About anything from hiking in the Sierras to sewing bags!

… but to be passive aggressive when it comes to this.

I have a neighbor, who every morning sets off their car alarm for anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes.  It can happen as early as 5am and as late as 9am.  Maybe even earlier.  On the mornings when I have an early Bible study, I could care less about the alarm going off.  All the other mornings, I’m tempted to go out in my PJs to find the guy.

The hardest thing is, it could be anyone at like eight different houses because of how the houses are arranged.

I just want to know, why does he HAVE to set off his alarm?  And why does he let it go for over a minute sometimes?  Or even multiple times?

My theory? It’s to wake up the rest of their household.  Instead, they wake up ME!

A new semester has started, classes are filled with fresh faces, and I have a problem.  I’m in classes from 8am to 7pm, with one large break at 2pm, and an hour from 5pm-6.  Most of those days, I’ll probably arrive at 730 to use the printer & print out assignments, notes, etc.  So, I basically have a 12 hour day on campus.

In the last year, my body has taken a beating.  Since August, I’ve been doing Jenny Craig & lost a bit of weight.  Now, I can’t eat their food because of my wheat/garlic/life allergies.

So, somehow, I need to eat three meals at school without spending a dime on campus… except for maybe a dollar cup of coffee to get me through the first few classes.  As it is, I already have to carry my laptop, two text books, binder, and notebook in my back pack.  Along with all the little things that add up — keys, wallet, laptop charger, pen case, etc.  Where will my food go?

Fortunately, for students in my department we have access to a fridge and freezer, along with a microwave.  Still, things get crowded and I hate being wasteful with my money by buying frozen meals or canned soups.  I need actual balanced meals!

Image credit: babykins! on flickr, from a bento fan group.

So, I had a thought.  I remembered seeing a craft blogger share her lunches, one of those expensive “laptop” lunches.  Since I hardly have $8, let alone $50, I started searching ebay for other bento boxes.  I found one that fit my budget, it’s a two tier bento with a spot for a napkin and chopsticks.  It’s large enough for me to eat a full lunch at 2pm, then have a large snack at 5pm & have dinner when I get home around 7:30.  For breakfast, if I don’t eat at home, I’ll eat something in the car, like farina.  Between my morning classes, like in the example photo before, I’ll have a yogurt and fruit.  I’ll just keep those in my back pack.  I also always have two clementines in one of the side pockets of my pack.

I like the idea of bento boxes being a way to create art from your meal, but I probably wont ever do that.  I’m more into the ability to organize my food into a small container while making a balanced meal.  For Christmas, my mom got me several different silicone baking cups, much like the cups that are sold to go with bento boxes.  I’ll probably use one or two of the baking cups to separate things in my box.  I’m also considering finding a lock-n-lock container to decorate to make my own bento.

Hopefully, using this bento-method to my meals will help me to keep eating healthy, while still being attentive to my allergies.  I need to get into the habit of making my meals the night before, including breakfast.  Expect a blog post here and there about the recipes I’ve tried and what’s been working for me!

The New Year started off without a bang for us, I was pet sitting alone, drinking sparkling cider with a chocolate lab slightly larger than me.  However, it didn’t stay uneventful.

That first weekend, we traveled to the Bay Area for Jeff’s grandma’s memorial & burial service.  We had a great time with his family remembering her life.  I never got to know Jeff’s grandma (she had several strokes years and years ago,) but she definitely sounded like my kind of woman!  It was great getting to see all of Jeff’s cousins that I only ever get to contact via facebook, where his cousin Rob is my favorite Mafia Wars buddy because he sends me energy packs.

Ok, now my focus is drifting and we need to get back on topic.

Anyways, after sharing a hotel room with Jeff’s mom and getting zero sleep, I went down the coast with Jeff to spend the day fishing on the pier in Capitola.  Jeff shared a room with his dad and slept the full night, the benefit of being awake the previous 40 something hours.  The rest of us couldn’t sleep because the sheets were like paper — every time you moved, even the flicker of a finger, sounded like crumpling paper.  Other than that, the hotel and appletinis were really nice.

Once we got to the wharf in Capitola, Jeff bought his bait and we set up shop.  He kept going back to the bait shop on the wharf so many times that they wanted to set up a tab for him! (Note: this photos are the unedited iphone photos of this trip — I haven’t downloaded the photos from our cameras yet.)

It was his first time since childhood fishing on a wharf, so he had a ton of fun.

I let him buy a crab pot, which made him happy as a clam.

He caught a lot of hermit crabs and sea snails.

One teeny tiny crab.

One starfish.

?

… and I need the camera’s photos to show you what else he caught! Once I have access to Jeff’s computer, I’ll post them.

While Jeff was doing all that fishing, I sat there reading “The Shop on Blossom Street.”  Really good read, I’m now on the third book in the series!  I also managed to find the geocache on the wharf that I had DNF’d on the last time we tried to find it.  That was rewarding, because it really showed how much I’ve developed my geocaching skills.  Tomorrow I’ll have a post of photos of some of the geocaches I’ve found over break.  Until then…

Enjoy the sunset

I cannot NOT allow this to go unsaid, and since I haven’t seen a single news article or blog post about this, I’m going to have to cover it myself…

Lately there’s been a few stories in the news about people getting stranded “because of their GPS.”  The Air Force even went so far as saying it wasn’t a fault in their system, but they wouldn’t say who was at fault.  Probably because they didn’t want to upset the GPSr companies like Garmin & Tom Tom.

Anyone who knows anything but just the basics about GPSrs can tell you what the problem was — both the users and the maps.  The maps are either from the device manufacturer or a third party, not the Air Force and GPS satellite system.

So, just like when we plug in addresses for directions on Google Maps, there’s some error involved.  When I had to go to the California School for the Deaf in November, Google Maps had me take two U-Turns immediately after each other, which put me back in the same direction.  It also told me to get on and off the freeway at the same street (I caught that error before executing it, but I have to admit I very sheepishly made those U-Turns.)

When I ended up getting lost in San Jose the next day, I used my GPSr to get back on the right track.  My GPSr has the most current Garmin maps installed on it.  Yet, it still told me to turn left, straight into a median on the expressway… no where near the actual entry onto I-880 a mile ahead.  My friend & I broke out the DeLorme Road atlas, which wasn’t any additional help, and decided to keep driving.

Road signs are also mis-leading *cough 152-E*Watsonville*cough,* but they do help.

Maps on GPSrs are not nearly as updated or advanced as Google Maps is.  Google takes into account what’s a back road and what isn’t, or traffic problems.  GPSr maps just see Point A and Point B, and they just simply connect the dots.

My recommendation for novice GPSr users?  If you have the ability to do so, export the route generated by Google or Mapquest to your GPSr instead of letting your GPSr decide for you.  I believe for Google you have to export it to KML file to Google Earth, then from Google Earth export the route to your device.  Google does have an export function for GPSr directly in the browser, but it’s only the end point, not the route.

Personally, I always use Google Maps.  You can alter the route to your heart’s content.  For example, we travel to the Monterey Bay area frequently for fun, work, & family (Jeff grew up in Mt. Hermon, at the Christian camp.  His mom grew up a stone’s throw from the Red Castle in Santa Cruz.)   Anyways, we take a road off of the freeway thru… Castorville? I think?  Even getting out of town we disagree from Google Maps, because we prefer to take advantage of the country roads that have zero traffic.

Basically, don’t rely on auto-pilot.  If it worked, we wouldn’t have airline pilots anymore.  Or taxi drivers.  Or wives who force their husbands to ask for directions.

The blog might be silent for the next few days, we’ll be in the Monterey/Santa Cruz area for Jeff’s grandma’s memorial services.  If something interesting should happen, I have wordpress on my phone, you’ll get an update!

Today I didn’t spend much time scraping, but I did manage to finish this week’s Designer’s Spotlight Challenge at O Scraps!  I got third place for last week’s challenge, pure luck that I would get selected on my first challenge

Of course, the prompts for this week are “Year in Review” and “New Beginnings.”

First, I managed to squeeze out my new beginnings LO.  It was easier because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my “adventuring” and “lifestyle” goals.  Maybe I’ll elaborate on them in another post, but for now you can settle for this page.

After finishing the New Beginnings page in the morning, I had plenty to occupy myself while I thought about the Year in Review page.  They gave us a great freebie template to use, but I knew I wanted to use my own to practice layout arranging.  I’m pleasantly satisfied.  There are a few changes I’ll make before printing this, but for now it’s fine for me!

I have a pretty big to-do list for tomorrow, so I doubt I’ll allow myself to do any more scrapping.

Credits: NinaScraps “Simply Together” papers & Sue Cummings “Vintage Brown” papers

Riley embraces the Jack Russel in her and makes sure we all know it.  From bouncing and bounding around the house, to getting herself covered in dirt and mud in the back yard.

I made this page for another O Scraps challenge, Web Inspiration.  For this challenge, a screen shot of something online is posted & O scrappers are to use it for inspiration in creating a page.  Click over to the thread to see the inspiration for this month’s challenge.

My page details:

The photos are texturized with a cement texture.
Papers are from Sue Cumming’s Paper Brown Vintage & Paper Whitewash V11.
Bow is from Sue Cumming’s Paper Whitewash V12.
“Riley” text is a clipping mask of a paper from V11, but the levels were bumped up to get that burned & brown tone.

Until Wordpress fixes the post scheduling bug, you’re probably going to see back to back postings from me like this.  I would prefer to schedule my posts to be published at a set time after I write them, but the newest update to wordpress broke that function.  A week ago they said they would post a fix “in a few days” but that hasn’t happened, and I’m not going to tamper with wordpress to fix it myself, like others have done.

I also promise this isn’t turning into a scrapbooking blog, you’ll still see plenty of our travels & usual antics.  This weekend we’re going to the coast for Jeff’s grandma’s memorial & burial services.  He’s planning for us to spend some time either in Capitola or San Francisco, but we’re still waiting on the final details to fall into place.

Now that I’ve forged into digi scrapping… I’ve joined a forum or two.  The one that I’ve been most active on so far is O Scraps, probably because it’s the most active, I like the member’s styles, and I love all of the designers in their store!

So, to get myself to make at least one page over the last few festivities filled days, I participated in their weekly Designer Spotlight Challenge.  This week’s theme was best Christmas gift.  Of course, hands down, the best Christmas gift is Christ!  However, I decided to do Jeffrey as my favorite Christmas gift.  Our first date was December 9th, two weeks before Christmas ‘07.  After that date we became an official couple, much to the shock of our friends.  No one saw it coming.  Only about two of my friends even knew that Jeff and I communicated outside of our Bible study.  It was nice to keep something to myself for once

The photos are from our trip to Yosemite in Feb ‘08, but I thought they best showed us at our early stages of the relationship and they’re “christmasy.”

Here’s my entry in the forum gallery, and here’s a link to the challenge thread.

Now, I need to do the “O” Scraps Creative Challenge for December… the theme is “Family.”

I’ve been into digital scrapbooking for… a week?  I can already see that my design style for-just-about-everything-else is showing through my pages.

If you were to ask me what that style is, I guess I’d have to say… simple grunge?

In the first page that I shared with you, you can see that I was still learning… but it still looks good.  I probably will leave it just how it is.

Then, I created the headers for the new look here at WMM.  Keep refreshing the page, there’s five of them.  You can see I remembered the amazing thing that is CLIPPING MASKS!!!  Oh dear, that created a monster.

Yesterday, as I was overwhelmed by having access to cable television and wanderlust, I shared the page I made for one of our trips up to the Shaver/Huntington area last winter.  More clipping masks with grungy edges.

Last night I was going through more of our photos and I decided to do my next page with some photos from one of the activities we did last Memorial Day weekend.  On Memorial Day, we took my mom and brother to our favorite gold panning site.  I didn’t take a lot of photos, because I got pretty upset when I discovered that all of my photos from the day before were over exposed because I forgot to switch out from manual mode after taking photos of a waterfall on our hike.  Remember that?

In the few shots that I took, I did manage to squeeze out this page.  The smaller photo is a rare shot of my brother… gasp… smiling!

I still am not “done” with it, it does need something more with the text.  Any ideas?  I’m thinking of doing some kind of line leading out from between the two words, but nothing that makes it feminine. Maybe I’ll do some grungy vertical lines like in an old movie.

I’m pretty interested to see how things develop as I continue to dive into this new hobby.  I don’t really use any embellishments right now, I like things simple.  I’ve subscribed to a few digiscrap blogs in my feed reader for inspiration.  I’m just not really into all the cutesy stuff that I see on most of the digiscrap sites.  Right now I’m using freebies from other people, but I have made a few papers that I haven’t shared yet.  In the last week, I think I’ve made almost 20 pages.  But, the first four or six from our first trip to Yosemite together are probably going to get redone. You know what?  Now that I’ve typed that, I’ve gone back and looked at those pages.  I wont be redoing them.  I might make some changes to the first one, but I am happy with the rest of them.

My creative process never stops, as I keep scrolling back to look at the “Gold Fever” page… I keep thinking about making changes and how I think adding the old-movie-like lines will really pull that page together.  The same goes for all the other finished pages.  When I quickly view them in Finder, I instantly think of something I want to add or change.

Honestly, as much as I want to hold a finished product in my hands or at least have something in an album, I know I want it to be exactly how I want it.  Which is probably while it’ll be another month or so before I send the pages in to get printed!

Starting to scrapbook has made me super nostalgic, with a super huge case of wanderlust.

I haven’t been to the snow at all since last winter.

Almost every day I have to look at the snow capped Sierras knowing I wont be able to go up there anytime soon.

Then, add in house sitting with access to cable… where I’m exposed to Little People Big World and their trip to the Timberline Lodge where I learned to ski.¹

Yeah, there’s very little holding me on the valley floor right now.  Just enough responsibilities to keep me from buying chains & hoping on the freeway.

Making this page just made everything worse.²  Remembering when Jeff & I made our survival cave when the hill got to crowded with kids sledding.  That day was great, the snow was falling pretty heavy, there was a point where we didn’t think we’d make it home.  Sheesh, I can’t wait until next December when we’re doing a winter camping trip up at Glacier Point in Yosemite.

Today’s the first day of Winter.  Instead of spending it in the Sierras romping around in the snow, I’ll be down here on the valley floor scrapbooking & working towards my goal of finding 100 geocaches during winter break.

1. Crazy, now they’re playing soccer in the field where I first started playing! [↩]
2. Papers from Three Paper Peonies [↩]

The story I am going to share is not my own, it’s one of my mom’s stories.  A recent one. You’ve probably heard your share of similar stories, most likely in the form of a chain letter.  But this one is completely and entirely true, yet you wont hear it on the news & it wont have it’s own page on snopes.

A week or so ago, my mom and brother were in the drive thru at Starbucks.  I believe they were on their way to school, when a mini cooper pulled up behind them.  When it came time to pay for their drinks, my mom went ahead and paid for the drinks of the car behind them.

My brother is a cranky teenage boy.  Half-empty type person.  We love him dearly, none the less.

He immediately told my mom to NOT pay for the drinks of the other car, “There’s more than just one person in there!!  It’s going to cost a lot!!”

Of course, my mom told him to shut up, it’s her Starbucks money, and it isn’t dipping into his Vanilla Frapp Fund. I can imagine that the entire rest of the way to drop him off at school he was hammering on and on about how she shouldn’t have paid for those drinks.

Later that morning, my mom’s principal played a music trivia game on the morning announcements.  My mom never EVER wins, even though she and her class have a pretty good strategy.  They get the email all ready to be sent, it’s just waiting for the answer, before the announcements even begin to play.  The kids have come up with the right answers a few times, but they’re never quick enough to get it in first.  My mom’s losing streak is a lunchroom topic, I know, I was there when it was discussed.

You see, my mom knows just as much about music as I know about ancient Greek.  One time a sitcom we were watching together referenced AC/DC… my mom had to ask me “what” AC/DC was.

Well, that morning as the song started to play… she KNEW the answer.  She knew that it was a Willie Nelson Christmas song before Willie even began to sing a note.  So off she sent the e-mail with the answer to the trivia game.

She won.

When she received her prize, a Starbucks gift card, she went home and showed off to my brother, “You SEE?  What goes around COMES AROUND!”

I wish I could have witnessed the look on my brother’s face.

Remember this story, give to others without thinking about reaping a reward.  What we have is NOT ours, it’s all entrusted to us by God.  Bless others as he has so richly blessed us.  Especially during this time of year, when many are feeling the stress of the Holidays.  Remind others in your own acts the reason for the season.

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. — James 1:17, NIV

Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that. — Ephesians 5:1-2, The Message