HAPPY 2009 EVERYBODY!!

Time simply flies, I'm trying to do too much, or we can simply blame it on slowing down with age ("the hurrier I go, the behinder I get"); but as you can see, I've been MIA for over a month again and so very unintentional. My desire is to be a good blogger, I have lots to share. However, I've never been accused of being highly organized or fast. That's probably because the free spirit side of my creativity makes a lot of mess and then the other twin side of my Gemini tries to be a perfectionist at the same time! Anybody out there understand or have a cure for this??

Hang in here with me, I've got a good digi-scrap freebie for you tonight at the end of this post! I won't torture you too long with too much chatter tonight but will bring you up to speed with my absence on here for the last month.

Remember, the holidays were fast approaching when I last posted.....I hope yours were merry, full of wonderful family memories now, and celebrated around knowing the reason for the season.....the birth of Jesus Christ, our Savior. We attended wonderful church services here in our coastal city amid congregations of thousands, and yet our perception of it is always warm and personal. Our pastor is amazing at knowing his flock individually no matter how large it becomes, simply a wonder to me. All of my family chooses to attend the contemporary services. They are casual, come as you are. It is not hell's fire and brimstone preaching, rather storytelling from the scriptures by a very enthusiastic minister done in a manner which instills the point of the story into you by the time you leave and you have absorbed and related that point and how it applies to your everyday life now. This manner of ministering is much more appealing and understood by young and old alike. We love it!!

Next, I accomplished the completion of ten digi-scrapped albums of 20+ pages each, size 8 x 8" as gifts this year! Wow! I was proud of me! Each was different and particular to the person who received it. I had my pages professionally printed by http://www.winkflash.com/ and I can't say enough great things about them and my satisfaction level! They were super, fast service during the last weeks of rushing, and the quality was superior! I am going to write them a letter of thanks and customer satisfaction that they will want to post on their site! I bombarded them all at once with my mega orders over a three day period beginning as late as Dec. 10th and running one order in on them as late as Dec. 17th. Everything arrived back to me in time to be neatly wrapped and distributed under everybody's tree by Christmas Eve, even the ones I had to ship. I had also scrapped a 4 x 6" Christmas card for my daughter to use of her and her 2 yr. old son Mason and Santa Claus on tree lighting night in the park, ordered 80 of those at $.06 each; dressed the new ferret up in her Christmas sweater and hat and snapped that shot to include in the Christmas cards, and captured all three of my grandchildren all dressed up one Sunday morning on their way to Sunday School (lined them up like crows on my fouton and forced them to smile for the picture)! So at 6 cents each for the 4 x 6" shots we were able to catch all of our friends and relatives up beautifully in our Christmas mailings. I even ordered a last minute photo calendar for my parents because it was on sale for half price and I caught a glimpse of that while placing my last photo order. How could I pass that up? My folks are an 8-hour drive from us and their great-grandchildren and 80 and 85 yrs. old (not getting down to visit as frequently as we would like them to do because they can't schedule time away from their ever rotating revolving doctor appointments between the two of them!)! I hadn't planned on this calendar and therefore didn't have the pictures for it edited or ready when I saw the half-price sale was to end in 30 minutes - YIKES! I decided I had to "go for it", made a quick decision to use my some of my scrapped pages of their great-grandchildren as the monthly photos and cover photo. The June photo was the only one I decided to scrap up at the last minute because I had a picture of my 2-yr. old grandson sitting up on a huge green John Deer tractor with his red sunglasses on and his favorite purple string of beads around his neck. I knew my 80 yr. old mom would appreciate this snapshot scrapped and on her month of June when she will be riding her smaller John Deer grass mower over her two acre city-ranch spread! Each month had a special scrapped photo page pertaining to any holiday that month, etc. I had Winkflash mail it directly to my parent's address, and I got their feedback as soon as it was delivered. They had to look at each month of it while I was on the phone with them and oogled, laughed, and thanked me profusely for such a great and handy gift which will hang in their kitchen for obvioius daily viewing by one and all who pass through. Again, if anybody can top the overall page prices, shipping deals, coupon sales, service and quality of Winkflash; please do let me know. I did a lot of comparison shopping before zoning in on them. I had picked them up from a scrapping forum thread which was in reference to the fact that they are one of the only online sites with unlimited storage which allows you to download your own high resolution uploaded pictures free of charge should you ever have need, such as when and if you ever suffer a computer disaster and lose any of your originals because you fail to backup on a regular basis. I am famous for this, even though I know better. I have suffered such a loss twice already over the last few years. I even have a huge gig Western Digital external hard drive (ebook) sitting here, and have still gotten caught with mechanical failure of a hard drive unexpectedly. Now not only am I attempting to be better at doing backups, but I am uploading all of my personal photos and scrapped pages to Winkflash practically as soon as they get on my PC. Yeah, baby!!

Next to lastly for tonight; I got way deep into making bread in my bread machine for gifts for my neighbors and I even made three different kinds of salsa and canned pint jars of that as gifts. Very busy in the kitchen and the house smelled wonderful over the holidays. My intent now is to share some of those bread machine recipes which I tweaked to perfection with each new loaf baked, so look for those in upcoming posts if you're interested.

Okay, this was longer than I intended, so sorry! Here's a freebie to make up for lengthiness and absenteeism! This is a set of 7 oval frames with a round photo opening, and they are abstract in coloration. They are png files so hopefully they will work in any program. I am still a newbie at scrapping (started in August) and would hardly call myself a designer, but I am playing around in both PSE6 and PSP2X, but consider myself still lost in these programs. Seven is my lucky number, so that's why it's a package of 7 frames.

Download here.

I hope you can find use for these. I would be happy to see and post your layouts. My email can be found in the TOU included in the file.

Yikes! Just realized I've got to take time and figure out how to remove the Christmas tunes from the player at the bottom of this page! Always more to learn.....

Be back soon, I hope! Tootles!!