Year of the Rabbit

We live in a suburban neighborhood that is surrounded by wooded areas, so we are no strangers to wildlife. We have deer in our front and back yards fairly frequently, and Miss Ruby will just stand and watch them, wagging her tail humbly, as if to say, "I recognize that you are much bigger than I and have sharp hooves." She doesn't bark at the deer.



The rabbits are another matter entirely. We have only rarely seen bunnies around here until this year, and they have been in our front yard almost daily this summer, feasting on the fine crop of tender clover we have cultivated in lieu of actual grass. (I was not hiding behind the bushes...I took this photo through the kitchen window. Maybe the shrubs need a little trimming? If you click on the photo you can see the cute little bunny.)



For some reason, the rabbits make Ruby totally lose her mind. Is it a breed thing (from one of the many unknown breeds in her questionable heritage)? Is it their sheer cheekiness as they sit there calmly chewing while she barks and whines and tries to claw her way through the kitchen window?



All I know for sure is that it is exhausting work barking at those bunnies.

Simple Vacation Album

I have been working on an album for the big American Southwest vacation we took last year. Because we took so many photos, a couple thousand at least, I am using a very simple style with a lot of photos per page. For the title page, I printed out a map of our route that Ron created using Microsoft's Streets & Trips software. (Have I ever mentioned how that man loves to plan a trip? He is a trip-planning fool.)

Here are the first few pages, created mostly with cardstock, scraps, and the Making Memories Slice and the Travel cartridge. I plan to add at least a little embellishment to the plainest pages, but right now I am all about getting the photos and journaling (done by Mr. Trip Planner on the laptop as we traveled!) down on the page.

So, is anyone else watching "More to Love" and willing to admit it? Those poor women...they were all lovely women but it was really painful to watch, and I'm just glad I'm already married so I won't have to resort to joining them next season. One poor girl felt compelled to tell the guy right off the bat that she'd never been on a date, one jumped into the pool in her evening gown much to everyone else's discomfort, and one calmed her nervousness with wayyyy too many free beverages. I was a bit disappointed to see that the guy apparently sent home the five largest girls. Way to make it not about the weight, dude.

In other TV related news, next week is the season finale of So You Think You Can Dance, and I hate this part. The final six dancers are all so talented that I can't stand to think of any of them being eliminated. That said, someone clearly has to go home and I voted (multiple times) for everyone except Evan and Kayla. I can't express how much I love this show and how much I wish I could dance like they do, but if I could I would obviously have to overcome some boundary issues. By the end of the season, those dancers have been in very close proximity to the sweaty crotches of all of the other dancers. (Is "sweaty crotches" a search term that is going to get me a lot of weird visitors?)

Um, let's see, what else? Yesterday we had the sunniest rainstorm I have ever seen. The sky was blue with almost no clouds, yet it was raining.



I took that photo on the way to pick Annamarie up from "Colt Camp," where she gets to ride horses and swim and apparently, be hosed down with dirt on a daily basis. She has never been one of those kids who likes to get dirty--it is no secret that she is a girly girl--but she comes home absolutely filthy every day. In the photo below, she is wearing a regular t-shirt, but it has taken me eight days of camp to convince her that anything with rhinestones and/or sequins is overkill for camp. This was on the way home, and that is her stuffed horse Misty Stacey Beer whatever she's calling the poor floppy, broken-necked thing this week.



And with scintillating news like that to report, you'll surely wonder why I am not posting every day.

I will never sleep tonight

HI! HOW ARE YOU? I'M GOOD, REALLY GOOD. I was feeling pretty draggy before I went to pick Thomas up from summer camp for the weekend, and I thought a cup of hot cranberry tea might perk me up a little, and now I AM PERKY. "Bouncing off the walls" might not be an overstatement. We're getting ready to head out to dinner with a friend, but I thought I'd use some of this excess energy to post a couple of layouts. Maybe after we get home I'll have some more tea and whip out 15 or 16 pages before I crash.

Many times I have considered signing up for a kit club but haven't actually bitten the bullet until Margie Romney-Aslett and her daughters announced the opening of The Girls' Loft. I love Margie's style and knew that I'd love the things she threw together, and I was not disappointed when I received my first package this week. Look at all of this pretty pink-and-greenness.



Both of the pages below were done with the Girls' Loft kit. The first one is an older photo that I have scrapped before, but it's one of my favorites.

Yes, I am scrapping

The embellishments on this last one might look a little random, but all of them were part of the kits used in classes on the Ultimate Scrapbook Cruise. So there's a sticker from Heidi Swapp, a rub-on from Karen Russell, a brad from Margie Romney-Aslett, etc.