She’s Alive!

Me that is. I’m alive. Barely on some days, but I’m here. I could write a big long post to catch you up to date, but would anyone really read it? (Not to mention I don’t feel like it. LOL!) So here are some photos from our summer. One and half weeks left of summer vacation for the kids. Bittersweet. I’ll miss them, but I think we’re ALL ready for them to go back.

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Let’s just let the pictures tell the story.

Since I obviously can’t be trusted or depended on to actually write any content on here these days (which is sad, since I’m often damn hilarious), I’m just going to post lots of photos of the past few weeks in our lives. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a total cop-out, but I’m cool with that. A picture speaks a thousand words after all, which means I just wrote 15,000 or so of them…

It’s fishing season here. The girls love fishing season.

Hannah continues to let everyone (including the Tooth Fairy) know who’s in charge.

Hannah’s dance recital is coming up soon.

We’ve all been doing lots of reading lately.

I made exploding photo boxes for Mother’s Day. Looks like a box, but when you take the lid off, the sides “explode” to reveal several layers of photos.

My girls get more beautiful by the day. :)

More later. I’m off to watch tonight’s “House.” :)

Could it be?

Could it be that spring is finally here? Yesterday was GORGEOUS! We spent the entire day outside. Now I’m not so naive as to think we won’t have any more cold weather (it’s supposed to go back down to 40 later this week). But yesterday was awesome and a little teaser for what’s coming (hopefully) soon.

So we donned short-sleeve shirts and we ran:

And we fed the birds:

And we explored:

    And we sat:

And we had a few meltdowns:

And we got wet and muddy feet:

And we drove the lawnmower:

And we played ball:

And it was a fantastic day. :)

Days 3, 4, and 5

I’ll be back later with a real post, but I wanted to get my Project 365 photos on here for days 3, 4, and 5. Lots to talk about later!

Day 2/365

Trying Again…

Well, I’ve decided to set myself up for failure yet again and attempt Project 365. I SO admire those of you that started it in 2008 and actually finished it. I could post all sorts of excuses as to why I stopped doing it 90 days or so into it, but the bottom line is that I didn’t finish it. So I’m determined to actually make it through all of 2009. I may fail again, but at least no one can say I didn’t try, right? LOL!

So here it is. My first photo for Project 365 – 2009. It’s Grace playing our Hannah Montana game for the first time on the Wii. I hate to admit it, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun and all of us love it. (Well, except maybe Steve. He didn’t see us playing it. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I came downstairs in the middle of the night one night and caught him busting a move.)

I’ll probably post most of my photos here on this blog as I go, but I also started another blog dedicated only to the Project 365, where I have no intentions of posting anything other than the photo every day. You’re all more than welcome to add that blog to your blog readers, check it out here and there, etc. You can find that here. I’ll make a fancy blog header and all that later, but for now, I just wanted to get things rolling. :)

 

And so begins…

…a new year.  My New Year’s Eve was rather uneventful actually. We had at least 3 or 4 invitations for parties, but we decided to just stay in (mostly due to the fact that we were exhausted from some Texas friends that came to visit last night and all of us (including the kids) were up past midnight). Steve went hunting today, the kids are sleeping at my mom’s for the night, and Steve & I just decided to lay low.

I spent a few hours editing my Christmas pictures, Steve & I watched some random movies on TV, we quick flipped over to see the ball drop at midnight, and then Steve meandered up to bed and I decided to quick blog before I followed him.

I don’t have too many complaints about 2008. Some here and there, but nothing we didn’t manage to trudge through. We had some scary moments, some heart-wrenching moments, some stressful moments, and some downright depressing moments. But we also had plenty of happy, fun, moving, delightful, and downright ecstatic moments, so I can’t complain. (Well, I could, but what good would it do me, really? LOL!)

I don’t make resolutions because I think they’re just things that people make as a way of trying to convince themselves to make changes that they really should have done regardless of the date or year (and because I never keep them). BUT, I have committed myself (once again) to Project 365, where I’ll take a photo a day for the next year. I was going strong until about March of 2008, and I still blame that on me getting a full-time job again. Pathetic excuse, I know. But I really want to give it another whirl. So we’ll see how it goes.

And there are a few things I’d like to see happen in the next year for us that I won’t go into right now (because I’m tired, I’ve talked about it before, and I’m still not sure what will eventually happen), so we’ll see if all those wishes/desires come true.

And with that, I wish everyone a wonderful, happy, sex-filled 2009. Here are some more photos from our Christmas. Happy New Year everyone! :)

And another Christmas has come and gone…

So it’s hard to believe it’s all over, isn’t it? How is it that we take months (or weeks… OK, days in my case) to prepare for Christmas every year, and then in the blink of an eye, it’s all over? HOURS spent wrapping presents, only to be torn open within seconds. I often wonder why we all put ourselves through it. LOL!

But the bottom line is that this was possibly my favorite Christmas so far. At least since meeting Steve and having kids anyway. The girls were on their best behavior on both Christmas Eve at my FIL’s house and on Christmas Day here and then at my MIL’s house. After the “Great Thanksgiving Incident”, I think they were afraid for their lives (thanks to Daddy) if they misbehaved, so for once, even though our one nephew ran around like a little tornado and acted like the biggest ungrateful brat in the world, OUR kids remained calm and thankful for all they were given. Ahhh….

Everyone seemed to be in a good mood this year, which as we all know, when lots of family members are all getting together, is no small feat. I got such nice stuff. Steve bought me some really nice clothing, cool gloves (both “regular” gloves and snow gloves… because apparently, my excuse of not being able to come out with them sledding because I didn’t have snow gloves was getting old), and a cool stovetop popcorn maker for the family (since we don’t use a microwave).

My mom had already paid for my new photo printer, but also gave me lots of nice little stuff like candles, body sprays, lotions, soaps, (apparently my house and my body need help in terms of scent? LOL!), and THREE magazine subscriptions. WOOHOO!

My brother and SIL also gave us really nice stuff, like winter & Christmas shaped pasta, Bath & Body Works hand soap, and a gift card for each of us (I got Barnes and Noble and Steve got Cabela’s).

My FIL came through again and gave us all a nice present or two along with $100 in cold, hard cash. God, I love that guy. LOL!

Steve’s brother and my evil SIL also did pretty well by giving us each a gift card – mine being for my hairdresser. I’m thrilled since I’m in desperate need of a haircut, but given my past with my SIL, there’s that little part of me that wonders if she was trying to tell me my hair looks like shit. LOL! And I’m still a little confused as to why Steve’s gift card was for Eddie Bauer. A store he’s never shopped at in his life, and the place we often make fun of them for shopping at (0ut loud) since good old Eddie’s pretty plain, average clothing can be bought for half the cost at almost any other store in the world. Perhaps they’re tired of Steve and I dressing like teenagers who live at Aeropostale? LOL! It’s anybody’s guess, but it’s all good. I’m sure he’ll find something there he likes. :)

My MIL actually did REALLY well choosing gifts this year for us, and Steve and I both got really nice clothing, some other stuff, and the softest blanket I’ve ever felt in my life.

The kids, as usual, made out like bandits. They got everything from a Wii (from us), a guitar (from my brother), Wii games (from my sister), new American Girl dolls with accessories (from my parents), and lots of cool craft stuff (from my MIL). Now keep in mind that those were all of the “big” gifts from all of us. That’s not including the other bazillion gifts everyone felt the need to buy them. Sigh.

I still have no CLUE where I’m going to put all of this new stuff. And I’m dreading the after Christmas chores of undecorating the tree and house, taking all of the lights down, etc. But I can’t even complain, because it was such a wonderful holiday this year, that I suppose it’s all worth it.

The Wii is AWESOME! My arm is sore from bowling and playing tennis, and I don’t even complain when Grace asks me to play some games with her. SOOOO much fun and probably one of the best gifts we could have bought them. I see years of use in our future (which is totally unlike most of the gifts they get). Good stuff.

My favorite part of the holidays is always the visitors though. I love that we seem to have totally random people floating into our house in the evenings just to drink a bit and hang out. Steve’s mom and her husband and his aunt and uncle stopped by the other night… we’ve had a few friends drift in… and tomorrow, Steve’s friends since childhood are coming to visit with their two boys. They moved to Texas a few years ago, haven’t been home in years, and we’ve never seen each other’s kids. I talked to the wife tonight and we’re all really excited to get together! :)

Anyway, I hope ALL of you had a wonderful holiday! I’ve barely had time to look at my photos I’ve taken, let alone fix ‘em up to post here. But I’ll try to do that in the next day or two. I do have one or two I can post, but they’re aren’t even remotely exciting. LOL! And, as usual, I’m not in a single photo taken. But I suppose that’s the price you pay when you’re the only one who knows how to work the camera. LOL!

Steve on Christmas Eve at his Dad’s House

Grace on Christmas Eve at my FIL’s House

The Girls Playing the Wii Before My Family Arrived on Christmas Morning

Grace Watching My Brother Playing the Guitar He Gave Her for Christmas

Total Drive-By (Again)

Because it’s 2 AM, and although I’m not even remotely tired, I know I need to go to bed if I have any hope of waking up before 9 AM tomorrow (which is way too late). But this is a good thing. Because it means bullets and we ALL love bullets, right? :)

And we’re off…

* I’ve been so busy, my head is spinning. Work, Christmas stuff, the girls’ extracurricular stuff, school stuff, making gifts, etc. Can someone stop the world please? Because I’d like to get off, if even for just a day.

* My printer took a shit on me 3 weeks ago. It suddenly wouldn’t feed any paper other than normal copy paper. This probably wouldn’t be a problem for most people. But because I print out a lot of photos, scrapbook pages, special papers for hybrid projects, etc., it basically meant my printer was useless to me. So in swoops my mom and buys me the Epson Artisan 700 photo printer as my Christmas gift. Happy, happy sigh. Mom rules!

* However, after printing a bit tonight, using the same double-sided, PrintWorks matte photo paper as a few weeks ago, the new one wouldn’t feed it through anymore either. Uh, I’m thinking it’s the paper, not the printers. So that old printer currently sitting on my living room floor isn’t broken after all? Um. Oops.

* I’m currently a little obsessed with David Cook. Don’t worry. I’m sure it will pass. But for now, I’m a self-proclaimed dork. It’s all good.

* Grace is now officially a Brownie Girl Scout after her investiture ceremony last week. She’s so proud! :)

* Grace is getting a guitar for Christmas from my brother. I think that’s fucking awesome.

* I currently have a total of 3 gifts bought for my children for Christmas, and one of those is a joint gift. (Joint as in for both of them. Not a big bong.) Now granted, the big gift is a Wii. But still. Do you think I could possibly get off my ass and BUY them something? Sigh. My problem is that every other damn family member has already bought them everything they could possibly want or need, so there’s nothing left for me. Dammit. This happens EVERY year.

* I also haven’t bought anything for about 80 other people I need to buy for. I guarantee you I’ll be out shopping on Christmas Eve. I really should have a penis.

* Today ended the 2008 buck hunting season in PA, and I’m sorry to report that my dear husband didn’t shoot one. This is devastating on many levels, and I’m SURE I’ll hear about it for the next year. So if you keep me in your thoughts and prayers, it would be greatly appreciated.

* I’m lip-synching like a rock star right now, thinking I’m all sorts of cool and shit. Yeah Allison… drink another one. [rolls eyes]

* I made some big decisions the past few weeks and I think I finally decided it’s time to move on and forge ahead.

* Hannah continues to crack me up daily. The wit and sarcasm and attitude that comes spewing from that 5-year-old’s lips makes my head spin around (while secretly beaming with pride). She really IS a mini-me, isn’t she? ;)

* Both girls are kicking some serious kung-fu ass in both behavior and grades in school. That’s my girls!

* Grace is student of the month for her class for December. :)

* This Friday, I’m helping out at the school for half the day for some sort of celebration or something (the details are sketchy). The woman who called said it’s “Pajama Day” for the kids and that I, too, am more than welcome to wear my PJs to the school. I have to admit, there’s a very large tiny part of me that wants to walk in wearing something from Frederick’s of Hollywood, like a thong with garters and a bustier. But I suppose that wouldn’t be appropriate, would it? (I’d also have to go BUY garters and bustier, and since I can’t even seem to buy my own damn kids a few Christmas gifts, I’m thinking the chances of me going out and purchasing these items are pretty much slim to none.)

* I know there are about 8 billion other things I wanted to update y’all about, but I’m totally blanking right now. Why is this not surprising?

* Steve’s 34th birthday is on Wednesday and I bought him a kick ass salad shooter. Sounds stupid, I know. But I can assure you he will LOVE it. I don’t think he even knows that such a tool exists. But I will no longer have to listen to his incessant bitching every night when it takes him 45 minutes to make a salad due to the slicing of a billion vegetables (because I’m all about giving people gifts that also benefit me somehow.)

* For Christmas, I got him the mother of all topographical GPS’s. He’s wanted one for quite awhile now for when he goes wandering around the woods. I’m not sure why he thinks he needs one since he knows those woods and mountains better than he knows the home we’ve lived in for almost 10 years, but whatever.

* I never told you guys about “The Great Thanksgiving Incident” involving my kids and our spawn of the devil dear, sweet nephews. I’m not getting into it right now either, because it’s almost 3 AM, but let’s just say that I’m seriously dreading Christmas. I’m thinking of just fleeing the state that week and going down to visit Tink and Hoop. Hell, it’s not like my kids are getting any gifts anyway since I’m suck a slacker. So what’s the difference, right?

And with that, I really need to go to bed now. I need to be up in 4 or 5 hours to shower and pick the girls up at my parents’ house to take them to Sunday School. Later gang. :)

I’ll leave you with a lovely photo of the family when we went to cut down our Christmas tree. :)

(Oh, and while we’re here… isn’t that coat thing Steve is wearing the UGLIEST damn thing you’ve ever seen? I hate it. I tell him it looks like a Bill Cosby sweater. No one else seems to agree with me when asked, but I’m holding my ground on this one. His dickhead friend Grace’s godfather gave it to him because he didn’t want it anymore, so I’m not sure if I hate it because it really is ugly or because it came from Joey, who I have some serious issues with. But either way, I’d like it burned. In fact, I think that’s my New Year’s resolution this year. Burn Steve’s fugly coat thingy. It may be the first resolution I actually keep…)

Year at a Glance Album

As mentioned yesterday, my custom deck of cards from Artscow arrived last week. There’s an option to turn off the numbers from printing on the cards. Since there are 52 cards in a deck, I thought it would be fun to upload a picture from each week for the past year and have them put on the cards. Then I had Steve drill a hole through the whole deck and I held them together with a standard office binder ring. (Note: I’ll be buying a smaller ring. This was just the only size I had in my stash right now. I’ll also tie some ribbons and stuff on the ring to “pretty it up”.

I had uploaded a design to put on the backs of all of the cards, so I just took a Sharpie marker and wrote a little bit about each photo on the back of them.

In Photoshop, I put a little “strip” on each photo and typed “Week of _______”.

 It’s been fun so far. Just looking at it this week, we discovered that during this week last year, there was some snow on the ground. Far cry from the almost 70-degree day we’re experiencing today. LOL! The girls get a kick out of it and we end up talking about the picture and some stories from whatever event the picture is from. Good stuff. :)

And once again, I disappeared.

Wow. I’m really slacking on this blog thing. I think it’s partly because I’ve spent most of my time over on Facebook again [waving to Facebook friends], partly because work has been busy (when I decide to actually work, that is), and I’m working on a bunch of projects for Christmas and stuff. I seem to have missed Halloween AND the big election here. Wow.

OK. So let’s start with a few photos of the kids on Halloween. I don’t have many of Grace because she decided she didn’t want to go Trick-or-Treating, so I only have the one of her on the day we tried out her costume idea (for now… I have some others of her I haven’t edited yet). She went to a bunch of other Halloween-related parties, events, etc., so when she didn’t want to trick-or-treat, I didn’t push her.

So here’s Grace. She’s a punk rocker.

Don’t you just love the attitude? LOL! (And obviously, when we went out in public, she wore a different shirt that didn’t bare her midriff.

And now, onto my little Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. She had a BLAST trick-or-treating!

This was the day we bought the costume. She had red sparkly shoes for the Halloween events. See? She had to wear many, many layers because it was freezing, but you could still tell who she was supposed to be, so she didn’t care.

In other news, I got my Deck of Cards mini photo album thingamajig the other day and will come back later to show you pictures of that. It turned out pretty cool if I do say so myself!

And now, I need to enjoy the last 15 minutes before the girls come bounding through the door from school. So I’ll be back later!

OH! And I have to show you why my children have reaffirmed that they are indeed mentally disturbed freaks. LOL!

Um, hello?

Hey gang! I can’t believe it’s been 9 days since I last blogged. How very rude of me. In my defense, things have been pretty busy here with work, Halloween events, switching our house’s heating system from oil to coal (for purely financial reasons), school stuff, and extracurricular activities. But I’m here now, which is all that matters, right?

In glancing at my last post, I see I never posted my Sunday layouts for my Week in the Life project. So here they are for your viewing pleasure, as well as the 2 inside pages that sort of act like a pictorial “summary” of the week.

I just have to do the cover page and maybe one or two “outtake” pages, and then I’ll get it printed.

What else? Oh! I’m a redhead now! I went last Friday and got my hair done. It less “orange” (actually, it’s not orange at all IRL) and more “auburn” in real life, but you get the idea. I LOVE it and may never go back to another color. :)

And yes, in the photo, I’m holding my shirt shut to avoid boobie flash. I had to use my self-timer and because it was sitting on our low windowsills, I had to sit on the floor and bend over. LOL!

Anyway, I need to go do some work now, but I’ll be back later. Tonight is trick-or-treat night in town (and no, I do NOT know why my town does it on the Wednesday before Halloween, but they do). So I’ll post some pictures of my little Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and my punk rocker/goth girl. Later gang!