sick day.

Today I'm taking a sick day. The last two days have consisted of the most miserable cold I've ever had. I'm just thankful the cold waited it out until the weekend to really get me.

And all last week I thought, "Hmmmm... this cold ain't that bad. Maybe my body's just doing a really great job of keeping the symptoms at bay."

And the whole time my cold was thinking, "Ha. This is just the pre-cold, sucker. You just wait till Friday night."

I barely slept on Friday night, since I could barely breathe from my mouth (dry scratchy throat) or nose (stuffed up). Woke up at 6am on Saturday morning, lay in bed for an hour being very sad that I wasn't sleeping in, took a really long shower, and went to lay down on the couch and watch Netflix. I wanted to let Chris enjoy his Saturday morning sleep-in, even if I couldn't enjoy mine.

While I slept on the couch later that day, Chris took to the stores to get me all sorts of drugs to try out. He even called Sarah (who used to work in a pharmacy) to get her input, and when he came home he had throat spray, drugs to help my headache, sore throat, and congestion, loads of soup, Sprite, and the cookies I'd requested. :) He immediately got to making me a hot bowl of soup, before going on to clean and organize the house.

LOVE that guy.

I felt and looked gross all weekend. I kind of wanted to hide from Chris every time he came into the room. Don't look at me! I wanted to yell. I'm so ugly and gross right now! And he'd just laugh and say whatever... though he did have me switch from using toilet paper for blowing my nose to some moisturized Kleenex he happened to have in his car... because he did notice that I was beginning to look like the ring leader of a very well-known pack of flying deer.

On that note, I've blown my nose so many times these last two days, that it is raw. When I took a shower last night, my face burned when I went to wash it. Ow.

Okay, enough about being sick. I'm starting to feel a lot better today, so I'm ready to put this thing behind me. Today I'm focusing on getting some stuff done.

On the agenda today:
Clean up the office.
Prepare our bills for a discussion with Chris tonight.
Pick up stuff around the house, since Beth is coming over later to cut Chris' hair.
Cook some chicken so I can eat up the leftover rice from last week, and have something more substantial for lunch than soup.
Work on my lesson plans some more.
Go through my computer files and do a backup.

I plan to do a lot of the paper and research stuff from bed, while I watch season one of How I Met Your Mother. (Yes, we now have a TV in our room- it's just like our days at the old condo, when we had roommates and never left our room! Except... now we do leave our room. So really the only thing that's the same is that we can watch DVDs from bed again...)

I've already been slightly productive today; after Chris left for work, I turned on my laptop, caught up on some blogs, and got super excited by Ali Edwards' recent post on digital scrapbooking. So I made up a page during the first few episodes of HIMYM:

I'd been playing with making my own paper and elements a while back, and this patterned paper and the butterflies were some of the more recent creations. I wanted to finally start working on some wedding pages, and I just started with one of the first images we got from our photographers, the dress shot. Looking forward to having time to keep working on this project (and the bazillion others I want to do). :)

November.

It's here again, people. That month that heralds all the upcoming vacations from work. That month where static electricity runs through your down blankets, hair, and car doors to give you a nice shock. That month where Daylight Savings Time ends and we're plunged into darkness before we can even escape our work desks. 

I'm still crazy busy again this week- work, school, and CSET studying are killing me. Thankfully, this is the last week before my second go at the CSET, so at least that won't be looming over me come Saturday night. Will I pass, though? It's iffy, I think. I'm really struggling with the statistics part, mostly because I have never in my life had to take any form of statistics. Not so easy trying to comprehend a whole course in one week.

Chris and I have been doing a lot of photo shoots lately. One was last weekend with Chris and Shay Moses and their almost-here baby boy in downtown Redlands. Another was yesterday with Chris and Melody Holz and one-year-old Bennett, in downtown San Diego. Have I ever mentioned how much I LOVE that my husband is so much into photography with me? Love, love, LOVE it. It's so much fun being a team and creating beautiful photos together.

I'm going to go back to studying about language immersion programs now. I leave you with a scrapbook page I made exactly 3 years ago, on November 1, 2007. (Oh, to scrapbook again. To attempt to write books again. To have free time again!)

Scrapbook page has been brought down for maintenance. Will be back up soon.

If you call, they will answer

The day after I posted the OSF's funny about people in the scrapbook biz, I found this in my email:

Hi. I saw your blog post. I wanted to check to see if anyone from Making Memories had contacted you for help.
Let me know.
Thanks

This was from Jenny. From Making Memories. 

Since then I've been in contact with the service department at MM, and my Slice is back up and working (with the exception of tiny designs that still distort a little bit, but really, that's just nitpicking right now). 

Who would've thought posting a quirky comment from the OSF would get me such a quick answer!

Thanks, Jenny, Ashley, and Making Memories!

The funny for today...

So Chris overheard me leave a message at Making Memories, about my awesome wonderful beautiful amazing Slice die-cutting machine... that is suddenly not working properly. I had received a ticket number when I contacted them via the website a few weeks ago, but when I hadn't heard anything, I went to check the status of the number, and it said the ticket number had been completed and closed. 


I was sad about this.


So I called and left them a message explaining the situation. And when I got off the phone, Chris piped up with this:


"You know, I bet it would be really great to work at a scrapbooking company."


To which I replied, "RIGHT?! WOULDN'T IT?! IT'S MY DREAM!!!" Because, see, I didn't realize his statement was a) facetious, and b) leading to something else.


He continues:


"Because all day long you'd get people calling with (switch to girl voice), "Um, hi! So sorry to bother you, and I hope you're having a great day and all, but I have a problem with my scrapbooking machine, and, um, see it won't cut out my star! And really, all I want is to go back to my scrapbooking! And I really, really love your products, so hopefully you can help me fix this star problem please?"


Touche, OSF. Touche.


But, um, seriously, Making Memories? If you end up reading this, I would really love it if I could cut things out again. Pretty please?

I heart scrapbooking

I got a really fun toy last week.

The Making Memories Slice.

It is amazing.

Basically it cuts out everything I want for me.

I like things that do menial tasks for me.

So in honor of my new fun toy, here are two recent paper scrapbooking pages (as opposed to the digital route I've been going lately).

First one: Me and the OSF

Second one: Ryan and I on an infamous friend date.

Some scrapbooking goodness

Been getting that creative urge again lately. Hope I can find some time soon in between new jobs and boyfriends ; ) to get back into this more regularly.

1:. On being 24 for one last day...

2:. On the adventure of turning 9....

3:. On best road trips ever... (this is my layout that was in July's Creating Keepsakes, by the way. Not at all one of my favorite layouts, but if they're going to pay me for it, I certainly don't mind!)

4:. On taking a day trip to Julian in January... and finding awesome brick wall backgrounds!

This one's for you, Katelyn!

Perfect lighting + willing friends (er, maybe not so willing in Brian's case) = fun in the backyard!

And, because Katelyn likes my "picture memory things" I made one for her. :) Here's a compilation of some fun shots from our impromptu backyard shoot.