The truth is, I don't have much of a relationship with Abigail or her immediate family. She lives in Colorado, and I live in California. I haven't even seen her in person since July. I had seen her in person one other time before then, although in both cases, the Abigail sightings were because we went to Colorado for several days in December and she came here with her parents for several days in July.
Because I don't really have a lot to write about Abigail - and nothing more to write about Grandma, since she moved on to Heaven in October - I have already randomized this blog, writing a lot about spiritual epiphanies and such.
It was on my other blog that I shared one aspect of the trip to California my granddaughter, step-daughter and son-in-law made. There were two trips to the beach by members of my family in the summer of 2011. Abigail, Holly and Rob made the one in July. Don and Ellen made their trip to the beach in August. It was miscommunication (mostly) that prevented the five of us from making that trip together, which I so would have loved. And I still would have gone back to the different beach in August! That's my privilege, living here!
At the time, my other blog was about my stamping craft projects. That blog had started with a crazy idea that Don and I could make a profit selling scrapbook supplies from our own website. Because we don't have room for a scrapbook warehouse at our condo, they would have actually come from what's known as a "drop shipper, " which is a company known as Doba. (Doing Business As). We figured out early on that the only products Doba had on hand that would be good sellers were acrylic stamps and a few Cricut supplies. I don't have a Cricut, they're too expensive! But I do have quite a few acrylic stamps, and had our idea gotten off the ground, I would have ordered more from my own website to create and blog about the great things that could be done with them. But, with the fees both Doba and the company we were working with would have charged for their services, it became clear that we would have had to have sold A LOT of scrapbook supplies to make it work. And this was in early 2010, when no one sold a lot of things. So we didn't do it.
In the meantime, I decided to post crafting projects, cards and scrapbook layouts, I had made with my own stamps. And I kept doing that for quite awhile, until late 2011. I have seen a good many beautiful scrapbook blogs explaining how they created awesome cards and layouts. I wanted my blog to be like theirs, somehow.
But my cards and layouts are not awesome. However, my cooking is. My current dream is to be employed as a food writer, so in November I changed the focus of my other blog to food, and I now use it to share any recipes I create. (I use cookbooks, but nine times out of 10, twist the recipe to make it my own.)
That eliminated my scrapbooking blog, which at the time I didn't see a need for. For almost nine years, I've shared hundreds of scrapbooking projects and tens of thousands of thoughts about scrapbooking with Two Peas in a Bucket, an online scrapbooking community. That community has tremendous bandwidth, so anything I wanted to share about scrapbooking could be shared there.
But earlier this month, Debbi Tehrani, a good friend I've made at Two Peas, started her own scrapbooking website, Color Stories Inspiration. Debbi is one of those highly talented scrapbookers with an awesome blog. Because of her great talent, and that of several people she recruited as a "design team" for her website, a new online scrapbooking community has started there. And many of them are not part of Two Peas.
Problem is, CSI does not have huge bandwidth. It's all relative. Less than a month into its launch, members of this online community have already shared 400-something scrapbook layouts. I myself have shared four. Each layout that each person has shared relate specifically to a challenge. Use five specific colors that she chooses, and use three or more of about 10 other elements she suggests. CSI really doesn't have room for pictures of anything other than that.
But Two Peas, in its 13 years in business, has accepted more than 1 million scrapbook layouts, cards and other photos. It also has sold several million dollars worth of scrapbooking supplies in that time. Two Peas seems to have unlimited capacity for text and photos. However, it does not. A few years ago it had to temporarily transfer layouts posted long ago off the site while it completed a major system upgrade, without which it probably would have crashed.
I am sure that was a major investment on the online scrapbook retailer's part. So I can understand why Debbi, whose income is her elementary school teaching salary and her husband's salary as a district manager of a restaurant chain, doesn't want to have to worry about a major website upgrade anytime soon. Granted, this couple has a lot more money to fool around with websites than we do. But they're not rich.
So....the many things unrelated to this challenge that I would like to share about scrapbooking with people at CSI will now become part of this blog. I also would like to share more about my daily life here. Ideally, I will in fact post daily entries. I don't know how interesting most of them will be. But I'm a professional writer, so I'll try.
I am not sure how the photography will work. Most of my scrapbooking projects I will be able to scan into the computer and post immediately. But the photos I take on a regular basis, I haven't been able to immediately post because I lost my camera cord. Since doing this, I have periodically burned a number of photos to CD, and then and only then can I upload them to the computer. So I suppose I will write, post, and come back later with the pictures.
See you tomorrow!
