Keeping busy

Last weekend, Don and I visited the  Los Angeles County Fair. We used go every year, but for a number of reasons, this was our first visit in three years. We picked a good weekend, as both this weekend and all earlier weekends in September were quite a bit warmer than last weekend. But, as always, we only saw about one-fourth of the fair, including the pirates and parrots show illustrated here. Before this show we also checked out the wine and the "natural resources" area behind the garden/wine building. This year, the area included displays of birds and reptiles from around the world, and information on the history of the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, and what these federal government agencies do today. This included a replica of a Forest Service lookout, a small nature trail, an opportunity (which we declined) to saw logs like a lumberjack and more. We finished the day by checking out some of the art, and by eating at the sit-down restaurant at the fair, which is something different every year, this year Italian food. I may have said on my other blog that I was going to enter nut breads in this year's fair, but I procrastinated too long, and did not mail the entry in. Maybe next year. I just have a hard time cooking nut breads in August though, when it's usually hot enough without firing up the oven for an hour or more.

These are two of the three two-page scrapbook layouts I've made about the fair.The background paper for both are from a really old stack of paper I bought in Target in 2005.The layout I have not photographed used paper almost that old that I bought at Michael's about the same time, one of those many times I've bought far more sheets for a specific project than I would use on that one project. Some scrapbookers will throw away papers they have had even for as little as a year, but not me. I love being able to mix old and brand new things for a scrapbook page that is all mine.

The page with the parrots I made with help from CSI Color Stories Inspiration, which provides free printables every week, including the wood-grain paper, the journaling card and the bird, which I enlarged 200 percent before printing. All of their printables match a specific color/embellishment/journaling scrapbook challenge offered each week. Although I have done a page for the challenge, CSIs is one of the trickiest scrapbook challenges out there, and this particular scrapbook page did not meet all of the challenge requirements. So I made another page, not about the fair, that did, but I'm still glad when the CSI weekly printables work on my "real life" pages as well.

This Saturday, Don and I were again busy, as we were interested in two events in Jurupa Valley. One of the two turned out to be a big disappointment, but I will soon scrapbook 15 photos or more from the other event, the Flabob Flying Circus.

Color studies

I'm going to let you in on one of my best scrapbooking secrets here. Scrapbook.com has a tool that makes picking colors easy! Just add a photo and look at the colors it chooses. Do any of those colors make a pleasing color combo? Then that's the colors you should use! Even if they aren't the colors you were thinking of.

Are those colors not making any combinations you like? Then pick one of the colors, just one, any one. Even if you're surprised to see it as one of the choices. Just make it a color you like.

Now pick any one of the schemes on the right. Because I am sure that since you liked the one color you picked, you will also like the colors that combine with in monochromatic, complementary, analogous or split complementary or triadic color schemes. At least you will like one of those combos, maybe more. But just pick one from there.

Now that you've identified two, three or four colors that you like, you will use those colors to select what else you need. Theoretically, that stuff will match the colors in the combination you just selected. But it may only inspire them.

Here is a layout that is my case in point.

The color scheme I picked from scrapbook.com capitalized on the green that is predominant in these photos, and the orange that many of the runners are wearing.  From the orange, I selected the triadic color scheme, which throws in a green a little darker than the one woman' shirt, a blue the color of Don's shorts and a little darker orange. Based on that scheme, I picked both of the green pattern papers in this page, the grass and the geometric shaped print. I was not able to find a suitable orange paper among those I already own, but I did find this yellow polka-dot paper. And yellow and green is a nice combo to me! My almost high school, Le Grand, had it for school colors. (Really glad I got to stay at Chowchilla High and its red and white though.) Because of things that coordinate with the yellow paper, I also changed the blue to a lighter shade. Although the blue is almost cobalt on the far left circle (which is not cut off in real life), in the C in camp and all the letters in Corona, even that blue is lighter than I had originally planned, and the more predominant blue, in the pinwheels, in three of the other circles, and in one of the O's in Boot, is almost pastel. But I think it works, especially since I also was able to incorporate three shades of orange in the words Boot Camp and the circles on the bottom. I have been loving the colors in this Splash collection of Echo Park (from either summer 2010 or 2011), for awhile, so I hope when I run out of Splash, something else is out there with them.

I'm working on another layout right now that took this color matching tool a step farther. The photo for that layout is of my granddaughter wearing yellow pajamas. I would have thought some kind of cheery yellow would have shown up as one of the color choices, but that did not happen. Instead, a shade of lavender was one of the predominant colors. I love lavender, and that's the complement of yellow, so I went with it!

If you use the complementary scheme with most shades of lavender, it will give you three hues of lavender and one of turquoise to choose from. To me, lavender and turquoise are lovely together, but when scrapbooking a little girl in that combo, pink is a great addition. And so, I found in my stash of supplies a few lavender things that would work, and a bunch of pink and turquoise things. I actually do have a lot of lavender things, but  how I decide which things to look at first, and which to use, is a little bit of trial and error I think most artists of any kind may be familiar with. But I still was not expecting what happened. When the page came together, there was absolutely no lavender on it. Just pink and turquoise. I love it, and I hope Abigail will too. She's getting this page, along with an entire scrapbook about the time she was ages 1and 2, for her third birthday.

Such drama!

There were two layouts I had in my existing collection that fit other challenges for the crop I am working on. one of them was this one, Tarnished Gold.

The assignment was, for "Drama Class," to do a layout about something dramatic. And for those who don't know the saga behind this layout, has it ever been dramatic. Hopefully, the series finale is coming soon, and Jurupa Valley will get the stolen money back and live happily ever after.

The clincher has come, it did so Sept. 1 when the Legislature passed legislation to restore the $6 million + each year Jurupa Valley had been counting on, but has never received because the state redirected Vehicle License Funds away from cities on June 28, 2011 - two days before Jurupa Valley's official incorporation. We were supposed to build a surplus during our first year, and we did. It was $3 million instead of $10 million. We were supposed to have a budget of $24 million this year, and right now we don't. Without the VLF, it's only $18 million. We cut our police force by 10 percent, but how much can a city cut when it's just getting started? For us, there would have been no way we could have cut enough. We will be toast if Gov. Brown does not sign the legislation. He has until Sept. 30. The Senate passed the legislation unanimously, the Assembly by a more than-two thirds vote.

But there are some villians in this drama. Most county governments, except Riverside of course, are opposed to this legislation because if more new cities incorporate, there is a slight potential it will mean less money for their existing cities law enforcement programs. At this time, the legislation is Jurupa Valley's only hope for survival, and will greatly help three other new cities in Riverside County (Eastvale, Menifee and Wildomar) and 144 others throughout California that incorporated territory and would have to make cutbacks somewhere to serve all of the new people without VLF. These villians are worried about what could happen, and in their mind, the potential inconvenience of that  trumps Jurupa Valley's survival and the ill effects on 147 other cites. The Los Angeles Times is also a villain in this drama, as it callously dismisses the four most severely affected cities as "unnecessary."

So, I am asking anyone who lives in California - especially ANYWHERE in Riverside County - to go to Jurupa Valley's website (www.jurupavalley.org) and find addresses of the governor's staff to write letters encouraging his support for AB 1098. This is important in such places as Fontana (where a large annexation happened) and in east Los Angeles County (where there is perennial talk of creating ONE MORE CITY), and in Madera County where it is hoped the orderly development of Rio Mesa will eventually lead to both the much less orderly developed Oakhurst and Rio Mesa joining Madera and Chowchilla as cities. In 2008, Oakhurst said no to cityhood the day Wildomar said yes. Oakhurst probably loves their 20/20 hindsight now, but I'm sure those people want the option to revisit cityhood some day.

And it's really important for Jurupa Valley, and for me.

Update (12/15/12): I was just looking at this and realized I failed to update all that the drama continues. Gov.  Brown did veto the bill in mid-September. We now have elected a Democrat to the state Senate, he is sworn in, and fixing this problem will be his second highest priority. His top priority is getting a medical school at UC Riverside. I wish him well on both endeavors, although I wish his priorities were reversed.

And now, three months later, we've all learned the Governor is being treated for prostate cancer. I have to say I hope he gets well soon, but I also have to wonder - Karma?

Some scrapbooking fun

Hapy Grandparents' Day everyone! I was so happy to be wished one myself by my stepdaughter, who is a mom to 1.9 kids (the younger expected to arrive any day now). And it was so fun to see my friend Thena Cullen Smith's pages about her grandparents that she's been posting on Facebook this morning, especially since those are true heritage pages, as Thena is at least old enough to be a grandmother herself.

I may or may not celebrate Grandparents' Day with my scrapbooking. I have an idea to do one page about Abigail, but seeing Thena's pages makes me wonder if I should just do something about my own, now all deceased, grandparents instead.

The page about Abigail I have planned would fit in with a very fun online crop I have discovered.  Back 2 Class doesn't mean much here of course. The only person in school at this time is Don, and he was not only taking classes all summer, he was also volunteering all summer in a classroom at a year-round school, a class that went off track in September. I will be joining Don at school in October, although I will be going to UCR-Extension instead of CBU. So with the elementary school class and my class starting in October, I guess that's really back-to-school month for us.

But the Back 2 Class Online Crop is fun. It offers multiple challenges, each based on a certain subject you might have taken at some point in school. You can submit one layout for each challenge. Unfortunately, the requirement is one layout, one challenge, and it must be a new layout.

My problem is, one of my layouts fits at least five of their challenges, and I actually created it with Friday's CSIColorStories challenge in mind, not this one. Another one of the challenges inspired me to redo the page about what I did on my 50th birthday. I of course finished that page some six months ago, but the challenge helped me give it some more oomph, so for that I am glad. Sunday, I saw that it also would have fit a second challenge.

And so far, I have done one page that fits one challenge of this online crop. In addition, there were five existing layouts that fit one of the challenges. In those cases, I hope a great crop like this will inspire some new ones as well, but I usually have to have some more of a starting point than  these challenges offer. That's why I often combine crop challenges.

I'm going to share all three of the recently completed or redone pages here, as well as what I posted to CSI on Friday night before redoing for this crop. In the post after this, I'm sharing an existing layout that fit the crop's "drama" challenge, because you all need to know the state/local political drama that has been going on here for 14 months, and has influenced how I think about government.

My original Run 2012 layout as posted on CSI Color Stories

The redo, which fits the Back2Class Online Crop's Math assignment, which is to use four pattern papers, three cardstock pieces (I used four), four of one emellishment (green flowers), three of another (white flowers) and 14 of something else (brads.) This layout also fits the crop's journalism assignment (write at least three to four sentences of journaling), the recess assignment (use a photo of outdoor activity), the and the physical education assignment (use a photo showing motion). It even fits the somewhat more complicated health assignment, which was to do a layout focusing on my (the scrapbooker's) body. Although there is a group of us in this photo, that's me in the orange shirt and white shorts. The journaling I had already done tells how running has affected me physically, and concludes with my desire to run farther and faster in the rest of 2012.  I did not run today, but I did walk nine miles this morning with some of these same people.

The health assignment also specified to use things starting with the letters B-O-D-Y. This layout already had that. It uses brads, one photo, Die Cuts With A View brand paper (known as DCWV in the scrapbooking world) and yellow cardstock.

I have come along ways since this day a little more than six months ago. On that day, my actual 50th birthday, I went three miles with Riverside Road Runners beginners' group, running part of the way and sprinting into Arlington Heights Sports Park at the end of my workout. Then I did everything you see pictured here. A few days later, I made this layout, but a little differently than what you see here. It was the perfect candidate for the Back2Class online crop's Home Ec class, which required following a recipe of five pattern papers, a border punched element, "stitching" a pennant and a butterfly element. I already had two of the pattern papers and the pendant on the page, but this redo required a little bit of lifting up and fixing. The red strip 2/3 of the way down, already cut on its jagged printed lines, is now border-punched as well. Above that, and above the pendant, there is some purple fiber. Since I don't have a sewing machine and punching this background paper full of needle holes wasn't an acceptable option, I like how the fiber resembles "messy" stitching. The pendant itself was made of the same three colors of solid papers, but I like these patterns. The pink and lavender ones have been in my stash since about 2005, the Basic Grey almost as long, and the red pendant paper is something I once received in a swap. Lastly, I added a butterfly, cut from pattern paper I bought in June. Sometimes you just have to wait until something good comes along.

This is the one layout that I made so far only because of the Back2Class Online Crop. The "reading" assignment provides a list of current best-selling book titles, one of which is The Dog Stars. That book surely must be about these adorable pooches a friend (somewhat related) placed on Facebook a few days ago. So they deserved to be captured on page.

They have some more classes for me to work on today. Yearbook is my next choice. You know how some lucky students were given the superlatives like "Best Looking" or "Most Spirited?" The assignment is to make a layout giving someone one of those superlative students.

I was not awarded a superlative, and I'm not sure if my stepdaughter was, but we can hope my granddaughter will receive one in 2028. For now, she's definitely already caught onto her mom's love of Ohio State, because Holly sent me a really cute picture of Abigail in a Buckeye dress. So, she will be my subject for the next assignment, most likely. Stay tuned.

Thoughts about Rubidoux

To pass the time on some hot summer days, I wrote an essay about Rubidoux, the oldest and most urbanized community in Jurupa Valley. Then I took a picture of some pretty trees, replicated them in my art journal, and added a bit of my original essay.

The prompt from CSI Color Stories International prompted me to draw the trees again and write yet another short essay about relaxing and drawing trees at the Rubidoux Library.  An then I wrote the epic essay posted below.

Update: Summer's over! The scary finances I've been weaving into this essay were improved in one way already, and likely will be vastly more improved tomorrow. And then even more vastly improved on Saturday, when Don starts getting his Air Force pension.

I haven't had the best summer, and that may be part of why I haven't been diligent with this blog. But that's an excuse, a copout even. Because today's probably one of the worst days of days that have been going progressively downhill, and in that downhill spiral, I've come up with something good to write.

I have to be honest about the direction my life is going right now. Other than the blessing of having two job interviews this month (bringing the grand total I've had all year to five), I pretty much am an old, possibly retired lady of 50. I have all the time in the world it seems. And of course, nowhere near enough money to match that time. In fact, all this week,  EDD decided to hold up funds until they figure out that they have to extend my claim instead of giving me a new one, which in essence means they've decided my husband and I do not actually need an income to survive.

 Meanwhile, my husband, who just turned 60, is not quite in the same situation. He is very busy completing requirements for a course at CBU. In fact, CBU is on summer break, but they're requiring him to complete some extra work so they will give him transfer credit for a course he took at University of Phoenix awhile back. There are two phases to this. First, he tutors a third-grade boy at an elementary school. Second, he goes home and completes very time intensive assignments related to that tutoring. Except that he has not stayed home to do this lately. Because of the extreme heat the past two weeks, he has opted most of the days to go to the local library instead.

Now, when Don goes somewhere I have the (very unappealing to me) choice of staying home without a car, or going with him. The elementary school isn't any of the ones near here. Because when he started the tutoring project in June, with a different boy who is now in fourth grade, it was for a summer quarter course at CBU. Problem was, the local schools were getting ready to go on summer break at that time. So, he had to find a school in Corona-Norco School District, which has year-round elementary schools, at which he could do this tutoring. That ended up being Eastvale Elementary School, which is of course in Eastvale. That's a 20-minute drive from here, maybe 25. Don tutors for 90 minutes, so that really doesn't give me enough time to justify coming back home. So, in spite of financial troubles, I have at least a small Cafe Americano at Starbucks in Eastvale, and often a medium-sized Carmel Macchiato and/or a scone. In spite of having no money in the checking account, I probably will even do that on Monday, because we do have money on Don's Starbuck's card. I think EDD is going to make a determination about my claim Monday afternoon, which will hopefully mean we have money on Tuesday. If not, we will limp through this entire week as best we can, and at long last, Don will start receiving his military pension next Saturday!

When at Starbucks, I spend the time checking my email. my Facebook, some job boards and Two Peas in A Bucket's message boards. I may need more time than my less than 90 minutes at Starbucks to do all that, but usually by late morning, or early afternoon at the latest, I am done with my daily computer routine. And there are still hours to kill. I often fill them with scrapbooking, but I'm not always so motivated.

I actually started a new hobby, art journaling, earlier this year. I of course also have the hobby of running, but that one has been a little difficult when it's 90 degrees at 6 a.m. and cooled back down to that at 9 p.m. Daytime temps in mid-August soared to well over 100, maybe 110. We just needed to find a cool place and sit, and that's the library.

I've made it a rule that I will buy NO new art supplies for the art journal, so I tend to rely on my old acrylic paints and very old scraps of paper, along with other scrapbooking and stamping supplies. to make this art journal . Since I can't really take bits of paper, paint, ink, etc. to the library, sI spent most of the time while we were there reading scrapbooking books. I'm grateful this is a large library, so large I wasn't able to read all these books during this period we were hanging out there. But another part of the reason I didn't finish them all is I just got tired of reading books all day. So, I tried to do the journaling part of my art journals on two of the days.

I'm using prompts I found on the website daisyyellowsquarespace.com. It's one of the best art journal blogs out there, and her "Kick Start Your Art Journal" archived section was the best thing for a beginning art journaler. I'm actually almost done working my way through the kick start prompts, and will soon be using her more recent, always updated posts for more great ideas. But recently, I was working on a prompt that suggested I find an unusual place to journal. To me, that would not be a library. But it would be the Bakers' Restaurant about one mile down the street from the library.

The library and Bakers are on Mission Drive, which is as "downtown" as you can get in Jurupa Valley. Mission Drive is the heart of Rubidoux, which was a community before the turn of the 20th century. Rubidoux alone is a community of more than 20,000 residents, so I'm not really sure why it never incorporated into a city prior to 2011. It certainly could have been a city in 1911,  and by the early 21st Century was a blighted semi-urban area.

Before and even for a short time after the city incorporated, Riverside County had used what was known as "redevelopment money" (another source of funds the state of California has taken away from local governments) to revive what had been a stale neighborhood. Buildings were cleaned up and given attractive storefronts, in fact the library and a few other county-run buildings were built from the ground up with redevelopment. Also, the median along the entire length of Mission Drive, at least from north of the library to the Riverside city limit, was spruced up.

The good work was either in the process or started shortly after we moved to Jurupa Valley in 2006. I want to say, but can't remember for sure, that the huge flowering trees were there before the project began, and redevelopment simply allowed the county to give them a good trim. In either case, they are now attractive trees and a dominant feature of what you see when you look at "downtown" in my city.

After writing an essay at Bakers, about Rubidoux and its troubles, I returned to the library and took a photograph while stopped at one of the four lights between the restaurant and the library. The trees dominate the photo. These particular trees were in the middle of the street in front of a mostly vacant lot, where a grocery store would have been built had the state allowed Riverside County to keep enough redevelopment to finish the project.

So, when I got back to the library, I decided to draw a picture of the trees and write a little bit about Rubidoux in my art journal. And a few days later, back home in the Jurupa Hills part of Jurupa Valley, I drew another picture of the trees, glued them to a 12 x 12 cardstock sheet and journaled about my life as it is this weekend. Doing that makes my life, and Rubidoux, look a little better.

The cats and a crafty project or two

Besides a granddaughter and a whole bunch of other little kids to love on (grandnieces, grandnephews, and three boys belonging to two of my cousins, all of whom are two and younger, our "kids" include two cats. Like all cats, they are usually a source of joy and amusement to us, but sometimes a source of frustration. Lombard because he's a little shy at times, Segunda because she acts either rambunctious or just plain stupid at times. Saturday night, she ended up being both. She leaped from the top of Don's easy chair onto the TV tray in front of him, knocking his computer down and breaking four keys. She was completely oblivious that she had done anything wrong!

This could hardly have come at a worse time. Don is in the thick of finishing assignments for the end of the CBU term the end of this month. One of them, a final project in his Educational Computing class, is due tonight.  He already felt hamstrung by having Powerpoint 2003 instead of 2010 on the computer, but now not having use of four keys was almost enough to set him over the edge. He was ready to take Segunda back to the animal shelter where we found her, and possibly send Lombard there with her. Thankfully, we still have our kitties, and Don has figured out a way to get his assignment done without those four keys (it does entail borrowing my computer sometimes.)

I had  selected a photo of Segunda to use for a weekly scrapbooking challenge at CSI Color Stories. The scrapbooking challenges the website's host, Debbi Tehrani, puts up here now, and put up at the scrapbooking site Two Peas In A Bucket until recently, have been creative diversions for me every week for about seven years. This  year we were challenged to do scrapbook pages with the colors of  orange (a yellowish shade of it), yellow, grey, black and white. Doing pages about reading was an optional component of the challenge. When I saw this photo of Segunda on Friday afternoon, it seemed like the perfect fit. I had thought, that since these were cookbooks, I would pretend Segunda could actually read them and was telling me which seafood recipe I should prepare for her.

We then went away until late Saturday afternoon. We weren't home very long when Segunda knocked Don's computer off the TV tray. That quickly changed how I felt about doing a scrapbook page accusing
Segunda of being smart enough to read cookbooks!

But, CSI has had a new thing for about a month. There are little doodads you can download off its website that go with the color scheme of the week. Some of these doodads are words you can use as titles. One of these, this week, was a phrase "Imagination is More Important than Knowledge." Bingo! That's exactly how I feel about Segunda. I love how imaginative she is most of the time. It doesn't matter that knowledge, even cat knowledge, seems to elude her.

And so I created a page focusing on that reality. Well, that's my title and the journaling explains why. CSI is about stories, and if you didn't really want to write about reading this week writing about monsters and adventures were OK too.  Life is an adventure with this monster cat.

The rest of a CSI page is about getting all the colors and certain embellishments (i.e. layered embellishments and metal things, which fits all of these flowers.) Most of the pages you would see on CSI are quite a bit more embellished than mine. It must be nice having the kind of money to throw that many embellishments on one page - I did not even when I was working. I don't know how they get other pages done each week.

But, I digress. The thing is, one flower especially on my scrapbook page, the one on the lower left hand corner, is highly creative for me. I made it myself, by hand, from foil. And a few visitors to my blog are probably wondering how I did that. So, for them, I offer these instructions:

1. Cut or punch three circles or scalloped circles from a sheet of foil. If you've got a circle cutter, die cutting tool or punches that will do this, it's easy. If you're like me, take three increasingly larger flower stamps and trace around them. Cut those out with scissors. Not quite as easy, but you can do it. You can also freehand cut three increasingly larger circles if you don't have any tools that will help.

2. Lightly crumple each of your circles, and unfold. If you have a Cuttlebug or other embossing tool, you could possibly just emboss texture into them instead of going for the crumpled look.

3. (Optional) Ink the circles. My three layers of flower actually have been dipped, front side down, into three different ink pads - two shades of yellow and one shade of gold. I am sure this hardly shows up on the scan, it isn't much better in real life. But, in real life, there is a subtle sheen of yellow on each layer.  Very subtle because I heatset the ink to help it dry faster. This was fine for awhile. I made this flower in a Two Peas card making event about six months ago. I never got it onto a card then, but it sat in my stash of flowers until now. And then some of the dried ink flaked right off the flower. Lesson learned: Don't heatset the ink if you're not putting the flower on a card.

4. Secure all three layers with a brad and attach to your card or page.

What Grandpa's up to

Although this blog is about my life as a grandmother, I would not be a grandmother if I were not married to Abigail's biological maternal grandfather, Don Porter. He is the star of my life. And he is the driving force behind a new scrapbooking project I embarked upon today.

Don decided in January that it is not time for him to retire, so he has gone back to school to obtain a special education teaching credential. He is taking an introductory teaching course this semester, which has an interesting final project.

He will have to address 10 foundations of education, and present them in some sort of artistic fashion. Although this could have been a brochure, a poster or something presented electronically, the instructor showed a sample that from Don's description sounds like an art journal. Since I have just started making one for myself, I offered to make an art journal for Don as well. But we've decided instead that we will make a scrapbook.

So, today I planned backgrounds and pulled scrapbook papers for these pages. I will need to print photos and stamp or otherwise embellish some things as well. The journaling, however, will be left up to Don. I believe he will be able to get each of his 10 topics onto one page in the 8x8 scrapbook album he has chosen, but if we are mistaken, I will also need to make pockets for his journaling.

It's late, so I will begin nailing down the details of my part tomorrow.

I also worked on one more page of my art journal this morning. I used my one bottle of spray ink to create the background for this page. While spray ink is one of the newest and hottest ways to embellish paper art, I have only been able to justify purchasing one color, and that was while I was working. So there is an area of the page that I am going to have to color some other way. I'll either water color or attempt to spray my watered down baby blue paint on this.

After I finished the spray job and left it to dry, I went with Don to school. I normally do this, and then hang out in that neighborhood of Riverside until he's done with class. I spent today at Barnes and Noble reading the latest issue of Scrapbooks Etc. (and found one more idea for a new scrapbook page to do on a growing list of random scrapbook pages I might want to do.)

But when Don was done with school, he wanted to eat lunch, go to Michael's to look at art journals, scrapbooks and scrapbook supplies (although I advised him we should try to use the many papers we have at home, at least until we figured out an idea). He then got his haircut while I hung out at Canyon Crest Shopping Center. I found a cool shop where you buy and paint ceramics, which they then glaze for you. So in a week, I will be the proud owner of a coffee mug I painted myself. It's a $23 coffee mug, so I won't be creating matched sets anytime soon, but it was a fun way to while away the time.

Just as Don got out of the car to go to our hair stylist, he noticed we had run over a screw that was imbedded in our tire. Since that probably had created a slow leak, we took it over to Kurt's Auto as soon as he was done. They plugged it for free!

Don also wanted to go to the commissary, since we were in that neighborhood. We didn't get home until about 6 p.m., so and after dinner we spent until now planning his new book. So that left me no time to work on my own projects, or even house cleaning, as it is now time for bed. So good night, and happy creating.

Day 2 of the Creativity Queue Challenge

My most recent creations in the Art Journal

I just wanted to update on my art journal project, since this is Day 2 of the Creativity Queue Challenge at Daisy Yellow.

Monday, I posted the first of these two when it was in process. I had created the yellow background with paint, watercolors and ink. I still have a lot to learn about all those mediums, but I'm looking forward to doing so in this process.

I do like how this one turned out. The new background is Christmas wrapping paper, depicting a "Holy Land" scene with the three wise men. But when I put a rectangle of white paper on top of it, only a palm tree remained. And palm trees are one of the many things that make me think of my own homeland, southern California. I have lived in California since just before I was 2, but only about half of that time in southern California. So when I think of the state as a whole, I also think of the Gold Country. Thinking about yellow and the state of California makes me think of a number of things, so I listed them here, then ran the yellow watercolor pencil and brush over the journaling.

Today, I created another art journal entry, and this one uses a medium I am a little more familiar with. Although I can't say I have ever made a frame like the ones on this second art journal page on a scrapbook page, this was a good use of some really old scraps. I mean, I've had those yellow and green scraps since I lived in Apple Valley. So that's somewhere between 8 1/2 and 10 1/2 years. I have had the red scraps quite awhile too, and the blue and purple ones for a few years. Since I never throw my scraps away until they are tiny, this was a good way to use some up.

I have been scrapbooking the past two days as well. I haven't finished my most recent creation yet, just everything except the journaling. I may post it soon. It's going into Abigail's second year album, as it is about how she and her parents celebrated St. Patrick's Day. Instead, here is a recent layout of her (but not a recent photo) that I'm keeping for myself.

I still enjoy scrapping Abigail's baby photos, but I need to do more of her as a 1-year-old

That album is slow in coming. I am not sure why. When she was born in 2010, I was excited about becoming a grandmother, and wanted to do lots of pages about her. But I knew I couldn't scrap every photo of her when Holly sent us about 400 of them in Abigail's first month, maybe 1,000 in her first six months. Still, the Two Peas board inspired me to do some pages, and some of those important milestones in her first year inspired me to do some more. I sent Holly a good-sized book for Abigail's first birthday. But now she's 18 months old, and I have done all of seven pages for the new album. Her 1st birthday, Halloween, Christmas, that very important announcement about a future new sibling we received in January, and now St. Patrick's Day.

I don't even know that I would have started, except that her first birthday photos matched Challenge 2 over at Color Stories International. That prompted me to do the first page. Challenge 10 also prompted me to scrap a photo of her - a baby photo that I will keep for myself.

Getting caught up on our own 2012 photos prompted me to do a few more pages for Abigail, including St. Patrick's Day. But I hope something comes along soon to challenge me to do a few of the more every day photos. I suspect in the past year Holly has only posted a few hundred photos on her blog, as opposed to sending us 1,000 in the first six months through Kodak Share. But 1,000, 500 or 100, I still can't scrap them all. But I will keep you posted on what I do scrap.

A trip to San Diego (Coronado)

San Diego, as seen from Coronado

A birthday party for me and for Aaron

Followed by a Jimmy Buffet concert

I wanted to share a few photos because I really should have blogged about what we did the second weekend in March. We had a fun trip to Coronado to see the Hughart and LePore family. Also making the (eight-hour in their case) trip were the Van Curens, aka my parents and brother.

The purpose of this trip can pretty much be summed up in the three photos posted above. It was the Van Curens first time to see Coronado (or San Diego) since my aunt and uncle moved there in October. Aaron has visited San Diego a few times in recent years to see his friends Rob and Mary (who accompanied us to some of the weekend's activities), but I am not sure about my Mom and Dad. None of the three of them had been to Coronado at all, as far as I know. We had visited San Diego as a family in 1981 or 1982, and as far as I know, that's the last time my parents had been there.

Don and I have visited more often, including trips to Coronado in November to see the Hugharts, and in March 2011 when the Lepores first moved there to see them. When we went in March of last year, we had made enough previous trips to San Diego, we were able to tell them where many things of interest were. San Diego itself can be reached easily from our house in less than 2 hours, Coronado in less than 2.5.

But back to this trip. We had to go from San Bernardino, where I interviewed for a job that is temporary, but will hopefully last until after the November election. It's with the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters. I am still waiting to find out at this point, March 21. Don't expect to know until next week. It took us three hours. When we got there, my parents still were 1 or 1.5 hours away.

Once my parents arrived, my Mom and Aaron met us, and Aaron's friends Mary and Rob, at a restaurant in Coronado called Peohe's. This was my second "special birthday dinner." Don and I had already done another special birthday dinner in Palm Springs on March 3, but Don had of course thrown in his obligatory concern that this was too expensive. My parents show no fear in this regard. My mom was the one showing no fear this time, because my Dad was getting over a bad cold, and was too sick to join us for many activities.

Because Aaron also had recently had a birthday, this was his special birthday dinner too. In fact, the restaurant staff kind of messed things up, at the end. After doing 100 things right.

We had ordered one desert for all eight of us to share. For some reason, the restaurant decided to give HIM the desert with a candle on it instead of me. Most of our table objected, since it was not Aaron's 50th, so the desert was moved to me for blowing out the candle and taking the first bite. It was delicious. We probably should have ordered two. I may be the only one who thinks that though.

We had another special birthday dinner the next day. This one was made by Ron, Annie and Jodi and served to us (the same people as Friday, plus my Dad, Jodi and her sons) in the clubhouse of the apartments where the Hugharts and Lepores live. It included steak, grilled vegetables, appetizers and cakes for both Aaron and me.

And after the dinner, Don and I, my Mom and Aaron and Annie and Ron went to a Jimmy Buffet concert. This was Aaron's sheer joy. I thought it was pretty cool too.

I have scrapbooked all the pictures now. I am going to share one of those pages with you, since I opted to post it on Two Peas.

Steak and Cake, the "birthday party" in photos and remembered in my favorite color, purple

Thinking of Grandma

I am playing around over at Color Stories Inspiration again today. This website challenges my scrapbooking to levels hard to reach when you are scrapping on a budget like me, but I have always been a fan of its creator, Debbi Tehrani, for challenging me to do new things. Another challenge, which for probably seven or eight years she has been posting at Two Peas in A Bucket has taken so many of my scrapbook pages from hohum to something special. I just finished one like that, and I think I will share more about the topic of that one in a future blog post.

Color Stories Inspiration is going to be less likely to help me finish up a page for my regular album. (Although it too did once.) That's because Color Stories Inspiration is much more about one photo layouts than the usual multiple photos I use in mine. You have to leave room for some fancy work, in the case of mine the vintage cabbage rose paper, the butterfly and the torn edges. My pages are simple compared to most of what you see at Color Stories Inspiration. Also, a key part of this challenge is the journaling, on one of several topics recommended by Debbi. This week, she goes to one of her favorite topics - childhood memories.

This line of Graphic 45 (the cabbage rose paper) is one I initially purchased to scrap Grandma's 90th birthday. So it, and butterflies make me think of her. Also, with Easter coming around again, I knew that on my cousins' Facebook pages, I would see a photo of Grandma from two Easters ago holding great-grandsons Wesley or Wyatt. Sure enough, on Wendy's Facebook, I found this great photo of her and Wyatt, and an added bonus, she is wearing my Mom's red jacket. (Grandma was always cold the last few years of her life.) I needed more red on this page. If you are a scrapbooker, you understand. If not, just trust me.

Part of the journaling on the page focuses on how Wyatt is a special great-grandson. He is the youngest of her relatives that she ever met. Wyatt now has a younger cousin (and Wes a younger brother), but unfortunately, she was too sick to meet Bradley. My hope is that while Wyatt, Wes and Bradley are too young to remember, the rest of her great-grandchildren who have met her will remember the kindness and class she exhibited throughout her life.

If you want to know all about that, scroll all the way down to my first entry. Or just know that this woman loved people. I know all of her children and all of grandchildren know that. That's Uncle Don, Mom and Annie, and me, my cousin Debbie, Aaron and my "little" cousins Chad, Jodi and Wendy. This also includes Matt and Mandy, two grandchildren she acquired in 1981 when my Uncle Don married my Aunt Sandy. I am pretty sure Debbi's children, Chris and Katelyn, also know how much their great-grandma loved them.

My Grandma has several more stepchildren in her family besides Matt and Mandy. The rest are through my brother and me, as we both became stepparents instead of natural parents. It is my sincere hope that John, Pamela and T.J. experienced that love from her. They spent a good deal of time with her when Aaron was their stepfather, and I believe their lives were enriched from it.

Unfortunately, my stepchildren will be in the same situation as my little cousins' little children. Not because my stepchildren are little, of course. But it is because Josh only met my Grandmother one time, and Holly never did. It is my hope that Josh remembers enough from that one meeting to know I had a fantastic grandmother. It is sad that Holly will never know. Except that the premise of my blog has always been that I want to love my own granddaughter (Holly's daughter Abigail) the same way I was loved by my Grandma. That's a tall order, but I will do my best, always!

The Ellen Porter Hall

Did you know there is an Ellen Porter Performing Arts Center? I have known this for maybe 10 years, ever since I first came across the idea of "Googling my name." The website for this performing arts center at Westmont College in Santa Barbara used to be one of the first things that came up. I always wondered what that place was like. I think from 2002 to 2011 we might have driven through Santa Barbara once or twice, never with time to drive up into the hills and find Westmont College. But this year, on our way back from Cayucos on Jan. 2, we did have the time. We snapped a few photos of me at the building, and on our way off the campus saw this sunset descending over the college's athletic field. It's an Ellen Porter sunset for sure.

My newest among favorite scrapbooking websites, Color Stories Inspiration, helped me get this together. So did this sketch from another favorite scrapbooking website, Page Maps.

The sketch I also used, with only three photos, for our quick trip to Refugio Beach we took before driving up to this college. (I don't have that layout scanned, at least not yet.) Even though I knew long beforehand that I would be using this sketch for both, it took "My Building" much longer to come together than "Refugio Beach." I wanted to use at least the small strip of ledger paper I have here, as it is very pretty with the mauve column dividers you see a hint of here. I also like the argyle pattern, which is on the reverse side of the column paper. But while I was able to mix pattern papers from two different lines on Refugio Beach, doing so from the same line was stumping me here.

CSI to the rescue! I could stick with the greys and purples of the ledger/arglye paper, but what if I somehow added pink, turquoise and red? And what if I "distressed" a page. (This background paper has what is known as a distressed look, that is it artificially shows signs of aging. I added to that by rubbing ink on the right corners and on the drywall tape on the left side). And what if I had stripes in straight and not-so-straight lines?And what if instead of just saying "Me at the Ellen Porter Performing Arts Center in Santa Barbara," I told you why I even decided to go there? (Of course you know I would tell you the story behind the photo without prompting from someone elses's website!)

And what if I used a 10-year-old scrapbooking product called Magic Mesh, like Fi Kenward, one of the CSI design team members had? Nope, I could not. Scrapbook products go in and out of style quickly, so generally once you use up any stash of a product you have, you can't get more. Such was the case with my supply of Magic Mesh. But what about drywall tape? I actually get to spend some time "chatting" with members of the design team on Fridays, and member Shaunery Wharton suggested drywall tape as a substitute.

So there you have it. Drywall tape inked red (the color of my departed Magic Mesh, and one of the necessary colors to qualify for the CSI challenge) on the left. The cute little bird I cut out of the ledger paper on the right, along with turquoise and pink hearts, the jewels and brads I pulled off the heart I had cut down to make the turquoise one fit (see my previous blog entry) and a purple flower with a pink button center. A much prettier page than I had before!

Social Christmas and why I'm sometimes on the A list

Yes, I have Christmas, not Superbowl Sunday, on the brain. I am a scrapbooker, and I like scrapbooking photos mostly in the order I took them. (Although this photo is a repeat of one I scrapbooked last week).

This scrapbook page is about the 14 Christmas parties I have attended over the last four years. Most of them are the same kinds of Christmas parties most people go to, I suppose. Work-related parties. Parties for my husband's work, and parties for church groups I belong to. These parties are all fun ways to end a year with people I have come to care about.

Well, that takes care of a dozen of the 14 parties, anyhow. The other two I have attended are a little more special. These are the parties put on by Bobby Ball Talent Agency. Bobby Ball is my husband's agent for Hollywood commercials.

For these, we drive to a nice party place in Los Angeles. We walk up to a security guard, tell him the right secret word, and go in. Once inside,we are surrounded by mostly young, mostly attractive, mostly well-dressed people who want to be stars. Some of them will be. The rest are just a blast to be with.