Live in Color

Yesterday I did a quick scrapbook page that I'd like to share:

This colorful page is a perfect celebration of Sarah and how colorful, zany, and wonderfully weird she is. What a great friend.
She and I had a long and much needed talk today and I am just so happy to have her.

Bits n' Pieces of Happiness

With some of the stressful things going on lately, it's time to focus on a little bit of happiness. I read this today -

10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy

The first one is very appropriate right now:

I have been finding a lot of cheer lately in little things... a frappucino at Starbucks... a good conversation with a friend... making a scrapbook page... getting a new laptop bag that I love! I really think they key to not getting depressed is being able to recognize these little things and be happy about them. Apparently I've been REALLY happy about them. When I got a bunch of my scrapbook pages printed and put them in my album, I hugged it. Hahaha. And when I got my new laptop bag and it turned out to be even more wonderful than I thought... well, I hugged that too! I felt a little silly getting so happy about little things... but reading this article today showed me that it is actually a good thing. So, let's celebrate that... here's some of my new scrapbook pages I've done recently:

And here is my new -Pink!- laptop bag! I just love this bag. A digi-scrapper's dream!

Now it might not be everybody's cup of tea, but I am just loving it. Besides being cute, it has more pockets than I could ever need and it's really great quality. It is cheering me up and I just want to find some place to go hang out tomorrow so I can use the bag and take my laptop somewhere! :)

One more thing that is really making me happy is this blog that just started January 1st... It's all about digital scrapbooking. And it is so chock full of awesome things every single day. It brings a HUGE smile to my face. In fact, this article about happiness was posted on THERE today! That's where I found out about it and that gave me such a pick me up :) If anybody is interested, here's the site - The Daily Digi.

In other news... I think I might have my very first client for my teaching business! My friend Christine who is a digital designer has a good friend who would like to learn digi scrapping. I told her I am not totally set up & ready yet, but that I would gladly teach her friend for half price if she doesn't mind sort of being my guinea pig and letting me sort of figure things out as we go along. I'm waiting to hear back about all of that, but it looks pretty promising. It would be such a great experience for me to have a person to teach as "practice" so to speak.

Hard Drive Drama & New Layouts

Friday night I had the girls over. I made meatball subs with my crock pot (they were just ok I think) and we were all setting out to accomplish various projects. I was going to work on my save the date cards... printing out the addresses, and the additional brunch cards, etc. Before I got started, they wanted me to put the flower photos on my computer to look at them. When I went to do that, I opened my iPhoto library and it was EMPTY!!!!! I was freaking out thinking that my photos were all gone!!!! Luckily they are still there, but the XML file that tells iphoto how to find the photos and how they are organized - that file got corrupted. So I will have to import all my photos again and re-organize them. It could have been worse but EEEK. My external hard drive was the cause of this... it has been acting funky for a couple of weeks and causing my iPhoto to freeze a lot. So right now I am not even plugging in the external hard drive because I don't want this to happen to my OTHER iPhoto library where I keep my scrapping supplies. That one would be a BITCH to re-organize!!!!!

I did a LOT of research about external hard drives because Ian's also did this to him a while back so I am done with Western Digital. We think the reason is the type of USB connector, with the small end that's actually on the hard drive being the problem. It just doesn't hold up well to someone using it ALL the time. I am ordering one that will allow me to use FireWire 800 (which should be super fast AND more secure of a connection.) Here's what I'm getting:

The LaCie Rugged 500GB External Hard Drive

(I got it for $100 less on NewEgg.com)

This drive has gotten unbelieveable reviews. All the other hard drives I looked at were hit or miss with half of the people saying they had no problems, and the other half of people saying they had problems just like mine. This is the only drive where no one complained of it failing after a few months. One guy even said he carried it around the WORLD in his backpack WITHOUT A CASE and it still worked perfectly. That's why they call it RUGGED! :)

I don't really dig the bright orange (it's even brighter in person), but luckily you can buy other color rubber sleeves to put on it. I tried to get one at the Apple store last night but they only have the 250gb, and they even called all the local stores for me to check. Oh well... it's ok but now I have to wait a few more days before I can DO anything about this! I was on such a roll with my scrapbooking, and now I am just sitting here not able to do any. Can't work much on my business stuff either, because I need my digital kits to work with to do screenshots and stuff for my lesson plans. GRRRRRR! I can't wait to get the new drive, get things transferred, do what I need to do to be up and running and organized again, and get back to work!!

At least I did manage to get some more scrapbook pages done before this happened. Here are the newer ones that I haven't posted yet:

I am really happy with these pages! Yay! And I miss my scrapping. I hope I'm up and running soon.

Finished Scrapping 2007! Well, Kinda :)

I am officially done with scrapping 2007 now...as long as you don't count my separate Greece & Turkey album! That one will still take quite a while. There was one empty page in my 2007 book and I finally threw this one together:

Nothing too special, but at least I'm DONE!!! Whoo hooo!

Now it's not as though I am just now getting started scrapping 2008... I've already done quite a few! But now it can be my focus. I am really hoping to get caught up, since you know, it's 2009 now. Haha!

Here are the new ones I've gotten done, from early 2008:

Pretty good for this week so far! I am glad to be getting things done. Next on the list is to finish my engagement pictures (from the day of getting engaged, not the portraits done later, those are already scrapped.) Just one more 2-pager to do with those. I do want to keep working on my Greece & Turkey book too. I think I might try to focus on that every time I get together with Kellie, so at least once a week I'll work on that album and the rest of the time I can keep catching up on 2008 :)