(Not really) Today

This week I had a customer go on and on about how stupid he thought it was for people to take pictures of themselves in front of places they're visiting.  It was sort of comical, listening to him on his tirade and thinking how just the weekend before I'd taken a picture of Kerig and I in front of the IHOP sign after we had a yummy French Toast dinner.  I'm quite certain he was waiting for the girl at the camera store to agree with him, that people muck-up otherwise pristine vistas.  And in some regards, sure, I get it.  But if you think I'm going to go for a ride on your crazy train? Forget it.

Because apparently having purchased this cutie-McCuteCute Nikon S01 it's going to be all Caroline, all the time.  

After our dinner we went for a walk through the park.  It was perfect weather for a walk - a little bit on the chilly side, but nothing a hoodie couldn't handle.  The sun was out when we weren't in the dense woods of the park.  We had fun playing with our cameras, shooting everything from wildflowers to trashcans.  We even played on the swings, attempting to take selfies with a really blurry background -- I figured that it would be like panning, but sadly, my camera works only in fully automatic, so I couldn't get it to do it. :( I'd like to say we walked for an hour and a half, but the truth of the matter is we meandered for an hour and a half.  And what we lacked in calorie burning, we made up for in just having fun.  (So much so that there are probably at least two more layouts that will come from this batch of pictures.  That's rare for me, but happy=scrappy, right?)

On Monday night I sat down at my scrap table and cut the "Today" strip and circle.  But once it came out of the machine I had no inspiration for what to do with it.  Plus, having sat in the drizzle at Ted's baseball game I was oddly beat.  I left those pieces on my desk, with no real hope of figuring out how to use them. But when I had a couple of minutes yesterday everything seemed to fall into place fairly easily.  I even lucked out with the photo arrangement.  Normally two verticals and one horizontal would cause me great stress, but when I was trimming the wallet-sized photos down and setting them to the side, they ended up piled much like the are in the layout. How often does that happen??

Other things that inspired me:  

This episode of the Paperclipping Roundtable, where the panelists are discussing layering techniques.  There was nothing in particular that caused an epiphany, but it was inspirational nonetheless.  

A Flair for Buttons on Etsy  Um. So Sunday was just a weird day and it apparently required some minor retail therapy.  Enter this etsy site.  That great thing about retail therapy at an etsy site is you get to feel really good about your purchase.  You're supporting a "local" artisan.  In this case "local" is in Iowa, but that's a lot closer than China, which is where most of our mass produced, commercially available items are coming from.  Factor in that they're flipping adorable and it's a total win.  I totally love them and the next time I need to spend $10 to feel better about life I'm totally going to back to her site! :)

Okay, that's about all I have for today.  I'm actually hoping to kick out a page or two this weekend, weather and inspiration permitting.  So hopefully I'll see you soon!