Atlanta Trip

Tuesday was one of my good friend's birthday's. She turned 25 (wink, wink!). So to celebrate her birthday we took a shopping trip to Atlanta! After all, what's better for a birthday than shopping! First we went to Ikea. We LOVE Ikea! She was thinking of maybe getting a couch for her basement. In case you dont know, Ikea has the coolest furniture!! We found alot of cool couches and tried alot of them out...
This one looked very comfy!! It was my favorite! Rhonda looks very comfy too huh?


Then there was this cute little white one that she liked. She really liked the tufted back on this one. Not soft enough for me.


This little number we saw when we first came in. She liked it right off and how cool is that light above it!!! I love it!


There were so many more options too! We just couldnt decide so she decided to think about it and when she decided on one we would just have to make another trip to Atlanta. Darn the luck, another shopping trip! LOL

I also liked this really cool light! Its awesome, right?!


This would also look great in my entry way!


Even with all the oohing and ahhing I was doing I also left with nothing!
After leaving Ikea we headed to an outlet mall not far away. I was in search of some new shoes. I wore flip flops and they had really thin soles and they were killing my feet. I really wanted a pair of Teva's like Rhonda was wearing. No such luck at that mall!
Then we headed downtown to do a little shopping. I dont remember exactly where we were but we stopped in at Atlantic Grill for a little bite to eat. It was already 2:30 and we didnt want to eat alot and spoil our dinner. So we were good girls and got our veggies in. We had some green beans.

Green beans are green beans right? They still count. We wont tell anyone they were of the fried family. Shhhh!

We also got in some spinach and artichoke. See I told you we were good girls!

Just overlook the cheese and chips. I am sure its good for you!!


Upon leaving there we headed towards Dawsonville to another outlet mall. So far we had bought nothing and we were not driving all that way to come home with nothing!! Oh wait, unless you want to count a pack of plastic cups Rhonda picked up for her DH but I don't think anything under $5 really counts as a purchase right?? So by the time we get to Dawsonville its around 5:00. I give up on finding the shoes I wanted and got a pair of sandals at Bass. They were having a pretty good sale and even though they weren't what I wanted I had hoped they would give some relief to my poor feet. Of course wouldn't you know it, the very next store we went to had the flip flops I had been looking for!! That is sooo my luck! Of course, I bought them and returned to the Bass store for a refund. Rhonda also had some luck at the next few stores we went to. She ended up with two pair of capri's and two really cute tops! So see, we didn't make the trip for nothing! However buy now it was like 8 or 8:30 and we had a little over a two hour drive to get home and we still hadnt had dinner yet! I do believe I must have been tired by then because I didn't get any pictures after we got to Dawsonville. I know, shame on me!! We drove up to Dalton and ate at Chili's at about 10:00. Yea I know, supreme time for supper huh? Since it was so late we just got something light and headed on our merry way. It was almost 11:30 by the time I got home but I hope my friend enjoyed her birthday! It was a good girl's get away day!

Digital Organization

The one thing that drives me crazy more than anything is clutter! I have become more tolerable with age but it still gives me a headache, literally! When I first started scrapbooking about 13 years ago, I started out as a paper scrapper. I had my own little corner in the back of our activity room with all my stuff. I had the cute little storage cubes and all that nifty organizational stuff. Somewhere I lost all of my mojo for paper scrapping. I think partially because of the mess it made and partly because of all the stuff you had to have. There was stuff here and there and everywhere!! Then I found digital scrapbooking. It was cool because there was no mess. You didn't have to worry about leaving things out or not finishing a page before you had to put things up because you just hit save and closed your computer up! How cool is that!? Another cool thing was when I went to crops it didn't take 3 people to load all my stuff into my car. Just me and my little laptop bag was all I needed. Not to mention there are a ton of cool things you can do with your pictures! I loved it! So I started buying kits and templates and all the necessary goodies you just have to have to scrapbook digitally. I knew there had to be some kind of organization to these supplies just like when I had organized all my paper supplies. So my initial thought was after unzipping everything I would put the kits in a kit folder (with designer name and kit name) and then I would copy the contents into folders labeled papers, ribbon, etc... Sounded like a great idea to me. I could use just one kit if I wanted to or I could branch out and use different kits and still be bale to give designer credit. However, there was a couple downfalls. Downfall #1 was that I was doubling the space being taken up on my hard drive by copying all these things. Downfall #2 was that I kept buying and buying and buying and eventually my paper folder was huge! Making it still hard to find what I wanted to use. This is where the organization programs come in. I have tried Picasa and Windows Live Photo Gallery and even the trial version of ACDSee. I worked with Windows Live for a good while. I got all my kits tagged by designer name and kit name and even what type of item it was. Now just let me tell ya. I have a ton of stuff! It took me forever! So I had started tagging by color. I figure if I have everything tagged by designer, kit, type, and color that I could survive with just that for now. I was on my way! Then the unthinkable happened, at least to me anyway. Somehow I managed to delete all my tags on all my embellishments!! Its true. It happened. A true tragedy, lol! So there I was back at square one. Here I sit, still at square one and I am stuck. I can not bring myself to tag all that stuff again. There's just too much! I did go through and delete stuff that I thought I wouldn't use but there is still mountains of stuff! My mindset now is that I cant, or maybe just wont, go back and tag all that again. It was a lot of work that disappeared in a matter of seconds! I don't feel like the folder option I was using in the beginning is even close to an option for the reasons I mentioned before. I also don't feel like I could ever go back to paper scrapping. Its just way too much stuff sitting around and way too much shopping for this or that only to discover when you start doing your layout that you don't have everything that you need. I'm really not sure what my option is right now unless it is just not to scrap. I really hate that because I love to scrap and I love looking at other people's pages and I get so inspired by that! I just don't understand why a hobby has to be so much work. Paper scrapping was never this much work, even with the clean up it required or the putting away of the supplies you bought. I don't want to abandon my much loved hobby but I don't know where to go from here. Cant anyone make organization easier? A hobby is suppose to be fun and enjoyable, not more work. I'm at the end of my rope. {{sigh}}

Climbing Out!!

As every mother out there can attest to, once we become mothers we seem to take the back burner to everything. I'm not sure why we do this. Just because we are mothers doesn't mean that we shouldn't take care of ourselves. I make sure my kids get their hair cut every month. I make sure they have clothes to wear. While I go for months without a trim. Never would I have done that as a teenager or in my younger years. Do we just run out of time? That cant be it, we make time for everyone else. Aren't we just as important? When did we fall to the bottom of our importance scale?? We, or at least I, tend to spiral down this black hole until we hit the bottom and then we wonder how we got there and who that face is in the mirror staring back at us. We need to find ourselves again and climb back up out of that black hole. I think when we look better and take better care of ourselves we tend to feel better on the inside and on the outside. It gives us that confidence and self-esteem that is sometimes hard to come by. Especially when we aren't in our "prime" anymore.
I am trying to climb out of my black hole. I have started running. One day I'm gonna run that 5k! I'm no longer that pale white that I used to be, I have a little tan going on. Today, I went and got my hair cut. Not a whole overhaul or anything. Just a hair cut, but that's saying alot when you haven't had one in 6 months! I also picked up some new little make-up trinkets from this cool new store we have in town called Ulta. They have absolutely everything you can imagine in make-up, skin care, hair care, you name it! They are also the people who cut my hair. They do it all there! I love it! I also got some cool funky blue nail polish. Yes, blue...that comes into play with my mid-life crisis thing. What can I say, blue is my favorite color! It made me feel really good to do something for me for once. I haven't felt like me in a long time. Hopefully, I'm going to resurface one day! Anyone else wanna climb out with me??I bet there is a big, beautiful world out there waiting for us!

My First Post

I wanted to start this blog as a way of keeping up with my day to day life. I wanted to be able to document the things in my life as they happen and have them for future use to put on my scrapbook pages. I wanted to be able to write about my family, my page layouts, my running, my adventures in overcoming my bucket list and anything else that came to my mind or happened that day.

Who am I? There are lots of answers to that question. I am a wife and mother. My family means the world to me. My DH and I have been married 13 years and believe me we have had our ups and downs but we made it to "unlucky" 13 so if we can live through this year we're good right?? I have two boys, ages 12 and 15. My 12 year old is my baby. No matter how big he is he will always be my baby. He is also my hyperactive child! My 15 year old just got his learners permit. Took him 3 tries but you know what they say, "third times a charm". Its harder than what you think. I remember taking mine and if I had missed one more I would have failed too! We went driving today and he done alot better than I thought he would. He did a very good job of staying in his lane. We just gotta work on turning. Then I also have a 16 year old step-daughter who lives with her mom. She has a very creative mind and is very good at coming up with "her own style" of clothing. She is definitely a very creative person! Sometimes I wonder what decade she is stuck in though, lol.

I am a sister, and a daughter. I thank my mom and my brother and sisters for everything they have done for me through the years because we all know I was a handful and then some!! They never turned their back on me and I love them for that! I am also thankful to my wonderful dad, who I hope is looking down on me from heaven and knows how much he meant to me even if I didn't always show it. Teenage years are rough!

I am a friend. I hope a good friend. I hope I am a friend that you can count on. I want to be a good listener when you feel like life has gotten the best of you because it happens to all of us and we all need someone sometimes! Even if I don't know the answer or what to do at least I can listen. Hey, I never claimed to be the smartest book on the shelf, lol.

I am a faux painter and a scrapbooker. I make my money painting. We do the decorative painting. We paint just about everything that can be painted, lol. We have painted ceilings and floors, walls and cabinets, furniture of just about any kind, and even a sidewalk! I do have to say that sidewalk is one of my favorite of all time. There was a small porch that was made of brick and they wanted their sidewalk, which was concrete, to match their porch. We did it and it was alot of fun! We drove by the other day and you cant tell the difference. I wish we had gotten pictures of that but it was about 4 years ago and we didnt think about taking a picture. I know taking pictures is what scrapbookers do but lately I tend to just label myself a scrapbooker. I dont really do it, lol. I have gotten stuck in a rut and sadly I cant seem to pull myself up out of it.

I am a runner. At least I aspire to be a runner. Its part of my bucket list. Yep, a bucket list, just like in the movie. It is the first of many things I must tackle. I am trying to follow the couch to 5k training plan and hope to run my first 5k by the end of September. I have had a few set backs. First I was having problems doing what you would think would be the simplest thing of all, breathing. I know your laughing. Stop that! Its alot harder than you think. I know you come into this world breathing and you would think that it would be a natural thing. Not so much! I finally overcame that to some extent and then started having knee problems. It was like life was working against me! Im not that old am I?? So I took a week off, went to an orthopedic and gave him money to pretty much have him tell me he had no idea! Gee thanks, lol! So a few days later I returned to running. They (my knees) were doing okay and I was super happy! The next week I went for a massage. Courtesy of a gift certificate I had gotten from my boss(Thanks Rhonda!) for Christmas. By the way, my massage therapist is THE best! Her name is Diana Mayfield and if your ever in Cleveland you should definitely look her up! She'll make you feel like a new person! Anyways, She immediately knew about my knee issue and what I should do for it. I told you she was good! It apparently has to do with my bad circulation and she told me to go get some women's multi-vitamins from GNC and some extra vitmain E pills. So that is what I will be doing this week. she gave me the explanation for it but I wont type all that here. This is getting very long as it is! And to think, I thought I wasnt going to be able to think of anything to say, lol. Anyways, I am back to my training and going to take the vitamins to keep it from reoccuring. Hopefully no more set backs. I hope you guys will cross your fingers for me because I really want to do this 5k in September!

If you've stuck with me through this whole post I am really impressed because it turned out longer than I had imagined and you must be really impressed as well or you would have returned to your regular web browsing by now. Thanks for sticking with me! I hope you will return as I continue on this journey to take on life and overcome all that it throws at me. After all, thats all we can do right?