Snipe Hunt!

Yay! New kit in my store at Plain Digital Wrapper today! I guess I've been in the mood for bright and fun lately, and this one fits the bill:


Lots of great inspiration and scrapping ideas courtesy of my creative layout artists!

(Layout by Interstitchal)

(Layout by Dracowin)
(Layout by Shanners)And a couple from me (finally scrapping some of my daughter's fantastic travel pix!)

And what's a brand new kit without a little freebie to go along with it? Today's sample is a quick page and word art (the word art is included separately, in case you'd like to use it on a different layout).

You can download the quickpage and the wordart HERE.

Warning: Whining

Yeah, like that's a big surprise. However, if you find yourself to be tired/annoyed/disgusted/bored by my recent riffs on Mother Nature and her peccadilloes, you might just want to go ahead and click "Next Blog" in your reader right now and just get it over with. Consider yourself duly warned...

We've had quite a lot of weather all week, and it has been annoying. Monday night I had the bright idea that some of my husband's compatriots, being assembled in town for a training meeting, should come experience the Southern household around the dinner hour. Good sound reasoning - these are folks he doesn't get to be around very often, and it's just smart to get to know each other in a relaxed and personable atmosphere so the next time somebody fires off an email, if it isn't one hundred percent clear (or tactful) you have enough understanding of the person's... well, persona, in order to realize that hiring an assassin probably is not only not necessary, but, well, reaching into overreaction territory. Unfortunately, being the introverted and indolent person that I am, providing the "relaxed and personable atmosphere" can fall a little on the "not-so-much-fun" side of things (although I worked diligently on my outlook to try to circumvent the whining, and was largely successful in the greater scheme of things, despite the moment an hour before arrival time when I discovered I had planned for a total of four guys and that number had been quietly extended to seven... ). Some extra beer, and a few additional steaks, and we were good to go again. After all, they could do their thing on the deck and it wouldn't matter that I only have 4 chairs around my table inside, LOL.

Except for the whole "weather" thing. Of course it rained. And was chilly. And while in the larger picture this didn't matter a whole lot, and that bonding occurred in spite of (and perhaps because of) shivering and standing and borrowing jackets. It was all good.

On Wednesdays, in the summer, when my husband is in town and free, he goes across the city to the drag strip and participates in "Test and Tune," an opportunity to practice his starts and timing and all that other stuff I don't really fully understand about drag racing (I get the first part, the "drag" part). I get an email message entitled "Drag Raining." Yeah. More clouds, more rain, more interruptions.... it's just par for the week's course. Annoying, but meh.

Yesterday, shortly after the dog and I scrounged through the fridge for some of Monday's leftovers for lunch (ok, I scrounged, but the dog was very definitely interested), I became aware of the fact that not only was it cloudy, but, it was CLOUDY. As in, somebody shut off some of the lights cloudy. Yikes. About the same time I noticed, it began to precipitate with a vengeance, and the next thing I knew, Angus was pretty much wrapped around my feet in panic, because, well, hail the size of a quarter beating down upon one's house is REALLY REALLY LOUD. At that time I remembered that supposedly there had been a tornado sighting earlier in the week (I maybe should start paying attention to the weather reports?) and we hoofed it to the basement to hang out til the noise stopped, and/or we ended up in OZ.

Once the deafening roar stopped, we came upstairs to a) check windows, and b) take pictures. Because it's kinda cool when there's a drift up against your back sliding glass window in June. I opened the front door to get a picture of the street being all white, and the smell was amazing... bruised trees smell wonderful, poor things. And after a nice round of photos, I went back to work at my computer, because one just doesn't waste mojo, particularly when it has been scarce and capricious, and I really didn't give much more thought to the event of the afternoon.

So when my husband came in the front door after his meeting, went straight to his office (no kiss, no greeting, no passing Go and collecting $200) and called the insurance company, it was a shove into a teensy bit of reality that I had overlooked. Oh yeah. Just because you don't end up in Oz (or even Kansas) doesn't mean that the roof is happy, or the hot tub cover, or the vinyl cladding on your sliding glass door...

I'm not even going to revisit my previous bloggery about blizzards in June... no more bright ideas for Mrs. Nature, Ma'am. Just respect.

All kinds of conflicted...

I've been on the Interwebs for a long time. Long enough to have seen a lot of things, experienced quite a few, interacted with many different types of folks, and to have signed up for at least a dozen "reward" programs. As the years have progressed, my willingness to participate in semi-mindless clicking activities for a small check, or a small gift certificate has faded. As a result, there aren't many left, and I don't always cooperate with the ones that remain, LOL. But today I got a notice for one of the more interesting ones, and I clicked.

This is the first time I've done so since I turned a rather round-numbered age with a substantially higher first number than I really care to focus upon. So it was with something of a start that I realized that I click a new radio button when it comes to the age demographic. The discomfort I felt upon doing so was intensified by the fact that it was also the LAST category (and while I can tell myself that this particular company skews towards a younger demographic, aforementioned discomfort remains pretty much intact). And while I will tell you that I was actually a little relieved when I got the "thank you, that's all the questions we have for you!" screen, if you look in my eyes you will see that I feel a hint of ageism leering down at me from the lofty heights of Comfortably Young.

So I did the only thing that could possibly make me feel better. I went to an online commercial site, and spent the equivalent of several weeks worth of careful clicking on a whim. I may be old, but I have disposable income. Take That, Interwebs!

A little mental. Very little.

A watched blog never boils.

Yeah, I know, I'm mixing metaphors and twisting things with that statement, but it's true. Just visiting your blog does not make words appear. It doesn't even make inspiration strike :) I know this, because I've tried really hard for the last couple of days, to no avail.

I made a couple of valiant efforts. Most of them turned out to posess the same level of success that the bird who tried to fly through my picture window this morning experienced. With about the same level of grammatical correctness as the previous sentence. Which I am not sufficiently motivated to analyze, let alone correct. (Sorry Mrs. Myhre, you haunt me still, but I've grown more stubborn as the years progress...)

So I guess the real question is, can one be inspired by a lack of inspiration? If one is in a suitably silly mood, does it matter if there's a reason for the silly, or does the presence of silliness in and of itself preempt the need for motivation? And how long CAN one ramble on about absolutely nothing at all?

For at least a couple of paragraphs, evidently ;) Any more than that would require an extra cup of coffee, and I'm not sure my nervous system is up to the task.

In other news, a happy birthday to my younger daughter, Molly Joy, who has now aged to the point to make her mother extremely nervous about cumulative numbers altogether, particularly in reference to the ones that appear in my age column. I'm starting to experience a teensy bit of the angst that inspired my mother to just stick with 39 for several years (insert shout out here to Denial and Rivers in Egypt and all that sort of thing). I guess it's apt punishment for my lack of sympathy for her feelings when I was the child. You just don't know what's in store for you :)

We went to se UP last night with aforementioned birthday child. Sweet, funny, inspiring, and most importantly... 3D! I will confess that I would have actually paid real money for a picture of the audience staring raptly at the screen in their big black Drew Carey 3D glasses. Not a lot of real money, admittedly, but I'm faintly intrigued by the idea of the diversity of the group, yet the visible talisman of the shared experience...

Yeah, ok, I guess I'd better go get that extra cup of coffee...

Mad As a Hatter

I have a new kit in my Plain Digital Wrapper Store called "Mad As a Hatter." Not gonna lie, I had an awful lot of fun with this one. Crazy colors, and fake fur, and fun textures - how can you go wrong! I mean, FAKE FUR, people! LOL. I'm so easily amused...
I had a little fun scrapping with it, too - I have a backlog of zoo pix that somehow have never found a home.

And here's a bonus that you can download for a limited time!
(sorry, download no longer available)

And as a special incentive, the first 5 people to post a layout in the Plain Digital Wrapper Gallery using the bonus kit will receive the full kit for free. Just leave a comment for me with some contact info (or email me at julieitis at gmail dot com). Have fun!

More Rain.

Yeah, more rain, and my solar batteries were already run down. However, silver linings and all that, so I tried to stay positive and focus on good things. So it was with a great deal of amusement that I watched a young mom and her two small children walk from the parking lot to the hobby store - both tots carrying open umbrellas with glee.

I remember that gleeful feeling myself. The need for an umbrella was a rarity in my northern Montana childhood - not that rain was so rare, necessarily, but liquid precipitation that wasn't driven by gale force umbrella-inverting winds was kind of elusive. So my eight year old self getting to walk outside with my blue-grey paisley umbrella that matched my blue-grey raincoat was quite a thrill. And to be honest, it's a thrill that I still feel every time I'm under a canopy of silk with the patter of raindrops beating a gentle cadence over my head. ::sigh:: Oh the romance!

All of these thoughts flitted through my mind as I drove past; the little boy especially made me smile with his bright yellow SpongeBob parasol, perched at an inefficient but adorable angle allowing him to focus more on it than his trajectory. I was amused all the way to the edge of the parking lot, when it suddenly occurred to me that if I were to unfurl my own umbrella, it would probably entertain a lot more people than some middle aged woman in a green Honda Element.

Y'know, what with it being a giant LADYBUG, and all...