Bits and Pieces: CHRISTMAS TREE QPs No. 4 & 5

Hello, All! I hope your Holiday preparations are going well! I've come down with a dreadful heavy cold after not being sick for about three years straight. And this, a week out from my travel plans! Ugh! What Irish luck I have! The last thing I want to take to my elderly parents is a communicable illness. I've been popping meds, vitamins, minerals, liquids, my own homemade Mexican Chicken Soup, fruits, and a Vemma (mangosteen + essential minerals) supplement as well as a few packets of Emergen-C daily for the last 3 full days. My faithful standby OTC medication for the heavy, wet sinus headcold that feels like your head is so full of congestion that it's going to pop open is a little red pill, sold by many different brands, but the only ingredient in it is 30 mg. of pseudoephedrine hydrochloride (which is a tip-top nasal decongestant). I take two of those every 4-6 hours at the onset of misery, and they really help alleviate symptoms. It used to be known as "Sine-Off" or "Sine-Aid" and also contained 500 mg. of acetomenophine (Tylenol) per pill, but nowdays you cannot find that combo. But, you can substitute your own dose of Ibuprofen or the like along with the little red pills. Plus, these days pharmacies keep this pseudoephedrine HCL up front in the store (behind the cash registers) and you have to ask them for it and show the clerk your driver's license because they track who buys and how much. The reason for that you can probably guess, yes, it's the ingredient young folks were using to make meth at home. Shame, shame! Oh well, it may be a tad harder to get, but it's still worth it. Enough said on my medical lesson for today. I'm feeling lots better already, and I'm the type I keep going even when ill.

It was gloomy gray here today and drizzled a little misty type rain off and on, so I turned all the lights on in my house, turned on the music and cleaned a bunch of things. I'm a "light-oriented" person, the more sunshine, light, or brightness there is, the better my mood is. I made good progress!

Today's FREEBIE is two more of my 2012 Xmas Tree Series, #4 & #5, Quick Pages. One has a green plaid background, and the other is a slightly textured solid sort of "plum" color. Again, they hold 15 photos, and you can add as much of your own embelishment as desired. Have fun if you're collecting these. They'll be useful in the years to come, right? You can do a different colored one each year! They are 12x12" png files at 300 dpi. (You can easily resize them down to an 8x8", etc.) Here is the preview . . .

DOWNLOAD HERE or HERE or HERE

I'm getting sooo frustrated with 4Shared acting so goofy lately. Am looking for a good third option. I'm currently giving top kudos to OpenDrive and Box for giving totally flawless performance without hassle to the uploader or the downloader! I also have DropBox, but the storage is small, so I use it more for personal things that I don't intend to leave in the account forever. It works beautifully also. Looked at plans by GoDaddy last night and will give that some thought, it looks more affordable than all the rest, and I've already seen how well it works from the downloading end. LOL!

TODAY'S "SHOW & TELL" INSPIRATION - - Below is my layout for PhotoShop Friday 2012, Week #50 over at the "Spragueground". It features a total little angel boy (my nearly 7 yr. old extreme preemie grandson) playing a snowflake in his 1st-grade Christmas Musical. Truly, he is such a sweetheart; mannerly, obedient, generally happy & good-natured. It was so fun to get to the elementary auditorium bright and early at 7:30 a.m. to see him and his little friends sing and dance their hearts out. He never missed a beat or a motion & seemed relaxed and happy doing this performance. I took lots of pictures, had to use zoom, and the lighting wasn't great. Luckily for me, the school filmed the whole thing professionally, so I'm sure the DVD I will receive soon will be better quality than my own photos turned out. The cool thing about scrapping this page and having the PSF12 weekly class available - of course, the template from Jessica; but the technique she taught this week was the use of our own text as an overlay. So after watching the class video (love those!), I gave this a few minutes of reflection back to the songs he had sung that morning, and I used the lyrics from one that was so cute to make the text overlay. The little verse I remembered so well because of their annimated gestures as they sang went like this, "You take a little snow, mix in a little dirt, and what you get we call "SNIRT"! So you can see how I've used this song overlaying my background paper. Very cool. Someday when he grows up and looks at these pages I've made for him, he will actually be able to see one of the songs he sang as a first-grade Snowflake! The photos may not be my best quality, even with PSE tweaking, but my overlay is the BOMB! We used two different fonts to make it. Have a look . . .

BTW, the PSF2012 course is on a huge sale right now if you'd like to pick it up to work on throughout the coming year. They are having the annual year-end sale, so that's just about everything going for reduced prices right now.

I'm working on a gift for my folks, a 2013 wall calendar which I will home print on my Kodak and take to Office Depot to bind for me because I want a spiral binder with a metal hanger in the middle so it's easy for my Mom to flip the pages monthly. She totally writes all over the blocks of her calendar, so many notes and appointments, etc. This is basically a premade QP type kit I purchased on sale over at JS and it is by Pink Paislee. It comes complete with a cover page and, of course, you can add text to the day blocks or fancy it up as desired. I'll show you my January and February pages here . . .

That's my parents' home in the Appalachian Mountains of southeastern WV during winter snow; and February is all of the great-grandkids from my downline. These are quick and easy pages to complete, so I'm on time with this one! Yeah for me! They always love this type of useful personal thing.

Check back tomorrow, I will attempt having something different for you!

TOOTLES!!