Old Movies

I have always loved this movie! I used to watch it

every time it came out as a little girl. But I never

finished it. This was on last night and I was

able to "stay up late" and watch the entire film.

It's silly, sad, funny, romantic, corny and just a great 'ole Love Story.

p.s. Has great footage too! That Austrian Alp mountain scene! OMG!

Making a list....

Well, this isn't Santa's list. It's my own....there is a really cool challenge/site. 101 things to do in 1001 days, you dan find it http://community.livejournal.com/mission101/ here. That's

2.75 years. So, if I start this on Jan 1, 2008 one-thousand-and-one days later is September 28, 2010. Yikes!

I'm in the process of doing this now, and I only have 65 items. It's a lot harder than I thought.

I'm going to leave a couple blank to fill in as the year goes by.

I'm so visual, I really need to be reminded of my list. I'll take whatever I can get.

And I think I'll be checking it at least twice, too! hahahaha

One week away!!!

These are some of my favorite ornaments and Christmas decorations. I wish I could take credit for all these pictures but I have a daughter who's got a great camera eye. She just grabs the
camera and off she goes. Thank God for digital!

I love, love, love Santa's and Snowmen (as you can tell). But
the tree is pretty overloaded. I have to slow down my ornament shopping.
I've always enjoyed buying the kids ornaments of their own and someday
it'll be fun for them to decorate their own tree with the ones they've gotten
over the years. Their grandmother is awesome at picking out the best
ornaments for them each year. She even got our dog an ornament to
commemorate the day she had an encounter with a skunk!!! We almost had
to vacate the house because of it!! For three weeks she still had "that smell".
I heard the scent can be carried in her eyes! Eeewww!

It's beginning to look a lot....

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas around here! And it

sure feels alot like it too! I've pulled out more sweaters and have

even worn my long tail hat. As a matter of fact, I wore my hat

out to take the two lower pictures at the local Light Display the

other night.

Snow would sure be nice to go along with all the Christmas displays.

That Christmas Spirit

I'm getting there! Started my Christmas shopping, made my list. But I'm sure
there will be edits to it as the weeks go by. Brad usually fills me in on something he "really wants" about a week before Christmas. You know, when I've already shopped for him and I'm running around tying up loose ends. Getting those last minute "oh I forgot" items. The kids are at least getting into better stuff, it's not so junky like it used to be. Some of the toys they wanted were made so cheaply.
Yep, probably made in China too!

I'd like to go back to the park I took these pictures of above in the evening and take these same shots at night. I wonder how much I'll have to fuss with the
settings to get the pictures "just right". Still learning and playing with my DSLR. I love, love, love it!

Happy Turkey Day

A life in Pictures

This was my March-April project this year. Since my oldest was graduating from high school, I wanted to do something "out of the ordinary" for a graduation present for him.

I heard about a really cool program on Komando.com called AndreaMosaic. You can download the program for free. The program will prompt you to create a "Library" of your digital photos. You'll need at least a couple hundred depending on the desired size of your finished product. You can adjust how often you want a picture repeated, the amount of tiles between the same picture and the amount your willing to let the program "distort" the original image. By distortion it may put a tint on a few photos to enhance the "back-up" view of the finished picture or it will crop the image or even rotate the image. (This will not distort your image on your hard drive only the "copied" image in the mosaic library)

You'll want to play around with the settings to see what you like. But remember once it does it's work, and you like the finished product you'll want to save it because it won't pull in the exact same tiles in the exact same way again. Very random!

Very fun and intriguing program for those that like a challenge and like to tinker
with things. There is a messageboard on this site that will answer a few questions to help you get started.

Here's the link to the webpage.http://www.andreaplanet.com/andreamosaic/


Enjoy!

Color Grid

I have seen this type of color/photo grid at other sites and I thought it

was so cool. I created this myself using all of my own pictures and

Photoshop Elements 4.0. This was super fun to make. Most of these pictures were taken at an area nursery. The two pictures of the tree with the blue sky are of my tree in the backyard. Both are of the same tree taken just one day apart. Amazing color change :)

Boo!

I couldn't have asked for a nicer day. We had a really "fattening" Halloween Lunch at work. We have some really good cooks amongst us. Not I , however. Last week I gave a "goblin bag" anonymously to Amanda. What a sweetie!!! I gave her the Dove milk chocolate with carmal filling, Yum!! She then goblin'd Brenda, who goblin'd Gene, who goblin'd Juanita, who goblin'd Mandy. Then I totally lost track.

Dropped my swimmer off at practice at 3:30, an hour later, she was done.

Only about 2 hours early! What a nice coach to give them a bit of a break and let them have some Halloween fun. Of course, it was all because my swimmer picked a "treat" and it was a "get-out" swim. And the challenge was met!

Swimmers Take Your Mark

.....and she's off!!! First meet of the season, at home
thank goodness. She was able to sleep in her own bed, do her own thing and we saved travel and hotel expenses. She had a decent meet considering how brokendown she is from training. After 9 practices a week the child has no problem sleeping at night. It's back to school tomorrow morning after being off since the 17th for a little Fall Break.

Her High School is requiring try-outs for the swim team this year. So, add another activity on to her plate tomorrow.

Dennis Prager Happiness Hour

I 've had my RIO mp3 player for almost 3 yrs and I use it just about everyday. It's a great way for me to keep up with my favorite talk shows.

Dennis Prager (DP) has a Happiness Hour which is his 2nd hour every Friday. If you're able to listen live it would be at 1 pm EST.

This week DP talked about the Destructive Nature of Envy. You cannot be happy if you envy people. Envy is one of our most human of frailities. But we must fight it. He equates envy to the "missing tile" syndrome. Which is like having a thousand tiles on the ceiling and one is missing, we tend to focus on that missing tile. Failing to see that the other 999 tiles are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing and are what we wanted.

There is always something someone has that we don't. But we forget that we also have things that others will envy us for.

A lady, Juanita called up and said that when she was younger she was often jealous and envious of others. Girls that had nicer clothes, pretty barrettes, etc. Then in her 20's she realized that the pain of feeling envy was much worse than not having that material "something" that she wanted. So, she made a conscious effort to stop being envious. It just wasn't worth it.

I love Dennis Pragers' wisdom and insight. I get a real kick out of him. I don't agree with everything he has to say, but 95% of what he does say is just right on with me.

You can download his shows from the following website: http://www.patriotunderground.com/

Remember your Family & Friends

I stumbled upon this blog of Ray Blakes a while back. He calls it "working on me". I haven't commented on many blogs before but I felt compelled to comment on this one. He was writing about keeping in touch with others. He established a system where he will reming himself to
contact a person on his list by 1) phone call 2) letter 3) email 4) face-to-face. You can find what
he says here:
http://workingonme.squarespace.com/journal/a-system-to-keep-in-touch-with-people.html#comments

So, I need to figure out a few things:
1- Who will be on my list
2- Names of those I've lost touch with and ideas how to get their current addy's
3- How I will respond
4- What system will I use to record these actions

Hats

For the last 6 yrs I've been making these long tail hats. The fleece choices have been more fun then ever. I totally have a weakness for cute fleece. I would sell these at little church craft bazaars and people just loved them.

This is a batch of 89 hats. Ready to go. When I was a kid I swam AAU, that first winter I caught pneumonia because I wouldn't wear a hat. So, this if for all those kids/ adults who need that extra warmth on their heads so they don't get sick. When I started this, my daughter would hand these hats out to all her friends. She of course, had the pick of the litter. I believe one season she had 15 hats that she wore regularly. A mother of a friend of my daughters made her her first hat. She was 8 yrs old at the time. About 4 girls had these matching hats. Michelle wore her hat the entire Christmas break, even slept with it on. I then knew I had to learn how to make these hats.

Windsocks

Color!! We start with the primary colors and work our way out! I love color! It's all around us. I lean toward those very Primary colors (reds, yellows and blues).

These windsocks are the coolest, a local garden shop has these out and they are the prettiest site. I always think I'll stop by and purchase one someday. But I get overwhelmed, which one would I buy? Would I get tired of it after I bought it? I think not!

Be Brave enough to live life creatively. The creative is the

place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave

the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your

intuition. You can't get there by bus, only by hard work

and risk and by not quite knowing what you're doing.

What you'll discover will be wonderful.

What you'll discover will be yourself.

-Alan Alda, advice to his daughter

My Dog

I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not

the better for it. - Abraham Lincoln

This is Gretchen. She's been with us since 1998, she was born in

August that same year. Which makes her 63 in dog-years. She's a

sweetie, most-of-the-time. But my family swears she can fake

an injury for attention and she definitely tries to get away with

things that she doesn't want to do. For instance, we'll let her

out at night before bed and she won't go do her business unless

we stand at the door and watch her walk off the deck. Otherwise,

she just turns around and waits at the door to be let back in.

What's in a Name?

Ok, so where have I been? I got my nails done today and there was an April issue of People out with Marcia Cross (from Desperate Housewives) on the front. She had twin girls in February. What really caught my eye was that she named one of her girls Eden, the other one is named Savannah. So, now I'll have to pay more attention to what's going on with the celebrities. But I tell you they are hard to keep up with. I don't even recognize half of them. Probably because I don't watch that much tv or see alot of new release movies. I'm the first one to change the channel if Brittany, Paris or Lindsey are mentioned.

There's got to be more to life...................

But really, if you know another Eden please comment. I've only known 2 other ones. One was a guy a yr older than me in High School and the other one was a daughter of a Dr I worked with.

People in the Crowd

Here are just a few of the fans sitting right behind us. Aren't they the cutest?

Go! Tigers! Go!

The St.Xavier Tigers beat Trinity Shamrocks on Friday Sep 28th 24-15 at the Papa Johns Cardinal Stadium where 37,750 fans watched this Catholic Superbowl. Last year the Rocks beat St. X, they scored early in the 1st quarter. An approaching thunderstorm had both teams go for cover in the 1st quarter and they never returned to the field.

Avatar Mosaic

Isn't this the coolest thing? I got this idea from my daughter. She made one of these for her friend. All you need to do is go to

http://www.iconator.com/ and copy&paste your favorite avatars to a

word document. Then I scanned it, and put the blue border on it

in PSE.