon downloading some great stuff from the designers that participated. The links are all good until March 14th so if you have a few minutes you may want to pop in and see if anything catches your eye before it's gone.

Apparently there were some complaints about the size of a few kits (there were a couple that could be classified as "mini kits"). As such they are clarifying what is a "full-sized kit" before the St.Patrick's Convoy heads out on March 17th.

I got a combined Valentines/Birthday present today!!! A new Dell Studio 1537 laptop with all the bells and whistles I could ever want. The best part is that it's RED!!!! I'm having fun playing with it and tweaking it just so tonight. I haven't even had a chance to check out all the features on it. It was a killer deal through the Dell Outlet because someone custom ordered it then cancelled the order after the laptop was made. So we got a $1200 laptop for half price! The extended battery alone is worth $200, not to mention that it has a webcam and fingerprint reader. I can have it scan my finger instead of remembering passwords to the various sites I visit daily. Although I have decided to not utilize that feature for bill paying and financial stuff...it's cool but I just dont' trust any program that saves passwords on the computer.

About the only "bummer" out of the deal is that PSE5 and PS7 aren't Vista compatible so I now have three nice big PS text books that are no good. I'm thinking it's time to bite the bullet and upgrade to PSE7 now or figure out ACDSee's Photo Editor program. I also have to re-install Office 2009 since I use Excel and Word and they only include Works - I prefer Word over Works because I don't have to save everything twice - by default it saves everything as a "works" file so I also have to save wordprocessing documents as a "word file" if I want most people to be able to open the document later.

Go figure, it's a holiday weekend during hockey season and we have no games!!! But it will all be back to normal next weekend. Actually we decided to forgo going to a tournament this weekend because we have two next month plus playoffs. The kids have playoffs the first two weekends of March and the juniors have first round playoffs starting next week. Our association is hosting the State Squirt Festival the third week of March, we have a tournament in Bremerton the fourth weekend and host the Midget Daffodil Tournament the first weekend of April. Which means that our camping trip this weekend was the last one until Mid-April when we go to the International Crab Races in Westport.


This was also the last week of the ADSR for Brandie and I. The final challenge of ADSR4 was hosted by We Are Storytellers.com where we were challenged to create a layout with at least half the page being made up of journaling about why being a storyteller is important to us. We had to collaborate and were limited to two small photos in the lower left corner, at least five elements, no more than two papers and had to incorporate a piece of word art supplied by the challenge host.
Brandie sent Laura a photo of her and why she thinks storytelling is important. Laura took her own feelings about storytelling and combined it all into one story. We decided to keep it simple so that the journaling could be the focus of the layout as requested.
Journaling:
For the past six weeks Brandi and Laura worked together as a team to preserve twelve stories
as part of the Amazing DigiScrapping Race. They have now completed all twelve challenges and may or may not win the Grand Prize. Winning the Grand Prize is not the most important aspect of the race, it’s the satisfaction of knowing we have preserved almost a dozen individual stories for the enjoyment of future generations. These are priceless stories that we all have within us ready to be told.
Both Brandie and Laura as individuals have a passion for preserving information, photos and stories of their ancestors for future generations. When Brandie comes across a story about one of her ancestors she tries to create a scrapbook page so that future generations may know what that person was like. This is very important to her because she doesn’t know what her father’s family is like and her mother’s family is from Germany. When Laura comes across family photos and family stories she adds it to her genealogy program and posts the intormation on various family websites so that other family members can enjoy it too. Eventually Laura gets the information preserved as a scrapbook page. We both feel that when you have a story about an ancestor it becomes a way to know that person a little better, even though you have probably never actually met the person in real life.
The simple stories we record about our day-to-day life now, are the stories that future
generations will cherish for years to come.

Kit Credits:
Treasured by Liella Designs for the Trash to Treasure Freebie Hunt

Word Art provided by We Are Storytellers.com

I'm sure that it won't stick or amount to much by the time it stops but I love it when it snows. Today it's coming down in big, huge, fluffy flakes or at least it is at this moment. It's been coming down piddly all morning (so small and light you had to squint to see it) but right before lunchtime....whammo....big flakes.
Of course the kids are all in school today and I'm sure the teachers are hating it because the kids are all antsy to go outside, distracted by the snow and wondering if it is going to still be snowing when school gets out. Since we are a hockey family snow really doesn't stop us.....it's kind of like any other winter sport.....if you can't drive in the snow you shouldn't play a winter sport.
Well....lunchtime is almost over and I have to go back to work although since we are doing consults all afternoon the snow will probably play havoc with our schedule and everyone will freak out and cancel their consults if it continues to snow.

It was "Home Improvement" day at the Burress house yesterday. We divided our time between reformatting my laptop and working on a couple "home improvement" projects. We spent most of yesterday ripping out the toilet and putting in a new one. The old one turned out to be the original toilet from when they built the house. The supply line was "copper" and we had to add a flange to anchor the new toilet to the floor with...the old one had four bolts coming out of the floor that held it in place. We also put a electronic, keyless deadbolt on the front door so we don't have to worry about the kids losing their stormdoor key anymore. We can't unlock our front door from the outside because it's the original (1946) hardware and they can't make a key for it without taking the whole thing apart and taking it to the locksmith. Luckily we have a good solid storm door that locks. It's wasn't infallible but was basically one more step a burglar would have to go through then get past the alarm system. Now Mike can quit worrying about us when he is at work and we both will rest easier when the kids are home alone.

In between runs to the hardware store and working on the toilet and deadbolt we reformatted my laptop. I spent the morning transferring files to the EHD and figuring out what programs I was going to need to reinstall and which I really didnt' need. After we got it reformatted I remembered that I needed to find my PSE 5 disk so I could reinstall it. This didn't stress me out at first because Mike figured it had to be around here somewhere, well after we got thinking about it we realized it was missing.

Normally it wouldn't be an issue because I'd just go buy another copy off ebay (I don't need to have the newest version and would be happy with PSE 5 again) We looked on ebay and he suggested getting PSE7 but I got looking at the requirements and it would use up all my RAM which I wasn't willing to give up and don't want to go buy more RAM at the moment. But this morning my hubby came through, he found the copy of Photoshop 7 for me. I have been using Photoshop Elements 5 so I figured it was close enough and I could manage to get my layout done. He got a copy of it way back I was just getting the digital bug. Back then instead of going on a digiscrap kit downloading spree I went on a bookshopping spree. We had three different Photoshop 7 books laying around. Back then I ended up using Elements instead of the Photoshop 7 program because Hummiesworld had great tutorials for PSE and I couldn't find any that were geared towards using Photoshop for scrapbooking.

Long story short...it's 4:41pm and after 3 1/2 hours of working in PS7 I completed challenge #11 for ADSR 4....YAHOO!!! I've posted it below. Thank goodness it was a fairly easy one...we were limited to one photo and the journaling was limited to one question and you couldn't answer the question with the journaling. No other journaling or words other than the question. I decided to use a photo of my great-uncle Ed and his garden. After finishing the layout I've come to the conclusion that Photoshop 7.0 is a little different than PSE 6 but I can work around the quirks and will probably like it better in the end. Since I have the books for it I will probably be able to do way more (if I was so inclined) than I ever could have done with PSE.

Now that I have challenge #11 done and #12 won't come out for a day or so(and both aren't due until Sunday) I get to tackle some serious tagging in ACDSee. When we reformatted I completely spaced of backing up the database. This is the second time I've accidentally deleted the tags. The last time I did it was last summer and it wasn't that hard of a project because I cleared out alot of freebies that I didn't use. So it's going to be another "clean out and tag weekend for me. Doesn't that sound like soooo much fun. It also means I can reorganize the categories in ACDSee. This time around I've decided to sort papers by color only not colors and patterns.

You know what....I just realized that we didnt' take any photos of the guys working yesterday!! What kind of scrapbooker am I?

About a month ago I went ahead and created a Facebook page. It has been fun connecting with people I went to school with. I've even connected with some friends from elementary school. Two nights ago when checking out the photo album on one of my alma mater's I noticed that people that were the same age as me were posting alot of photos. So I started uploading some of the ones that I scanned last month. Somehow I've managed to only get some of my brother's school stuff scanned and none of mine yet. So it was fun uploading old photos of him. He will be suprised if and when he gets his own facebook page.
Ever since I joined facebook I rarely check my myspace page. Facebook is so much nicer and I like the uniformity of it. Some may hate the fact that they can't "reformat" it to match their tastes but you can still have lots of fun with the various applications that they have.