MiniBullyMom's Musings

Life has been real crazy at our house this past weekend for me. I worked out at the Washingtonian's for Wildlife Conservation booth at the Fair on Thursday night, Friday the dogs went to the vet for some long overdue checkups. Hemi has been limping due to a strained muscle and Tina apparently has an ear infection and a urinary tract one. So $150 in prescriptions later they are both on the mend. Although I have discovered that pet medications are definintely cheaper online!!! If I had purchased them online they would have only cost me about $50. But I did save over $600 on their checkups by joining Banfield Animal Hospital's Wellness Plan. We signed up for the Basic plus for Tina since it includes a yearly teeth cleaning. We signed Hemi up for the Basic this year and will swap it over to the Basic Plus next year. Kiwi isn't signed up yet but we will probably sign her up next year. They all needed shots and boosters this year and Kiwi will be due for boosters next year. We had plans to go watch Daniel's (Christina's best friend) football game but we got out of the vet to late. I spent Saturday doing stuff around the house, grocery shopping, relaxing and reading and promptly fell asleep around 11pm.
This morning I decided that some of the yardwork on the street side of the house needed to get done. It has beauty bark and as such every few years we need to replace all of it. About two years ago the waterline broke and they had to tear out part of the retaining wall and a 3 foot trench across the sideyard to the house. We should have redid the beauty bark after that but didn't. Then this summer I decided that we either needed to redo the bark this fall or rip up all the overgrown weeds and plant grass. I figured either way we needed to rip out the weeds so I got started on it. five hours later I had it about a third of the way done with the hardest part of it being knocked out. While doing all of it I decided that we would plant grass instead of beauty bark. This is the best time of the year to plant it because the root system has until next summer to develop. I also realized that if we do beauty bark I'd probably be weeding and that grass was just easier to mow. 
Now every night this week (rain or shine) I'm going to have to be out there finishing up the project and getting the grass seed planted before it gets much cooler during the daytime.

...are in full swing everywhere else but here. Every year I tell myself that life will slow down when hockey season winds down but it never seems to do that. I think it's because we put off doing a bunch of stuff until the "off-season". Toss in a family reunion, garage roofing, upgrading some wiring, reseed or rebark half the lawn on top of all the normal stuff we do during the summertime. It just gets overwhelming and then we do a bit of this and a bit of that. The scary part is that none of it gets totally done. But I can say that about 10 other "little projects" that aren't part of the big projects do end up getting done.
One of the major "little projects" I recently completed was unzipping, organizing 7 gigs of digital scrapbooking stuff. I still have 3 gigs left, although I did clean out over 15 gigs of freebies that I never bothered to unzip/use in anyway. I've about decided that I'm only going to download what I'll use and that I can't download something else until I use what I downloaded last. Not sure how long I'll last with that mindset but I fully admit that digiscrapping is an addiction. I knew that I was taking a chance five years ago when I started paper scrapping and now I'm three years into digiscrapping. But I have well over 200 pages completed (although I've only printed about 50) and have started a Family Scrapbook for one branch of my family.
Now hockey season is starting up and I've decided that the constant "scheduling" we do during those 8 months help me stay on task and as a result I get more done. Go figure I guess I need the structure not free time.
Although I do admit that I get more scrapping done when we go camping during the wintertime. I think it's because generally it's just my husband and I camping without anyone else and we just relax and don't have the internet to distract us.
Now about those big projects....I think I need to make sure we complete at least one of them before the end of the year. I need to make a New Years Resolution in the middle of August to complete the garage roof this year - since we've talked about getting it done for the past two years - and now that I've made a resolution I need to get to work on it.....well after I finish organizing/tagging two more digital kits and worked on the mental planning on the next layout I'm going to complete using some photos we took at the Corn Maze about 5 years ago.

Well we have done a ton of work in the backyard this summer. We decided to hold Christina's graduation party at home. The first photo is of the garage where a huge Pampass Grass plant used to be. Mike hated it from about the second year we had it. I loved it but realized after 10 years that it had performed it's original function and was tired of it's leaves getting mowed over. So we decided to rip it out. That turned out to be a major project in itself. It took a chain saw, electric hedger, axe, pick axe and shovel to get it out of there. The plant reached all the way over to the tiki torch on the right and about a foot past the tiki torch on the left. You can actually see a patch of dirt between the torches where the plant actually covered/laid over the lawn. We ended up planting four short pyramidalis trees along the old fence to hide the neighbor's garage. I finally gathered together my three beach logs and tied them into a piling (this was a project I wanted to get done last year) and hung the buoys we found at the beach also to create my beach scene. I have glass floats resting on a "stump" of wood we found another time in the flower bed that is the just out of the photo on the right hand side.

The toilet "arrangement" is the newest thing I did to drive my hubby crazy. We ripped it out of the bathroom this past winter because it was leaking. You just can't toss them in the garbage here but they will take them at the dump. Well it was the original toilet to the house and the only reason we took it out was because we couldn't retrofit the "guts" of it inside the tank. So I decided to plant it. I placed it in a hidden corner of the yard and filled it with "Impatients" of all things. Every guy who sees it just shakes their head but the women think it was a neat idea. One of my friends even fessed up that she was thinking about doing the same thing with one they had. Two weeks later we went to her house and lo and behold she had done it. Our husbands think we are both weird.


This is the last section of the backyard that we need to finish up. We have been storing campfire wood under the tarp and after we finish reroofing/painting the garage Mike will probably build a covered storage bin for it. We have debated making an arbor or gazebo to cover this deck but resisted so far since we have a covered patio attached to the little garage closer to the house -yes we have two garages in our backyard. I'm leaning towards an arbor of some sort because that would allow sun through but I'm just not quite convinced I really want to do that. We need to pressure wash, stain and fix the lattice work that runs along the sidewalk. The only reason we really don't sit out on that patio is that everyone across the street can see that deck because they are on a hill and it faces their front yards. The other patio provides lots of shade and has electrical outlets. I'm actually sitting at the bar on the covered patio as I blog. The next priority is getting this big garage roof shored up, reroofed and replace all the wiring in it. We are hoping to shore it up in September and immediately get it roofed before the "rainy season" hits in full force. Luckily we can roof half at a time and be okay. We bought the shingles off Craigslist and have then stacked in the small garage, the plywood and 2x4's are in the big one and now I'm hunting down tar paper and deals on flashing. Next summer we should be able to repaint the big garage to match the house, put a peaked roof on the little garage, rewire it and complete turning it into an oversized shed.


Now to get back to digiscrapping. My daughter is a huge Tim Burton fan and when I saw this new kit created by "Digital Reality" it reminded me of the photos I've seen of Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter in the new Alice in Wonderland movie Tim Burton is filming. You can check out the entire kit at Divine Digital. There is an absolutely awesome string of paper lanterns in the kit.

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?