Busy!

I have an all-day recorder workshop to attend tomorrow. Too bad the past two nights have involved very little sleep. I will try to get myself to bed soon, but I have a hard time making myself!

Here are some recent layouts:



This was done with Grandma's Recipe Box by Digital Designs by Athena



I used Kind of a Big Deal by Geek Chic and Sir Scrapalot for this one.



This used Apple of My Eye by Flutterbye Faery Designs.

Wow, I guess I have been absent from my blog. We are starting to get back into a routine, and school is starting on Monday, so that will help a lot. I don't seem to do well with a lot of unstructured time. It was fun to not have to be places at a certain time, but after awhile, it turns into being lazy all day! The kids got to drop off their school supplies, meet their teachers, and see who else is in their class, so I think they're getting excited about it. We have some fun things planned for this weekend, and then suddenly it will be school and sports! We do have our trip to Mt. Rushmore for Labor Day weekend to look forward to before our weekends are filled with soccer and baseball games.

We had a lot of fun up in Silverthorne with my family. The kids were excited to meet their new cousin Moby for the first time. We got in some bike rides and board games. Declan won Doodle Dice, which made him happy, and I ended up winning Hand and Foot rummy.

I did this layout using the Pool Party set from Plain Digital Wrapper and a template by LDH Originals:


This one used Dance in the Rain by Geek Chic:


This one used a collab by Julie. It is. and Dani's Delusions, plus a template by Scraps of Candy:

Tomorrow we are off to Silverthorne for the week. The kids are very excited, and it will be fun to be back at the house we got married in! Luckily we'll have internet, so I won't be out of touch, but I will be busy with family so probably only checking in at night after people go to bed...

We had a fun weekend camping. We got rained on pretty heavily Saturday night, but we didn't let it stop us from having a fire. We pulled over a canopy for the wimpy adults to sit under while the kids sat out in the rain and played in the fire. They were having a great time, and everything was wet so less chance of them burning something up by accident! We had a problem with our tent last year leaking pretty bad (from a heavy rain fall at this same camp site), but we sealed it up and had a tarp across the top as reinforcement for the rain fly. We did discover that we should have pulled the rainfly out from the windows (which explained the flap with a loop just for that purpose, duh), so we did get some leakeage in around the windows, but we just made sure to be more in the middle of the tent and it wasn't that much water coming in anyway. Sunday was windy in the early morning, but it settled down enough for us to take the canoe out on Jefferson Lake. It started to get stormy again, so we ate lunch, packed up, and headed for home. Now we are looking forward to a week up in Silverthorne!



A recent layout using Waterworld by Donna Rafferty.

I guess I haven't posted many of my pages lately, although I have been doing a lot!



Using Neopolitan Taffy by Dani's Delusions.



Using We Are Family, the charity collab.



Using Get Your Grunge on by Captivated Visions.



Using High Tide by Brandi Sutherlin Designs.

We went to the Renaissance Festival yesterday. We had a good time, but after awhile the heat and crowds get to me. Everyone was congregating in the shady spots! The kids ended up getting some fancy walking sticks, and the lady even carved their initials in them.

On Saturday night I went on a photo walk in downtown Denver. I guess it's a national event and there are walks going on all over the country on this same night. I joined a yahoo group of local area digiscrappers, and some of them were going, so I signed up, too. Basically we just walked around on a route the leader had already picked out and took whatever photos we wanted. My main goal was to experiment with my camera and get to know it better on the manual settings instead of always using auto. It works well for a lot of situations, but there are times that it's better to use the manual settings. I used to do a lot of photography, and develop my own prints and negatives and everything, so it's something I always mean to get back to, even though now it's all digital! So I am happy to say that I didn't use the auto settings, or the flash, for any of my photos, and I spent a lot of time just experimenting with exposure bracketing and the different white balance settings. The other digiscrappers were really nice and we stayed and had a late dinner at the restaurant at the end of the walk.

I had a chance to work with this awesome charity collab, We Are Family, available at Gotta Pixel. It will help Sally (KyRainbow)pay some medical bills from her fight with cancer.