ha! well today I had to go into the LSS to pick up some album refills I ordered in a while back. Unfortunately for my credit card, the shop had a 20% off sale!!! so as well as the album refills (2 packs) I picked up another album (Travis wants the NZ layouts to be in a separate album), as well as 2 gorgeous Basic Grey mini books!!! ooooh I love those :)
Heres the normal 8x8 bazzil album:


And my Basic Grey mini tag book:



And the other mini book: (my fave and the only one left ;))




When I go into the scrap book shop I aways end up looking at all the bits and pieces and just wanting to buy them all!! I have never done traditional paper scrapping before, but would like to just print my pics and BG papers off, and then put little prima flowers and gems and glitter on afterwards.

But I have stacks of flowers, glitter and jewels in my digital stash and tell myself to do a Craig David.. and just walk away!!! LOL Speaking of cute flowers, I am in LOVE with these:

Hand painted flowers from Michelle Bradley, in pastel or primary colours. and they look great all extracted and in folders ;)

ugh Im feeling so yuck today. I always seem to get the beginning of a flu / cold but it just never eventuates. This morning im freeeezing cold, all rugged up and still shivering here at work. LOL I get weird looks from people going past my office cos I have my scarf wrapped tightly around me and a big jacket on, when they are just walking around quite comfortably in a shirt!!!! I have an inspection which is actually booked in for 2:30 and I always feel bad cancelling booked inspections. So I am only here to hang around and do that, and as soon as its done im heading home. Productivity has gone through the floor today.. which is probably why I spent time browsing every single product in the scrap shop! LOL I havent got much of an appetite so I am sipping on a delicious "hearty winter vegetable" lots-a-noodle cuppa soup!!! yummo and im getting nice and warm from it too :)

Ohw ell, at least its friday.. and its mufti day so ive got jeans and sneakers on and am nice and comfy (just need a blanket to wrap around myself LOL) and I have 2 days to relax and sleep in. ahhhh nice.

NOOOOOOOO!

My DVD's apparently are corrupted!! The one with the pics is salvaged though cos the DVD player managed to read it somehow.. Travis thinks the DVD players aren't as sensitive to errors than the DVD roms on computers and thats why.. so we saved all the photos onto the DVD hard drive, last night we put them back onto another DVD.. BUT the entire file structure is lost AND now it has renamed them all generic names.. like the camera does. LOL SO I have 3,500 photos all jumbled and un-named... Geeze louise....thats causing me a headache just thinking about it!!!

As for my other corrupted disc, well that is the one that has my unflattened finished layouts on them. Travis got the first 500MB (out of nearly 3GB!!!) and saved that to the computer, but because the files are not JPEGS I can't rescue them - we tried copying them onto the DVD recorder. travis renamed them as JPEGS, even went as far to put DVD menu screens on it to make the DVD player think it was backing up a proper DVD... LOL That didnt work though! AND because I have been lazy and not bothering to print them for ages they are GOOOOOOOONE!! well, I have the scaled, low res web copies... so 2 lessons learnt for me:

1 - flatten and save as JPEGS... its not like I go back to change anything anyway, and my galleries have all the credits if I need to go back.

2 - PRINT THEM OUT!!! I wouldnt care if I lost them then cos I still have the hard copy.

AND I made a third back up disc with ALL my kits on it, and thankfully that is perfect :) SO I have the pics, and I have the kits so I can re-create the layouts I loved... I only have about 20 layouts unprinted and lost forever, and probably only 5 of those that I love enough to re-do a carbon copy of.

SO all is not lost, and it could have been much much worse.
Funny how I have been using photos off that corrupted disc since April.
All the pics I got off it those times were in the "family" folder.. the other night I was looking through the "plants" folder, so I guess the family stuff was in the first 500MB of uncorrupted files and thats why.

:)

Just stuff!

well I made my font bigger! hope its easier to read now! I figured out how to change my background colour and have a bg image there too :) Got an email sent to me yesterday with some cute animals.. so seeing as this is going to be a boring post I will weave them in ;)

Just need to mention that Lauren Grier is having another CT call :) So go check out her blog, her designs are awesome and she is a lovely person as well!! She will be selling at the Sweet Shoppe from July 1st, and her debut kit is just gorgeous! :)

Ha well I got up nice and early for the soccer to see the Aussies get ripped off by the silly ref in the dying 30 seconds of the game. Australia 0 - REF 1. Nice job. But at least there wont be any more early mornings for me!! So thats one good thing!

grrrrr I have all my pics backed up on DVD's.. went to put one in yesterday and the computer kept freezing when I went to open a file. Something is wrong with the actual program I used to burn it so Travis used the DVD recorder (the one hooked up to the TV) and the pics were fine. Phew so we backed them all up onto the DVD player's hard drive for safe keeping while he tries to fix the program. The stupid thing is, when we bought the laptop everything was all bundled on it, and we didnt get the individual discs for each program..so we cant just simply uninstall and reinstall the offending program.




So i didnt actually get to scrap last night :( Which was very annoying as I have beautiful new kits from both Lauren and Faith to work on, and I CANT!!! I might use this as an excuse to get an extern HD.. they arent that expensive and it would make my life more easy in that I wont have to sift through silly DVD's to look for my pics!

My eye is on you :)

hehehe. I used to really dislike my eye colour cos they are "just brown"... I wanted a pretty green, or at the very least a nice blue! LOL Actually, they are a dark brown and you have to get really close, or have a nice bright light (like my camera flash LOL) to be able to see the pupil. I actually quite like my eyes these days... so much so that I had to get in nice and close for a pic to display it on my blog LOL

I made a nice BG to go with the banner.... I just can't quite figure out how to get the BG to work properly in this silly blogger template... it just shows up in patches.. might get Travis to help me with that... then agin white still looks good so I might just leave it.

hmm... well today we took Onslow to the vet and they think the lump is a reaction to the antibiotcs they gave him a few weeks back, which they injected between the shoulders where the lump has now appeared. So we have to just keep an eye on it, make sure it doesnt get any bigger, and if it IS what they say, then it will disappear of its own accord. Phew! AND we ddnt get charged for the cosultation which I thought was pretty neat :) Although, they could have told me that BEFORE I lined up at the counter for 15 minutes waiting for my turn to be served LOL

not much to report today... same old boring saturday housework...did the washing, did my pilates DVD, went for a nice brisk 50 minute walk, it was a beautiful day here today!
Not much on the plans for tomorrow... well, technically tomorrow is already here seeing as it is 1:00am LOL

Socceroos play on tuesday morning, 1:00am (AU time) so that will be another day spent being very very sleepy at work LOL. I get so caught up in the world cup every time its on, but normally I find soccer to be a pretty boring game. And this year with Australia being in it (and doing quite well!) its much more exciting :) So go the Aussies on Tuesday!!!

Random Thought Thursday

Random thought:
Do you think dogs from foreign countries can understand each other? I had this thought today when I walked past a lady talking to her dog in Chinese.. telling it to sit obviously, cos it sat. And I got to thinking.. well I know it wouldnt understand ME if I went up to it and said "sit" (cos obviously I cant speak Chinese) but if a chinese doggy met Belle and Onslow.. would they understand it if it barked?? OR if an American dog met Belle and Onslow would they notice that the bark has a different accent?
LOL These are the kind of pointless, illogical thoughts that occupy my head space for most of the day.... quite sad really isnt it??!!

SO MOVING RIGHT ALONG-

Well, I chucked all my blog links plus more that I go to but havent gotten around to actually linking on my blog, into a bloglines thingy cos I actually am quite lazy and have had enough of cliking on 50 different links to check if they have been updated LOL

Anyway I logged in yesterday and 2 were updated so I checked them out, this morning there was one more, and thats it... but when I clicked on my little linkies to the side, MORE had been updated over night and I wasnt told. LOL
I must be doing soemthing wrong.. I dont read instructions, I just found a little bloglines shortcut to put in my faves, added everyone and had no idea what I was doing LOL
So I will keep the links here for a while longer till I can trust bloglines! Not sure if I like it yet....


Anyway how sweeeeeeet is this kit by Michelle Bradley??!!



Its her new Spring doodles kit, available here at her shop!
So many gorgeous elements in it, so soft and girly and I just love it!!! Couldnt use as many elements as I wanted to on this layout so I will be doing osme more layouts with it LOL

Everything from the above kit, except for the jewels whcih are by Jeanelle Paige.

Thats it. Something random and illogical (dogs).. something completely irrelevant to your everyday lives (bloglines issues) and some kit pimping :)

Now off to buy 3 litres of milk, some raw sugar and a yogurt or soemthing else to snack on cos we have run out of snacks and Im hungry!! (*more useless info)

wet wet wet

I just went out for an inspection after looking out the window and seeing no rain.. as soon as I hopped in my car it started BUCKETTING down and hasnt stopped. I came back to work, my good spot out the front was taken, and I had to park a mile away with no umbrella and my pointy, high heeled boots and try to run!! LOL

<---- look... new blinke :) I'm on Deb Fishers CT now :) I was so excited! I have lots of Debs freebie kits, and never knew she actually had kits for sale! LOL Now I do and her kits are gorgeous :) Check them out!

I realised today I have done 86 layouts for the year. I must have no life. I spend every spare minute glued to the laptop, but my spare minutes are only about one or 2 hours in the evening, where I would be sitting and watching TV anyway. I suppose I've just gotten to the point where I can whizz through the program, know my tools, know what looks good and what doesnt and that one or 2 hours is pleanty of time to knock over a layout. Here is layout number 86 for the year, and 101 for my entire scrapping lifetime :)

The pic was taken by our wedding photographer, Wayne Patterson and I used Debs Annies Room kit :)

In other news, the poor plaza across the road from work has been ramraided AGAIN!!! thats the 3rd time in 6 months that some tools have driven cars / forklifts and 4WD's through the doors and taken the money boxes from the ATMS. Must be costing a fortune to fix all the damage..

AND we have a vets appointment for onslow on Saturday as he has some weird lump on the back of his neck. Better to get it checked out cos we have only just noticed it.. Travis noticed it on Sunday and I noticed it on monday. Its probably nothing but we thought we would get it looked *just in case*. hopefully it doesnt turn into another drama that I will have to scrap about!!

Well, lunch break is over! Better get back to work now :(

sleepy monday...

ah the joys of living so far away from the rest of the world... I set my alarm to go off at 2am just to watch the socceroos get beaten by Brazil :) Was a good game though, the Aussies played ok, but Brazil.. well they arent number 1 for nothing!! Bring on Friday!!! At least this game is on at 5am... just means that I will be leaving for work later cos no way am I missing the last half hour of that game!! LOL

Anyway.. I have been forcing layouts lately cos I havent had that spark.. until saturday night where I did 3 in 3 hours, and they just got better and better (If I may say so myself!!)




1: WHAT'S on the menu credits: Read all over - Faith Trues contribution to the ABC Benefit kit at the daily scrap.

2: THE final goodbye credits: Cool linen by Faith True and the font is Pea Johanna Script.

3: BELLE at the River credits: Kit used is Shabby Style Neely Purple by Victoria Stegall (FREE from Oscraps). Jewels are by Jeanelle Paige, stitching by Kim Hill and the doodle by me.

We went scuba diving on Saturday so that might be where these layouts came from :) I always seem to be creative after a dive.. must be something about the relaxing atmosphere underwater, the variety of colours and shapes.. I was paying lots of attention to the "boring" things like sea sponges and plant life, rather than the interesting things like fish, starfish, cuttlefish etc.. although there was one funny cuttle fish.. they were hiding under leaves and I couldnt see them and nearly squished one! His friend started getting all aggressive and changing colours and getting all up in arms. LOL I love how cuttle fish just start flashing and changing colour.. they look like a real life cartoon! LOL The water was freezing.. well about 16 Degrees (celcius) whcih wasnt too bad.. but after 60 minutes of being underwater I was starting to freeze! LOL

And that was basically my weekend. Did the cleaning, cooked some meals in advance for the week, bought some new stockings, did the fruit and vegie shopping and basically spent the day whinging as I was just generally feeling off yesterday.. had a headache which didnt go no matter how many panadols and cold and flu tablets I took, and my throat was feeling a bit sore too... Feeling much much better this morning though, albeit a little tired..

Better get back to work! LOL

Time for some music :)

Just because I cant get enough of this song and unfortunately the album hasnt been released yet!!
Anyway not much has been happening....Had a nice long weekend. Did the gardening which took me hours cos it hasnt been done since about beginning of summer and was full of weeds! LOL Looks pretty now! Put some yucky napthelene flakes in the garden too cos I noticed lots of cat poos in there.. so now the front yard smells like moth balls! hahaha Jessies not here to keep watch at the windows and scare the neighbourhood cats away these days so now I have to do it :)
I have been on an exercise kick the last few months trying to get rid of this extra 6 kilos that I have put on... would like to lose 10 of them but my aim is 6 ;) I dont eat anything bad.. lots of fruit, vegies and salad, just that I havent done any where as much exercise as what i was doing before we were married. So now we go on a 50 minute walk every day but wednesday and sundays. Wednesday I do a pilate DVD, Saturday I do a kick boxing DVD and a walk, Sunday I do another bout of pilates and a cycle as well. I lve the kick boxing DVD its so much fun!! I got the point where I was used to it and it wasnt hurting as much, so I moved on to the next level up, and now my legs are so sore i cant do anything that remotely resembles a squat!! LOL
ANyway after 4 weeks of doing that routine - and not missing one single day - I have lost.... wait for it...... 1 kilo!!! ROTFL hardly seems worth it, but I can see the difference. Tummy is flatter and my belt has loosened ;)
Oh well, Im going now so I can listen to my song :) :) I love Live!!!!!! Pearl Jam, Live, and the Offspring are the ONLY bands which i HAVE to get every single album the day they are released :) Have I mentioned that I have met the offspring in 2003?? I got to play pool with them!! I won a radio comp and it was the best night. When we saw them in concert 6 months later I was sitting there looking around the packed room thinking how many other people here can say that they have had drinks and played a game of pool with them??! and talked about scuba diving ;) That was a tops night!!!

Thank God for long weekends!!

I cant wait! my day is nearly finished... only 45 minutes of my working week left and then 3 days off!! woohoo!! Not doing too much.. we were thinking of going diving but I dont think we will. LOL After diving in water which was only 10C in NZ Im not scared of Winter in Sydney Harbour!! LOL We will take the dogs for a walk, excercise a bit, do some grocery shopping, clean the house.. go to the footy on Saturday night and dad is comeing over on sunday (I think the real reason is to show off his new car! LOL) and thats about it! A nice relaxing long weekend... get the boring hosuework and groceries done bright and early on saturday and have 2 days of nothingness :)

I scrapped our Zorbing pics!!! I have been waiting for the right kit and as soon as I saw Lauren Griers Beep - truck edition I knew it was going to be a zorbing kit!! LOL The font I used for the journalling is "Pea Jane in a hurry" and the word ZORBING is CK Mix n match.



This is the together view.. looks much better than 2 squares ;) Its my 2nd double!! I love doing double layouts.. so much room for pics and journalling :) Oh and the doodles (circle, stars and swirls) are all by me :)

I got myself a Gmail account. yay I love my Gmail now!!! I tried to change my yahoo groups over to gmail but they are still going to hotmail.. oh well, I will still be using both anyway.

Work didnt care at all about my car :) (I reversed it into the brick letterbox as I was taking Onslow to the vet.. a bit dent and scratches in the rear panel!) But they looked at it, and said oh thats nothing, we will get that fixed no problems. Phew!! Thats the 2nd car to be damaged by that letter box!!! First car was my new little barina as I was trying to reverse up the driveway.. and went too quick and slammed my foot on the accelerator instead of the brake!! LOL Wasnt funny at the time though... hahaha

hahaha I am trying to sort thru some layouts.. SM has a digital layout call out, and I dont thing they will be too impressed if I sent all 90 of mine in.. LOL Not that they will take any.. they dont seem to like me!!!! The only layout that *hasnt* receieved a rejection has been waiting for 5 months to be allocated an issue!! LOL In January I got the "We are interested" letter... April they said yes it will get published but we dont have an issue yet.. LOL I have given up now!! (I dont buy their magazine anyway... shhh!)

Oh well... better head off now. Hope the roads arent rediculous today. It has been taking me over an hour to get home lately.. its only a 40 minute trip but there always seems to be multi-car pile ups in the afternoon and god it annoys me when people stop to look at an accident on the *other side* of the road, which isnt affecting them anyway so why stop??!! grrrrr that makes my blood boil!!!!!

Alrighty better go! Hope you all have a great long weekend :)

Happy Tuesday :)

Yep, happy Tuesday everyone. We have been having great rainy weather, I just love it!!! Love this delicious cold snap and dreary weather :) I hate being at work in these conditions though, I would much rather be curled up at home inside just doing nothing other than watching the rain.

well... what has been happening?? Not much.. Onslow is shedding his puppy coat.. Belle shed hers in the month before we went away and that was relatively painless cos her coat was much thinner and shorter. Onslow is another story!! That dog has way too much hair. I was brushing him for 35 minutes last night, and had a standard sized plastic shopping bag next to me.. after 35 minutes it is half full!!!! AND there was pleanty more left on him but I had to leave it cos he started getting cranky.. Poor boy.. 35 minutes of someone reefing and pulling at your hair requires a lot of patience as it is! LOL I will take a pic of all the hair cos its just too funny!! I ran the brush over Belle (she was getting so jealous cos she absolutely LOVES being brushed) and I only got a couple of strands of hair from her.

I made it on to the CT for Shelby Digital Designs! so yay for me :)

There was something else that I wanted to blog about today.... hmm what was it????!
Oh! Thats right :) Peta Stokes (otherwise known as possum) has created a great scrapping community for all us "downunder" scrappers, called digital scrapbooking downunder :) Like I need another forum to hang around!! LOL Its a great place though! Drop on in and say G'day! LOL who says Gday anyway?? Not me! LOL

AH! I did a layout of Travis being a goose last night (what else is new??!) here 'tis:

LOL I just love the vacant expression too :) Kit used is "little Firecracker" by Faith True. The box around the journalling comes from Faith gRungE frames pack. Lots of great stuff in the gRungE lines, I have been leaning towards more "messy" layouts lately, with doodles and frames and the gRungE stuff is great for that so thanks Faith!! LOL Oh and the paper tear is by Tracy Murphy (blog gift) and the font is (i think) Pea Carrie. Its a Pea something font cos thats all I have been using lately. Love them! Have to go back and download the rest of them I think :)

Well thats all for this Tuesday :) Thanks for dropping by. Hope you enjoyed your stay ;)

The recovery

Well we got to take onslow home on friday night as he recovered in "leaps and bounds" throughout the day. It was just the anesthetic from Jessie that knocked him out, and the toxicity also gave him the little seizures the vet could see. When I got home he was alert and awake and able to move his head.. by the time he got to the vet he was completely out of it and they had to really shake him to get a reaction.
Now we just need to give him antibiotics and hope he doesnt pick up some nasty virus or other kind of illness. Silly boy!
Belle was VERY VERY happy to see him







LOL Why these have suddenly flipped to the side is beyond me.. the file that I upload is normal.. once its up here it turns around... *shrug*

So thats the update :) Poor boy though can't have any of his anti-inflamatorys for his hip dysplacia though. Apparently his ordeal put a huge strain on his vital organs, and these tablets affect kidneys and liver, so he will be in a bit of pain from that for about a week. We can already notice that he is walking a lot more stiffer and struggling a bit to get up. BUT its a small parice to pay! Apparently if we would have left him for a few hours and not found him then his body would have shut down because the anesthetic they use to euthanase animals is an old fashioned one which is really strong and not like the normal one they use for operations.

If we would have known something like that could happen we probably wouldnt have put Jessie in the yard in the first place!! Onlsow gets the award for being the first patient of that nature to be admitted to the vet!! LOL

Thanks for all your comments!!

A panic, now an anxious wait...

I came home to find Onslow laying on the tiles in the sun room in a pool of vomit unable to move and whimpering and groaning.
When Travis got home we bundled onlsow into the car and ran him to the vet..
basically they think he has had a seizure or a fit of some sort, and by the time we got him to the vet he was floppy, snoring and basically in a comatose state.. the next 6-24 hours will be critical as they dont know why he had the seizure, or how big or if he has brain damage etc.. SO blood tests have been taken and we will know those results in a few hours... will keep you all posted..

EDITED about 15 minutes later.. we scoured the yard for foreign objects snakes etc... the dogs have dug up Jessie!!!! OMG im going to be sick :( :( :( (Jessie died about a month ago and we buried her in the yard)

Just as Travis ID'ed her remains in the yard, the vet rang.. dunno WHAT she was ringing for, but Travis told her we found jessies leg on his bed.. she said ooh that excplains it.. cos she was saying that whatever he had eaten had a lot of anesthetic in it, and thats why he was basically in a comatose state.. We had Jessie put down so they pumped her full of anesthetic.. funny I never thought it would still be effective after all this time. Anyway Onlsow is starting to wake up and be more alert now, but she did stress that he isn't out of the woods yet. They have put charcoal in his tummy to absorb whatever is left in there and done other bits and pieces which Travis couldnt follow.

Poor Travis s now armed with layers of gloves and plastic bags and going on a hunt to find the rest of Jessies remains. We are going to put her in the bin so it doesnt happen again. The weird thing is, a few days after we buried her, they were sniffing and scratching around the grave, but after a few days they lost interest. We had pavers over the top of the grave and they had not touched nor scraped away anything for a whole month.. what possesed them to suddenly do it now is beyond me.

Even though Onslow isnt cleared yet, and still classed as Critical, they said it was a good thing he is such a large and strong dog.. if he was a smaller breed it may have been an entirely different story at this stage.
OMG what a night this has been!!! First my horrible nightmare, now THIS!!! of all things...
I am keeping very close eye on Belle now.. lucky for her she doesnt really eat bones very quickly.. Onlsow usually steals hers after swallowing his.

ANOTHER EDIT - All that was left was the one back leg.. no wonder the poor boy was in a coma!! He has had so much anesthetic.. please send your thoughts our way to help him pull through... :(

OMG!!

I had such a disturbing dream last night!!! Now I know dream retelling can be so boring to the people who have to listen / read it so I will try to keep it brief!! I have a layout to post at the end of the dream to keep it not-so-boring!!!!

Ok.. well.. last night I was in bed (this is not the dream BTW) and Belle woke up and shook her head.. people with big dogs will know the noise that they make when their big jowls go flapping about the place! LOL It was about 3:00am and it woke me up and I thought it was someone trying to force open the front door and I got all scared. ANYWAY i go back to sleep and have this dream...

Im inside the house with travis, an old, crazy man breaks in to the house and starts attacking me.. I try to push him down the stairs but he wont budge and he is just going NUTS! Travis disappears from the dream now, so im by myself. then the scene changes to outside.. the guy is in a ditch with 2 cats, im standing over him with a plank of wood with a nail sticking out.. and the guy starts to get up.. so I bash him over the head repeatedly with this wooden plank and nail (Even in my dream the sound and the feel made me want to vomit!!!!) THEN the scene changes AGAIN and I am back in the kitchen... at the stove.... frying steaks.. but the steaks ARE BITS OF THE GUY!!! Silstyle!!!! LOL I was watching them cook and standing there with the knife ready in case he puts himself together and jumps out of the pan!!! I woke up feeling really really sick..
What a stupid thing to dream of!!!!

Anyway this is a layout that i did last night:


Something a little different, but I really like it so I think you can expect to see more of this from me :) Im a messy, cluttery kind of person so this type of layout was just second nature to me!!! LOL
The majority of bits and pieces came from Melany Violets "fuzzy doodle blooms" kit at Simply clean digi scraps:

The brown buttons are from Faith True's "Flowers in her Hair" kit, the stitching and the distressed edge overlay from Lauren Grier's "hibiscus" kit both of which are available at Elemental Scraps
Doodley swirls are my own doing :)

Oh well.. got an email from the food authprity about some particular cured meat being laced with salmonella... so my afternoon is now going to involve running around to ALL the delis within our Council area and making sure the product is removed from the shelf. what a great afternoon im going to have! LOL
Oh well.. I have tomorrow off.. I need to keep repeating that to myself ;)