Lets Get Sketchy!

A couple of days ago a was cruising the internet for some sketches do get some motivation to scrap. I stumbled on an awesome new sketch site called Lets Get Sketchy! that I am so excited about! AND, they happened to be accepting entries for their new Design Team! So I thought I would give it a go. :)

Here is the awesome sketch that we had to use to make a page. I love it!

I had an awful hard time choosing a picture for this page. I finally settled on one of Chuck and I in San Antonio celebrating our 3rd anniversary a coupe years ago. I used Echo Park's Times & Seasons papers to make my layout. I just love the kit and the awesome patterned paper! I sprayed my border punch with some iridescent gold glimmer mist to give it a shiny, glittery look.

Lets Get Sketchy!  is also have a great blog candy giveaway of some the cute new Echo park collection, A Boys Life. Make sure you go check it out!

Thanks for taking a look at my submission, and good look to everyone else that applied! I'm so excited to see what everyone does!

Photo Pass Pictures!

A few weeks ago we got our Disney Photo Pass pictures in. This is the first time we actually got the photo pass CD, or any photo pass picture for that matter. We decided ahead of time that we were going to splurge on it this time. So anytime we saw a photo pass person, we got that picture! Here are some of my favorites!

Project Life

So every New Year I debate on trying the picture a day challenge, or also known as Challenge 365. Last year I even started the challenge but sadly only lasted a few weeks. This year I stumbled on a similar challenge, yet less stressful. It's called Project Life. I take photos throughout the week, sometimes everyday, sometimes not. And I include journaling cards about each photo or event that happened that week. Becky Higgins, the creator of Project Life, sells these super cute core kits. They have coordinating inserts for journaling and what not. I purchased both the Teal set and the Cobalt set, as they go well together. I'm still waiting on buying the page protectors I really want as they are sold out, but I did get some others. I have two weeks completed so far, and I'm working on the third. Here's what I have so far!

Published!

A couple of months ago I was approached by an online scrapbook magazine and asked if they could publish one of my layouts! I was super excited! And this month the edition of Scrapstreet.com came out with my page in it! Check it out here: http://scrapstreet.com/ss12/janu12/contents.htm. Below is the layout I had published.

Goodbye 2011, Hello 2012!

Top 12 Favorite Memories of 2011

1. Disney World of course! We has such an amazing time this year, probably our best vacation to date!


2. We met some amazing people this year. After many years of knowing Ingrid and Elmer online and becoming vlose friends, we had the opportunity to have out with them for a full week. Of course this was Disney World as well, but I thought it deserved it's own number. :)

 
3. Mihai and George. They were our wait staff on our Royal Caribbean Cruise in April. They really were so awesome and nice, they made our entire cruise. Chuck and I still joke today about some of the sayings they had, and their lovely Romanian accents.

4. I got to see my high school best friend for the first time in years. She came to Austin for a visit with her family and we were able to drive down and see her. I am so glad we did!

5. For the first time in my life, I set off fireworks! Well I mostly watched Chuck and his sister Alicia set them off, but it was the first time I had seen or done anything like that. We just don't do that where I'm from!

6. Beautiful Jamaica. On our 2010 cruise we had such an awful experience in Jamaica. This year, we didn't get off the boat there as we wanted to relax. But the view from the ship was so amazing. It was the most beautiful place I have ever seen.

7. Snow in Dallas! More than once! But there was one particular week were we had tons of ice. It was Super Bowl week actually. The last few days of that week it snowed like Chuck has never seen before down here! I loved it! We got 6 inches and it felt just like home to me.

8. This last summer we had renovations at work. They transformed our office into...well an office! We now have a conference room, cubicles, and even a break room for the crews! It was a physical notation to see just how fast we have and are growing.

9. For my birthday the awesome people at work got me a gift certificate to Texas de Brazil. There is a big long running joke at the office with me and this restaurant. For the longest time I called it Texas State Brazil. So for my birthday, I got to go there, and it was AMAZING!

10. We moved! I'm not to fond of the house we are in, but we did move out from our little apartment into a small house with a backyard for the pups!

11. Getting my piano and corner cabinet. My company moved these down from Ohio for me. It really solidified that this is where my life is going to be.

12. Planning for 2012. :) My husband has lots of plans. He is officially starting his own business. We went to the courthouse and registered the name a few weeks ago. His best friend is moving back to run it with him. I am so excited for him and all of their plans!

12 Hope, Dreams, and Goals for 2012

1. To go home to Ohio for a visit! I haven't been in over two years!
2. To lose weight. I know, it's cliche, but I really want to do this.
3. To get pregnant.
4. I want Chuck's business to succeed so that his dream comes true.
5. Learn to manage my stress! Chuck says I am always super stressed.
6. Leash train my dogs.
7. Get a fancy camera.
8. Do more geocaching! I want to double my found count this year!
9. Get a new car.
10. Find a house that I love, that we can live in until I can talk Chuck into buying!
12. Get my piano tuned, and brush up on my skills.

10 things about myself that not a lot of people know

So I started this blog challenge on Scrapbook.com. Our lovely hostess will give us challenges each week on what to write about, and hopefully that will get everyone writing more! :) So this week the topic is 10 things about yourself that not a lot of people know.

1. I absolutely love African Elephants.
2. I'm lactose intolerant.
3. I'm a worrier. I worry and stress about everything.
4. I'm sadly a reality TV junky.
5. I met my soul mate playing an online video game.
6. I have anxiety when I'm in a car and someone else is driving. 
7. I know how to ride a horse.
8. My favorite food is watermelon.
9. The sight of a spider can make my physically ill.
10. My dream is to be a stay at home mom.

There ya have it folks! Now you know me just a little bit better than you did before!

Moving Day!

Oh my goodness, it's been forever since I posted! I really need to get better about that!

So this past week Chuck and I moved out of our little one bedroom apartment in Carrollton, to a nice three bedroom hosue in Lewisville. I love it here! We have a nice fenced in backyard for the dogs and I even have my own scrappy room....for now. :)

I don't have pics of the house yet, but I do have some of the movers! I was lucky enough that the company I work for moved me as part as a training exercise. I had two awesome trainers there, that I know and really like, and then three new employees that were in training to see if they would make the cut. They all did a super good job. 

I even got my PaPa's corner cabinet and my piano moved in. It feels so good to have them finally! It's been close to four years since I have played my piano and I am so rusty! But I am so excited to get it tuned and get back in the swing of things.Now I just have to unpack everything! :)

Scrappy Monday - Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo!

This week I'd like to share a page that I completed for the Progressive Challenge over at scrapbook.com. I love this challenge! My scrappy friend Stacey runs this challenge and I just love it. We meet once a month on the last weekend of the month on the forums. The way a progressive works is kinda like those books you used to read when you were a child, where you got to choose your adventure. Basically she asks questions and gives several possible answer, whatever the first answer is posted will dictate what steps we must do! The first step is if you will use a sketch or lift someones page. The second is what techniques you will do to the papers on your page, and the third is about techniques you do to your pictures. The fourth step, is my favorite in a sick and twisted way. It's the hardest step, but I always learn something new. It's better known as the flower step, or the handmade embellishment step. Fith is the step where we add extras, like ribbon and such. The sixth and seventh step are for the title and journaling. And when your done, you've got a completed page! The first three done always get extra points towards a RAK.

There are two techniques I really loved doing on this page. I made a stamped frame using swirls and butterflies with a touch of embossing. I love how it turned out! I also love the clock I made out of chipboard, paper, and a key charm for the top. I don't necessarily care for the title, but for now I'll keep it! Thanks for looking!

My Sister Layout

So I haven't posted any scrapbook LOs lately and I really hadn't realized it until the other week, when I tried out for a design team for a sketch site. They ask for a link to your blog where you share your projects, and well, mines mostly just pictures and ramblings. So I thought I would start sharing at least one LO a week.

This is the page I made for said design team. I didn't get selected, but I love how the LO turned out. The ketch is from Sassy Lil' Sketches. I used Basic Grey's newer line called Out Of Print. I just love this line. The feel of it always makes me want to scrap my sister, as it just screams her name to me! So this is a recent photo of my baby sister at Lake Erie. Isn't she gorgeous? I inked all of the squares with distress ink to make them stand out a little and to create some definition. It's hard to see but there is also just a splash of blue Glimmer Mist behind the squares. I really love how this turned out!

Too Hot To handle

So last weekend my work volunteered at an annual race called Too Hot To Handle. And boy was it hot out! We bring our truck and a couple of office staff out to do bag check for all of the runners so they have somewhere to store their items while they race!

I had to get up at 4:15 that morning to get ready and be to the race by 6:00am. I hate early mornings! But I was up and there on time non the less. There were a ton of runners this time, more than last year even. Here's a couple pictures I took.

Lake Lavon - 4th of July Weekend

So I did have some other fireworks fun besides just going to see the fireworks this year. We went and shot our own off. I'm not talkin the smoke bombs and sparklers I've always done growing up as a kid. But real, big, sparkly, bangin fireworks!

Every year it seems there are three fireworks stands on Lake Lavon. You go out there, buy some fireworks, and launch them in a field they provide. Sounds safe enough. There was EMT, and firemen, and police officers there. All legal! So we went out late one night this weekend, bought us a couple packs, and set some off with Alicia!

Now, it is a freaking' war zone out there! Kids running in the field setting things off, people not watching where they are shooting things, people shooting things at others on purpose....but it was fun. The smoke was incredible from all the fireworks. There mist have been HUNDREDS at the field we chose. The smoke was so thick, driving up you couldn't even tell where we were crossing the lake!

We stayed out there for about two hours I think, lighting a lot of small things. Then when we were ready to go, we launched our big kit, "Fade to Black". Sure, it wasn't the biggest kit there was, but it was still really neat! Short, but neat!

Happy 4th of July!

I just love Independence Day. I love what it stands for. I love being patriotic. I love the fireworks and fair food and bands. And heck, who doesn't love a three day weekend! Which might I say I appreciate so much now after working years at the hospital where you didn't get these holidays off.

Chuck and I decided to go see Addison's Kaboom Town this year. It was ranked #3 in fireworks displays and over 500 thousand people were expected. Now we didn't make it to the street fair, but we saw the fireworks. We parked far away and walked up near the airport. We found a spot on the curb to sit and had front row seats really.

As we arrived there was an airshow going on. A pilot was writing things in the sky and doing loops super close to the ground. It was very neat! The we waited about 20 minutes, while watching what we think were Plano's fireworks off in the distance. Then our show started! It was a great show that lasted about 30 minutes. We really enjoyed it. Here are some neat photos I took of the fireworks!

CRUISE!!!!!

Ok so I've been putting off posting about our cruise forever, just because I know its going to either be a huge post, or multiple posts. But it's time. So here we go folks!

Getting on the ship was super easy. We arrived at about 11:00am and were told that there were some issues (they didn't go into detail) and that they wouldn't start checking people in for another hour or so. Well we were starving so we left to get some food, and came back at about 12:30. Just as we finished getting checked in, they started letting people onboard. We were probably within the first 300 on.

Our stateroom was ready to go for us. We had gotten a promenade view in hopes it would help my seasickness, and I really believe it did. We had a big window and more space in the room. Our room was comfy and the steward was great. 

We ended up eating in the dinning room every night. We hadn't planned on it, but we loved the food and the service so much we just kept coming back. We had early seating, which was super early for us at 5:30. But we had found the late seating on our last cruise interfered with a lot of the evening activities. Turns out not many people like early seating, so we were able to get a table all to ourselves!

 The dinning room was beautiful and our waiters were awesome. Mihai and George were from Romania and just excellent. The food was yummy, especially desert. Here's a few of my favorites.The chocolate sufle was my absolute favorite. We even tried escargot and it was pretty good! Chuck got a steak almost every night, in fact I think he got one 5/7 nights.

We went to several of the shows in the theater. They were ok. The singers and dancers were good, but there was a comedian on the last night. Honestly he wasn't that funny. He made some tasteless jokes that I found funny (haha) but the family in front of us were clearly offended. He also had a lot of jokes about if the ship sank, which I thought was a poor thing to joke about with so many kids at the show.

We went to several events ran by the cruise director's staff. Can I just say they were amazing. On our last cruise I never even saw the cruise director. This guy and his team were EVERYWHERE. We went to a disco party, saw them preform Fountains, and went to Quest and the nightclub. Plus they were at lots of the mini activities throughout the day.

Fountains was a skit put on after the last nights theater show. It was a parody taken from Monty Python. It was gross and hilarious all at once.

Quest....oh Quest. I was a little scared going into this. I had read things warning about quest. But no real details were posted. So we went. Oh my gosh is it fun! Adult, but fun! Chuck got called down to participate. He had to dirty dance with the skinniest guy in our section. They both whipped of their shirts and went at it. We won that challenge too and they made it on the cruise review video. It was hilarious. Our team came in 2nd place if I remember correctly. It was a great time. I lost my favorite lipstick however as it was needed in two different challenge and came back to me mascaraed haha.

As far as the ret of the time on the ship we had a great time. The first couple of days there was a lot of wind and they had a lot of the upper decks closed. We played mini golf three of the nights in the dark and wind. It was a ton of fun! We also went ice skating and saw the ice show, which was AMAZING! We did a digital scavenger hunt and swam in the pool, as well as hung out in the sports grill watching for hockey scores. The bar tender there was awesome! We also hung out on the helipad a bit which was beautiful. We saw lightening from there our last night and heard thunder, which sounds a lot different in the ocean. We had the best time at the Quest afterparty at the Vault. They had 2 DJs and lots of booze! Who knew we were the nightclub type!

OK! On to our first stop, COZUMEL!

Chuck and I were super excited about stopping here. Last cruise we were miserable with sunburn and didn't enjoy Cozumel. We decided we were going to go to their famous Playa Mia beach. Honestly we were disappointed. perhaps a storm had ran through recently, but the beach was dirty with tons of seaweed on the sand and no one was swimming. They made us keep our umbrellas closed because of the wind, which sucked for me since I burn so easily. BUT, there was an open bar!

We hung out at the beach for a few hours and decided to head back a little early. I didn't want to get burnt and not be able to enjoy our favorite place in Grand Cayman the next day. We did some waundering around the port and then headed back on board for lunch.

The next day was GRAND CAYMAN! Our favorite place ever!

We decided we would go back to the beach we went to the last time we were here. Royal Palm Beach. They had renovated a little bit and now had a pool with a swim up bar. Our taxi driver tried to talk us into into going to one of two other beaches but we weren't having it.

We got some nice front row beach chairs and an umbrella to protect me from the sun. We swam and snorkeled a little bit. Chuck snorkeled more than I did. He found a stingray even. We had a really great time and really enjoyed ourselves. Getting back on the boat wasn't too hard either. We hardly had to wait, but the waves were pretty bad and it did make me a little nauseous.

Our last stop was in JAMAICA!

We decided not to even bother getting off here. We origionally planned to go to a beach, but decided in the end we didn;t want to brave Jamaica after our last experience here. It was a beautiful day and the island looked gorgeous though. I can't wait until the new port is finished. It was still a mess while we were there, and partly why we didn't get off. Instead we went to Johnny Rockets and took a nap. It was a good time.  :)

Disembarkation was easy peasy. Since we were taking our own luggage off we got to get off early. We got to walk right off and were in the car and going by 9:10. Now we can't wait to go on our next cruise!