Happy Halloween!

The manfriend said "You need to update your blog."

My response: "I know. But I'll just whine about school, and who wants to read that?"

Well, I'm going to update, and I'm going to address school, but I'm not going to whine about it. This time.  ;)

Things are...going.  Last week I had a doozy of a day.  I really bombed a quiz.  Like 10% bomb.  Ouch.  (Mind you, I'm not whining, just telling the story)  I handed in a nearly blank quiz sheet and spent the rest of the class silently wiping away tears of humiliation and stress and worry. After class I went home, cried some more (not so silently)(let's hear it for time and place appropriateness!) and then dug in.  Problem was, I had deprioritized that class to make room for a final in another.  I thought I understood a little, when it turns out I barely understood at all.  I was really scared that I had gotten myself so far behind that I was going to have a really difficult time catching up.  But here's what I like about me  (sometimes*): I decided to think about how I would help my kids in this situation, and then try to follow that advice. So while wallowing in my pity party and worrying that I'd never catch up, I decided that I was going to try to figure out what it was that I didn't understand.  If I could articulate what I didn't understand, at least I could walk into my professor's office with my head held high and say "I've tried to figure this out, but I can't make it click.  Would you mind explaining to me how to do xyz."  Because that's what I'd tell my kids to do.  (if in fact, their genius mother couldn't help them :P  ).  I spent the afternoon working homework problems, and getting one wrong after the next, but really paying attention to what it was that I was having issues with.  And then trying to think critically about it...instead of giving in to the urge to throw up my hands, give up, and take a nap.  And oh, how I love to take a nap!  Turns out that in trying to pinpoint what my issues were, I actually figured out what the heck I was doing wrong.  I decided that I would visit my professor the next morning anyway, and ask for clarification on a couple of more difficult problems.  It wouldn't hurt to have him shed some insight on those problems, and it certainly wouldn't hurt to show him "hey, I'm trying."  I spent a good portion of the weekend trying to get caught up entirely, and back to feeling good.  And Mother Nature/Sweet Baby Jesus were on my side, closing school on Tuesday (the next time that class met) due to the storm, which gave me a whole extra day to get right with calculus without piling on more stuff.  (Sometimes I think that's the hardest part - we move at a crazy fast pace, and if something doesn't 'click' into place right away, there's no pause before we move on to the next topic.)  So the purdy notecard is my "fresh start."  I'm making a new effort to take better notes, to make a card like that for each section we cover (to make homework easier, but also to help when exam time rolls around.)  And can I tell you? I have center of mass down cold.  See? I'm not whining.  This is my triumphant post about how a humbling experience turned into feeling all "Yay!" again. Yay!

This is a scrapbook/crafty/Silhouette-y/Cameo-y type of blog though, so I should also show:

Going back to my roots in uber-simplicity, and featuring American Crafts Pumkin Patch.  I have a couple of pictures from this day that I really love, and yet I haven't told the story about getting her ears pierced.  But this wasn't the time - this is just that smile... No cheese, not forced, not fake.  That's 100% real, honest, happy.  And that's all that needed to be said.  

I do have some other stuff in the wings. 

Like:

  And:

Oh! And I wanted to share one more thing.  I take my writing implements VERY seriously. I find something I like and I stick to it and I love it to death.  So I buy my Bic Round Stics by the case, and guard my GraphGear1000 by Pentel with my life. I like my Sharpies sharp and in every shade for notes to the kids and coworkers - they say "Hey, I'm in a fun color, but don't tell her you didn't see me!" And for my notecards (like above)  I am absolutely, positively head over heals in love with: 

Which can be found at Amazon: Staedtler Triplus Fineliner felt tip pens.  Love them. A lot.

And with that, I'm going to sign off.  I hope everyone is safe and dry! Thanks for stopping by!

What I did on my Summer vacation:

Panicked.

Yesterday was one of those days where my professor talked and I listened...and for as much as I understood, he might as well have been speaking in Portuguese. Ok, maybe it wasn't quite THAT bad.  But it wasn't that good, either. And then he assigned the homework, which looked a little like this:

Chapter 5.8, page 398
ODDS:
19-33
45-73
79-99
105-109

Chapter 6.2, page 420
ODDS:
21-27
33-41
57-61

And then, for good measure, a worksheet.
Oh! And don't forget to study for the quiz.  You know...the QUIZ...the one we start every blessed class with.  His favorite phrase is "...I'll take a point off for every time you make that mistake." I'm convinced it's entirely possible to get a negative score on his tests.

Anyway, yesterday. Holy cow.  By the time 11:00 rolled around last night, I was done.  And by "done" I don't mean "finished my homework." Rather, I mean, I was done trying.  I was throwing in the towel. I woke up this morning with a lump in my stomach. This is the day that it all unravels.  This is the day that the gig is up.  You're not smart enough. You're not strong enough.  You're not dedicated enough. You're a sham. Just like before.

What a crappy way to start the day.

Plus, I hadn't even studied for the quiz.  Most of the time, in a math class, a quiz is "do these three problems."  With Mr. I-Will-Whip-Your-Sorry-Ass-Into-Shape-and-You-Will-EARN-Whatever-Grade-You-Receive it means memorization of definitions, theorems, and formulas. It's a page worth of regurgitation.  Math? Not (generally) a problem. Regurgitation? Sort of an problem.

My big issue yesterday is that we were doing something based on something I learned in 11th grade.  For those who don't know me personally, 11th grade was 1984. Holy SHITBALLS.  (excuse my language, but I deserve credit for holding that in until now) Normally when a teacher is working on something relatively obscure, like, say, hyperbolic trig functions, a teacher might elect to do a brief ten minute refresher.  No.  Not Mr. Damn-The-Calculus-Torpedoes-Full-Speed-Ahead.

Despite the self-loathing mantras I started the day with, I am smart enough to "plug-and-chug."  A mathematical term meaning "just plug the damn numbers into the formula and get the friggen answer already."  It's common practice for people who don't actually know (or want to know) the theories and concepts behind the math.  So I was able to - painstakingly - get through about 70% of the homework.

But 70% isn't really good enough in a class that meets for an hour and 45 minutes Monday through Thursday.  I suppose it would be fully acceptable on Thursday, but if you pull that 70% crap on Monday you are seriously putting yourself behind the eight ball for the rest of the week.  This guy moves fast and if you don't get what we talked about yesterday, you might be building your flimsy house of cards on a sandy beach in a windstorm, if you get my drift. Which is partially why I woke up with nothing kind to say to myself this morning.  "You're fucked" was kind of as nice as I could muster.

But the heavens smiled on me today.  He hadn't even taught the whole chapter yesterday.  And during our break I mentioned that I hadn't been in a trig class since 1984 (which, by the way, is a critical error when surrounded by a bunch of 19 year olds. There was a faint ripple of "1984??"s heard in the room after I said it. What an ego booster.  Because I'm taking that as they all had no clue that I was ...well...as old as I am.  Guess that cat's out of the bag now, eh?) Anyway, I mentioned the 1984 thing and that I couldn't really remember what it all meant and the professor didn't really say anything.  But then after he covered one or two things, he offered us an impromptu extra credit assignment.  In the course of telling us what he wanted us to do, he fully unfolded the concepts that I hadn't understood.   He drew and labeled graphs, reminded us what things meant, worked some parallel problems.

Gratitude is one of those things that has been ingrained in me from a million years ago.  I don't know if it's from years of "Say 'thank you.'" or the format of the way I pray, but good doesn't go unnoticed.  I am so grateful for the way he dropped back and punted.  That he changed up his lesson to quietly accommodate the old lady and did in a way that wouldn't bore the other students, and would even throw a life raft to some other students.  Despite my panic today, I'm doing well in the class.  I don't "need" extra credit, per se.  However, doing the exercise will reinforce what I had long ago forgotten.  That he didn't throw me under the bus for the other students to see or ignore my issues, for that I am extremely grateful.

Oh, and that homework up there^^^?  For the first time ever, he reposted it and told us to finish it up.

Whew.

And so I came home with a HUGE weight off my shoulders.  Today would not be the day it all unraveled.  Or the day the gig was up.  I might revisit the sham thing, but I can let go of it today.

And then I allowed myself to work on some design team stuff.  Oh how wonderful it is to "have" to scrapbook.  To be able to switch gears, switch from left brain to right brain is such a relief sometimes.  And how grateful am I to have this opportunity to have this balancing agent in my life? ETERNALLY.

And the Instagram shot at the top of the post? That's the sneak peek.  But you knew that already.  ;)

Another Sneak Peek

Today is the deadline, and it made a nice little whoooooshing sound as it whizzed by.  It's been quite the couple of weeks and the calendar doesn't have as many holes in it as it usually does.  I sort of thought because I was scrapping under a lot of pressure that I'd end up hating whatever I made today.  Nope.  I get to use Bella Blvd and it's impossible to play with those colors and not love the result. :)

See what I did there? Talked about all the happy colors and then showed mostly text?  That's called creating suspense baby. :P

Stay tuned...

Manaña...

Tomorrow I will do a real blog post.  Fo shizzle.

In the meantime, here's a sneaky of what's on the table today:

I ♥ days off where I get to play!

Pssst: Part 2

So I thought to myself, "Self, what if, instead of waiting until this is all done, what if you showed a little at a time?"  Now, it's not that I really think that you all (all, what? 2 of you?) are hanging on my every creation.  But I am intrigued by people's process, so what if someone else is?

And here's the thing.  I'm a painfully slow scrap usually.  But when it comes to mini-books, I don't care.  It's not a page.  It's a proooooject.  I don't even want to finish it too quickly, because then I'll be back to square one.  You know square one: What picture should I scrap? What story should I tell?  What papers/colors/fonts/die cuts will support that story.  Oh, I am not friends with square one.  Too many friggen decisions.  I already have to make decisions all day long, I don't want them assaulting me in my hobby.  That's why I'm in no rush.  The pictures - well, to be honest, they're not all picked yet, but I know basically what I'm using.  I know the story.  I know the papers and the colors.  Not every decision is made, but all the big ones are - now it's just floating along with lots of direction and playing.  This is the good stuff.

So this is what I did today.  Sprayed down six layers of "RIT" so that it has some nice beefy height to it.  Plus the little butterflies.  They're one of the reoccurring themes.  Why? Because my new scrap lady crush (Karen Grunberg) has shown me the way.  With two sons she uses them all the time and it totally works.  And in this case they make sense...but you'll have to take my word on that since I haven't really talked about what I'm doing.  ANYWAY,  I also did the funky 1970s style VW bus, because the other theme of the album is road trip.  Can't wait to see the headights once they dry.  ;)

But yeah.  I actually sat at my scrap table from 8 to midnight and that's all I got done.  Oh.  I also took in about 5 episodes of Pawn Stars. :P

I'm away again for the weekend, so I'm looking at Tuesday before I can play again.  If I make any progress I'll share again...

Thanks for stopping by!

Pssst

I'm workin' on something.  Don't say anything to anyone though.  It's kind of a secret.  Only the two of us really know about this....I don't want to make a big deal about it or anything.

I'm not making any promises as to the timeline.  But check back in a coupla days. Or next week.

Hopefully by the 29th...since that's when I'm really back to the old grind.  In fact, just got my text books today.  I'm excited to be back in a math classroom, but I don't think I'm ready to let go of the freedom I've had this summer.  Yikes. I'm scared! At any rate, I'm trying to squeeze in as much fun - scrappy and otherwise - into these last days of summer.  Hope you are, too!

Boy's Birthdays

Ted springs on me that he's going to a birthday party on Sunday.  Not "Hey mom, I got invited to a party.  Can I go?"  but rather "I'm going to a party on Sunday afternoon."  He cleared with his dad and arranged his own ride, so it's not like I'm upset, but as The Mom, I spiral into what-to-buy-yet-another-12-year-old-who-has-everything mode.  I ask Ted for input, and he says "I don't know...they have everything...how about a gift card to WalMart?"  Um. How about not.  I don't mean to sound snotty, but working in a small shop whose biggest competor is (sadly) WalMart and knowing that WalMart's stated business objective is to undercut the local business....like I said....Um. No.

Now, because Target has had the good sense to keep their animosity of local small businesses to themselves, I'm all for a Target gift card.  So off I go to pick one up.  But of course, I enter the store...and get SUCKED into the dollar spot.  And worse, into the $2.50 spot. :P  Black handled bucket?  For $2.50?  I'll take it!!  I'll fill it with Twinkies!  I'll put a skull sticker on it!  I'll be the most hated mother on Bama (this kid plays on Ted's football team)!  Ok. Pause.  Rethink.  But I'm still taking the bucket! 

Aside: what is it about scrapbookers that make us so stubborn about just putting a gift card in a greeting card and handing it over?  I feel like everytime I give a gift card I'm challenged to engineer some presentation device...


Today is no different.

In an attempt to not bring on the hate from Tyler's mother, the bucket is filled with Rice Krispie Treats (c'mon! At least they're better than Twinkies!), Trident Gum, Target fruit snacks and a bag of Goldfish snacks.  When I got home I asked Ted if he was okay with my doing the monster and even let him pick which monster.  And I asked him "Are you sure this is ok?" about 6 times, and he enthusiastically said "I'd love to get this!  I'd take it downstairs and play video games with it all day." Um. Yeah.  Feeling the hate. (In my defense, at least it doesn't make noise or come apart to 200 tiny pieces that hurt when stepped on)

And then there's the gift card holder.  Cute, no?  I love the skinny monster, and I'm glad I finally had an excuse to use the talk bubble....kinda cute.  The googly eyes? Yeah. I dig 'em.

And I want to take a minute to talk about flash.

Poor, maligned flash.  Everyone hates him.  Especially everyone in the scrapbook world.  Heavy hitters like Karen Russell, Erin Terrell Clarkson, Maggie Holmes, Erin Cobb, Tara Whitney...etc, etc, etc...  they ALL say FLASH IS BAD.  Most even go so far as to say they don't even own a flash.  Seriously? 

And I am NOT saying that I am a better photographer or know more than the aforementioned heavy hitters.  They're ALL amazing shooters, and I wish I had half the talent any one of them has. 

But I just want to stick up for the poor, maligned flash.  He's not all bad.  He's just misunderstood.  You can't just use the one on your camera and expect it to do a good job.   Because aside from using it outside on a sunny day to fill in shadows, the on-camera flash just can't do a great job.  Why is it even there then?  Well, near as I can tell, it ads enough light to boost shutter speeds in order to avoid blurry shots.  Hopefully we can all agree that blurry shots are decidedly worse than shots with flash.   And really, if you're shooting with a point and shoot camera, your only option is flash on or flash off.  (Mostly...there are a couple of excpetions, but I'm not going there right now)

But if you're using an SLR you have another option.  A dedicated flash that slides into your hot shoe solves a myriad of problems: No red eye.  No harsh shadows.  No blurry pictures.  No whacked out color shifts.  The joy of the dedicated flash is that 9 times out of 10, the flash head can be aimed at the ceiling, and in so doing, the light bounces off the large white plane of the ceiling where it gets diffused, and rains back down on the subject.  It wraps around the subject - so the harsh shadows are eliminated.  The light is softer, which is really pleasing.  You can still set your camera to a very low f-stop so if you want a shallow depth of feild, you don't have give that up.   And it's not like you have be some tech-no whiz.  You put it on, aim it at the ceiling and fire.  The camera pretty much takes care of the rest.  Yeah, if you turn the camera sideways to get a portrait shot, you do have to have a flash that both swivels and bounces, but most flashes do that anyway.  (Let's say 7 out of 10 flashes can both swivel and bounce) As an added point, bouncing the flash keeps you from having that harsh shadow that just plain yucky, but it also prevents the flash glare that happens on shiney, reflective surfaces.  For instance, shooting the metal bucket with the flash aimed right at it would have  giant white spot, totally devoid of detail.  Not. Good.  Bring on the bounce.

At any rate, the shots above were taken at 10 o'clock at night.  No way could I have taken those without flash.  Even if I had boosted my ISO to 3200 and turned on the room lights, it still would have been iffy.  And I'd have to have made a custom white balance reading - there's no way that the three light sources in my kitchen would have come across cleanly in any of the pre-set white balance settings.  The joy of flash is that the camera knows EXACTLY what the flash is doing, and knows exactly how to deal with the white balance when you're using it (unless, you, the user, set the white balance to something funky - but under Auto or Flash, the light will be pure and whites will be white).   

Blah blah blah.  Too much lecturing.  Maybe I should do some before and after/good and bad shots to really illustrate why flash is so damn functional.  Next time the heavy hitter's voices ring in your head that FLASH IS BAD, say gently back NO. HE'S JUST MISUNDERSTOOD.

And that's what I'm working on.  I may finish sometime this month...

(also taken with flash.  :)  Just sayin...)

A little preview...

I've been "working" on this project for over a month now. Granted, most of the "working" has been acquiring materials. That's the easy part, when everything is optimism and good intentions. Then you get to the "doing" phase and suddenly that which was absolutely phenomenal in your head is a little shaky on (or "in") paper. But you forge ahead and trust that the vision will play itself out. Maybe not exactly as you dreamed, but perfect in its own right. We hope.

As of this writing, it's about half-way finished. I'm hoping to make more progress tomorrow night and maybe have pictures to share on Thursday.

Oh! And guess what?? This is probably the first thing I've made in EONS that hasn't used the Silhouette in any way, shape or form. On the one hand it feels kinda wrong, but it's nice to know I'm not totally addicted. Because I really don't have time in my schedule for 12 step programs.

Stay tuned!