Moments in Time

Well, we're off on vacation in another hour. Right now, two weeks seems almost two long, but I think it will go by fast. I miss Dixie already. Poor Ali cried when we left her last night. But Dixie is staying with a friend from work, Denise, who breeds and LOVES labs. Dixie can go swimming every day and, I think, will have fun. Hopefully she won't miss us too much either.

Before our trip, I finished all my ATCs for my upcoming swaps. I've added them to my Projects gallery. The project I am really excited about is my new, alterable "Memory Purse". You can see all the pictures (including before and after shots) in my gallery. Here's one shot. (You can see a larger view by clicking on it.
I LOVE how this turned out. I love the paper collection - Mulberry Meadow. All products are made by The Angel Company, with the exception of the "smile" sticker on the tag. That's by Creative Memories and I bought it from my friend & super CM consultant, Jill. :-)

I also finished reading "The Yacoubian Building". Great book. Written by an Egyptian for the Middle Eastern market, it's an interesting insight into that culture and way of thinking. There's an interesting side story that relates to the current conditions in the Middle East and the rise of the jihadist movement.

I'm off to do some last minute packing and then it's open road for the next 7 hours or so!

All that wretched cleaning and organizing paid off. It was so nice to work in my CLEAN room! Ugh, I can definitely see why I let it get so messy though. Keeping things all picked up and put away in there is not easy. It's just not in my nature. I'm definitely the messy, creative type. :-/

If you look in my Projects album, you'll see pictures of the ATCs (Artist Trading Cards) that I made today for two swaps that I'm in. Here's a sneak peek. (You can click on the image to see a larger version.)



The girls have been busy creating, too. They built a house and cars (out of boxes) for their Webkinz stuffed animals. Look for pictures!

...when you're having fun.

Well, we haven't just been having fun. I've spent more hours than I care to think in my craft room cleaning, sorting, organizing and purging. (Gotta love FreeCycle!) But, I am almost done (whew!) and look forward to some crafting time tomorrow. Check back for some pictures of the finished projects.

Recent fun for the kids: going out to lunch (Panera), out for ice cream (Randy's), and having friends over. We also saw Night at the Museum. I was never in a hurry to see this movie but I actually liked it a lot. (The preview clips with the movie threw me. I have this thing about monkeys. They give me the creeps. I don't know why.) Anyway, we also saw Ratatouille. Great movie with wonderous animation. I'm always blown away by great animation and want to know more about how the movie was done. I checked out the official Ratatouille site, but didn't find anything there. You can definitely see the stamp of Brad Bird, who also directed "The Incredibles". Several of the characters have Edna-like elements to them. (I think Collette is a younger, prettier, much taller and slightly softer version of Edna.) That's a good thing to me, because Edna was my favorite character in The Incredibles (Although I'm glad I didn't get named Edna - which is what my father wanted to name me - eek!.)

We've got the first leg of our NJ trip planned. We're stopping in Columbus the first night. We'll just make it a relax and hang out at the pool evening after a long day in the car. The next day we're stopping at Hershey, PA to do the "sundown special" at Hershey Park. It's Hershey's 100th anniversary this year, which makes it kind of special. The next morning we may do some sight seeing around the town, then head off for Aunt Jean's house in NJ. While we're there we may go into NYC to the Museum of Natural History. I've always wanted to take them there and seeing Night of the Museum has piqued Jessica's interest. Just planning the trip out has been arduous enough (trying to please everyone when no one else wants to do any work in researching/deciding - I feel like the Little Red Hen!). I haven't yet worked out the entire trip.

Off to my craft room to finish cleaning so I can actually MAKE something in there tomorrow! :-)