So many Mondays, so many Tuesday mornings...

How about a little bit of the Pogues for the day. When my DH and were just dating, I was in college one town over. It was a long distance call, and a 45 minute drive. So, we didn't see each other much between working and schooling. However, we had a standing Tuesday night date. That song by the Pogues was out at the time, and it became one of "our" songs.

Anyway, I've been having a hard time blogging, as is evidenced by my last post being a couple weeks ago. Oh well, I've never been a good distance runner. My boss is ADD and I'm Gen-X (yes, I see the screaming generalizations here, so don't point them out), so we joke all the time about us only working 1/2 our hours, but getting in an entire weeks work in that time. You know, we spend a lot of time mentally planning our work before we actually work work.

Speaking of work work, we are having our office remodeled, so I spent the morning going through my desk and putting seemingly worthless things in a box so I can sort them out later - didn't want to tax myself - and I came across my collection of favorite Dilbert cartoons. One of my all time favs is pointy-hair holding his fist in the air saying "This is your stupid idea. I'm crushing it. Crush. Crush. Crush." Gotta love that one!

Well, I've probably rambled long enough to count this as my post for the week. I had a long, sappy thing about best friends, but I'll save that for another day.

To leave you...
But I knew that you
With your heart beating
And your eyes shining
Would be dreaming of me]
Lying with you
On a Tuesday morning
(more of the Pogues - you really should go listen to that song. I really like it)

Jacqui

My name is Jacqui, and I'm a scrapaholic

Scrapbooking has been around for centuries. In early times, scrapbooks mostly consisted of copied poems, theology, philosophy and art. In modern times, scrapbooking has become a way to preserve one's personal family history. Scrapbooking has taken the family photo album and added written stories that give future generations a glimpse into who these people were, what they did, and what they loved. Scrapbooks are less likely than photo albums to be sold by our great-grandchildren at a yard sale because their ancestors are not simply people smiling at the camera. These books are instead a wonderful written history of where they have come from.

I started scrapbooking after my first son was born, and I finally found the creative outlet I had been searching for. My mother is an artist who works in just about every medium possible. Throughout my life I have tried drawing, pastels, oils, acrylics, cross-stitch, sewing, quilting, and on and on. My biggest problem, besides not being a very being a very good artist, is that I am a "product person" not a "process person". I'm not into doing something just to do it. I do things beacuse I enjoy the results. Since I only have so much space to display the products of most of my forays into the art world, I gave them up. Scrapbooking finally opened a world where I could be artistic without being a good artist, and also serves a long-term purpose - preserving our family history.

It took several years to finally find my style. I could very easily throw away my early pages and not feel that bad about it - if I only knew where my negatives were. But now I can put together pages in a reasonable amount of time and be happy with the results.

I'm not completely obsessed - I have only created maybe 100 pages total in the 7 years I've been scrapbooking - but that's okay with me. I tend to scrapbook personalities rather than events. I don't feel the need to scrapbook every picture that I take; all my extras go in traditional photo albums that we can enjoy. But I get to spend time remembering the special people in my life, and hopefully preserve the memories of my son's childhoods to someday share with their daughters.

To find out more about scrapbooking and see some examples, visit some of these sites:
Creating Keepsakes
Simple Scrapbooks
Two Peas in a Bucket

Celebrate Your Family Today,
Jacqui

Oh, Brother

At Christmas time my 7 year old wanted a camera. I was just about to buy him a wonderfully inexpensive film camera with zoom when suddenly I realized - you have to buy film and pay for pics with that thing! Wow, I forgot about old-style photography. I decided that I was not paying all that for a 1% return of decent photos. So, he got a new Playstation game instead.

Fastforward to spring. My dad called me while he was on vacation and said that at the local Best Buy they were clearencing some cheepo digial cameras for 25 bucks, and did I want one for the boy. You're kidding - bring one home. So, in his Easter basket was his first digital camera. I finally got around to buying him an actual memory card a few weeks ago so his pics weren't automatically deleted when the batteries run down, (I know I'm a bad mom, what can I say). Anyway, yesterday I finally downloaded all 112 pics he's taken, and there in the bunch was this beauty. This is his younger brother. I figure this is his viewpoint of him most of the time. Maybe we have a budding photographer on our hands - capturing real life in all its glory.