case to convert former PC 80GB hard drive to EHD - $40
new 120GB for additional back up - $99
multi USB hub - $25
saving 98% of your data when your system crashes - priceless

Outlook's archive function - useless

been working on a new product

I was just going to make some word art but then suddenly "The MUSE IS UPON ME!" (guess who said that. hint: mel brooks movie) and I ended up making a set of 43 candy heart stamps in assorted colors & phrases. They will be up at 1hourscrap.com next week and I'll be running a special for Feb 7-9. A couple stamps will be the daily download each day for you to sample and the complete set will be 20% off for those 3 days. Plus they will also be on sale the first week they are up so you have 9 days to get these stamps at 20% off.



Now I am working on the 'love' word art I had originally planned on doing. That will be going up soon with a couple pieces available on the daily download as well.

one word

This Moment: exasperated (with the boys)
Your Shoes: slippers
Craving: silence
The State of Your Home: cleanish
Annoyed By: sons
Noise In the Background: sons
Really Want To: organize
Thinking about: shopping
Smelling: coffee
Favorite Product In Office Supply Aisle: notebooks
Don't Ever Want To: camp
Your Eye Color: greenish
The Weather: cold
Have Never Tried: bungee-ing
Think Everyone Should Try: sushi
Last Vacation Destination: Flordia
The Last Thing You Had to Drink: coffee
Your Bad Habit: coffee
What You're Going To Do Now: laundry

tagging is tedious

very very tedious, but I can already tell how handy it will be. Lately I have been doing layouts with lots of stuff on them, stuff from many sources rather than sticking with just one kit and tracking down that string of beads I remember seeing somewhere is a PITA. Plus as I was going through it I kept thinking "I have that? Why haven't I used that?" So I'm hoping it will cut my spending way back too. I've done all my 1hour stuff and am about halfway through my 'new' kits folder, which is stuff I have bought but haven't used. I'm dreading hitting the rest of the kit folders, let alone the embellishment ones. I'm doing pretty good though. I started with general categories and a 'various' one and every so often I stop & go through the various category & create more categories off of it. I'm not doing it by color right now. Just by description - brad, rivet, paper, ribbon, with some subcategory stuff - ribbon bows, square brads, word art on tags. The problem I can forsee is having too many categories to be useful for searching. We'll see I suppose.

Geez do I have a lot of flowers & floral things. I use some them on the boys layouts but I really wish designers would do more boyish elements - cards, vehicles, balls,tools, dirty/rusty things.

an up and down sort of day

On the downside...overdrafts worth $450 were posted. DHs employer had some glitch or something with their payroll people & the direct deposits didn't go through so they had to cut everyone checks. The 15th was MKL day so the banks were closed. DH was out somewhere all day on the 16th, so it was the 17th before the check was deposited. After 2pm. GGGRRRR...On the 17th his truck payment, our auto insurance & the electric bill were all auto debited. And they posted before the check. Fortunately the overdraft protection just removed the money from savings with no fees but it's still irritating.

On the upside...my new EHD arrived. It's so *tiny*. Its a Western Digital Passport drive. 120GBs, USB powered. I can so easily take it & my laptop over to my recliner in the evenings. Woohoo!! even better news, my monitor shipped back to me today!!!! It'll probably be the end of next week before it gets here but it is fixed and on its way back!!!!

I'm working on a quick page pregnancy album. I haven't decided yet if it will cover 4 week or 6 week periods. I want it to be 12 pages. 6 weeks would give me 5 pages for specialty stuff like the nursery, the ultrasound, the name search etc. 4 weeks would only give me 2 pages. So the tags are all blank & I also haven't decided whether to fix the word art or leave it on separate .pngs. I like versatility but I also want this to be an instant album - all you have to think about really is what photo & your journaling.

I've been doing well with my scrapping. DSP has had some really fun challenges and DSD is rocking with them. Between the 2 sites I have about 18 challenges I want to try to do by the end of the month. But everything is on hold now that I have my EHD. I've been slowly tagging things, but I'v been waiting for the new drive to really get going. ACDSee is now copying all my digi stuff to the new drive(its been about an hour so far) & I am going to take the next 3 days to focus on tagging. Now that the drive can come with me to the recliner or the bedroom I have more time to work on it.

Do you think you can sing? In front of people or just in the car?

No I cannot sing & I have no illusions about that. I've never been able to sing. I can just sort of carry a tune, but I have no range at all. I only sing in large groups where my vocal inadequacies are not that noticeable. Or when I have been drinking (And so has everyone else). I can't watch American Idol because I get so embarrassed for those people.

I've become my mother again

Tomorrow is Bunco night. The theme is the 80's. I can do the 80's. I am in fact embarrassed by the sheer number of clothing items I own that can be assembled for an 80's look. (and the thing is I purge my closet regularly, where do these wide belts come from and just *where* were those stirrup pants hiding anyway?). I have a few looks to choose from but I am thinking that the Flashdance thing is what I want to go for - leggings, a tank, scrunched up socks & a cut up, off the shoulder sweatshirt. I even have a sorority letter sweatshirt from 1987 to use.

Then it happened. I became my mother.

I got out the scissors, picked up the sweatshirt and said, out loud to myself, "Why are you ruining a perfectly good sweatshirt, cutting it up like that?" Which is exactly what my mom said 20+ years ago when I was getting ready to cut up a high school logo sweatshirt. Suddenly I was 18, in our kitchen, listening to Duran Duran, using my mom's "good scissors" & feeling guilty for cutting up a good shirt.

I did however continue to cut now as I did then.

What do you have faith in?

[i]"Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase."
Martin Luther King, Jr.[/i]

I have faith in the existence of the Divine. A higher power does exist & its the same being no matter what you call him/her. I have faith that the majority of the people you meet are good & decent people just trying to get through their day as best they can - just like you. I have faith in myself, that in the end I can find some way to cope. These things keep me going every day.

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In other news I saved up $150 toward the Red Dwarf DVD collection that I want. It is anywhere from $180-250 depending on where you buy it. but I'm also saving toward a new EHD. I want a USB powered 2.5" one. Something little I can take with me into the bedroom. My current EHD must be plugged into the wall & is a big heavy sucker. I was thinking of getting a 250gb drive, so I'm looking at $200-250 for that. There have a been a lot of threads in various places about 'how many gigs of scrapping stuff do you have?' which has made me really look at how much I have. I got rid of a bunch of stuff a couple months ago. So I sat & added up the digi stuff, the photos, the PSP stuff, the music & the audiobooks. Really, a 250Gb EHD is overkill. My 80GB EHD is not quite half full with all the stuff I have & I move stuff off regularly. I also have the trial of ACDSee & am tagging things so the EHD is on my mind. So when I found a 120GB 2.5" USB powered EHD for $99 yesterday - I bought it. I was going to get the videos first but I have them in VHS & can watch them in the bedroom if I really need to. It should arrive by the end of the week.

I got some new products uploaded to 1hour scrap. A set of quick pages & some desktop wallpaper calendars. They should be available sometime this week. The wallpaper is available in the standard 1024x768 and I also did a set in the more widescreen 1280x800 size as well. I have a widescreen monitor & am always having to resize desktop wallpaper.

not so perfect

You know those commercials for facial cleanser on tv? The ones where the woman with the perfect complexion is in a perfectly white terry cloth robe, in her perfectly clean bathroom, with her hair perfectly held back from her face in a perfect knot or perfectly smoothed back by a headband, no random hairs sticking up in little tufts making her look like a guest alien on Star Trek. She has one of those beautiful bowl sinks that look gorgeous but takes up all your available counter space. It's perfectly clean, no water spots or toothpaste smears, & is on a smooth equally perfectly clean counter top. She gets the tube for cleanser from some unspecified location (can't tell where but there is no counter space for it so there must be a hanging shelf somewhere), washes her face and leans forward, cups her hands full of water & in one perfect motion, splashes the cleaners off of her face. No water splashes on the counter or gets in her hair or dribbles down her arms, soaking the robe. Then you see her with her hair down, dabbing at her face with a thick white towel.

Why can't I ever wash my face like that? Even considering that I have no bathrobe, & my sink is molded into my 15 year old bathroom counter, with water stains, and none of my towels are white (and many are not thick) and my hair does stick up around my headband so I do resemble an extra in the Star Wars canteena scene (especially once I get the cleanser on my face), you'd think after a couple decades practice I would be able to splash water on my face without it going all over the counter, the floor & myself. Really. Cup water, lean forward, bring hands to face at full horizontal position. But no.

Describe your sleeping style. Are you a side sleeper, snoring on your back sleeper, wake at the slightest sound sleeper, sprall across the bed and sleep through an earthquake sleeper? Spill your secrets!

I am a side sleeper, generally my right side. I also have to have a body pillow to prop my leg/knee up on or I wake up in the middle of the night with a pain in my hip. I roll around a bit during the night. I cannot fall asleep on my own or stay asleep either. This has been going on since I got pregnant in Jan 2002. I started taking Lunesta for it in Nov 2005. Lunesta helps me fall asleep & for the most part, stay asleep. Providing no small boys come into my room, climb in bed and proceed to poke or kick me for an extended period of time (like last night for example). I am generally coherent enough to understand what is going on & can respond to things verbally if I am awakened in the night but physically I am like a drunk, stumbling around from wall to wall, grabbing anything I can find for support. I am not a light sleeper on Lunesta but not a deep sleeper either.

yeah warranty!!

My monitor is still under warranty!!!! I swung by DH's office & got a box for it. Now it is swathed in bubble wrap and packed in those air bag thingys Amazon has been using lately. I have several dozen of them. They are ALL in the box. No one is going to accuse me of shoddy packing! I'll ship it UPS tomorrow. They said if they cannot fix it then they will send me a new one. Given that the screen is all black with occasional green flashed (very Christmas light effect) I'm thinking I'll be getting a new one.

resolutions

My resolutions for 2007...out here for the whole world to see & reply when I screw up on them:)

1. Serve better & more interesting side dishes. I have a whole post around here somewhere about my food resolutions, but the side dish thing is the one I am really focused on.

2. Lose 20lbs. This involves exercising more & eating less & better. I already go to the gym 3x a week, but I am going to up the strength training & weights & increase cardio. I'm also going to try to get a 4th day in whenever possible (even if that means going on a weekend). eat less is pretty self explanitory.

3. Journal more - online, in my layouts, in the boys' books and in my 5 year journal. I was really good about that journal in 2004 & 2005, but 2006 has been very sporadic. I blame getting more sleep. I started it when I was sleepless & forgetful, now I am sleeping & remembering more events so I'm less inclined to write them down.

4. Stick to the budget. There is another post around here about the odd tendacy since about April for there to be a random, unexpected $500 cost every month. Auto repairs, medical expenses, power surge blowing out thing, etc. Plus we were randomly going over budget on stuff anyway, so the last few month have been hard financially. We revised the budget & are moving forward. The $500 expense thing appears to be continuing - our dryer is taking 2-3 tumbles to dry a load it used to do in 1. We cleaned out the vents, pulled it out from the wall & cleaned out the ducts in the wall. Nothing is helping. The dryer still works though & until it is actually defunct we are not getting a new one. But every time I do a load of wash (every day) I am reminded of our need to save money toward a new one.