I need to learn how to.....

overstrike words in my blog posts. Any of my readers that know how to do this, or can direct me to a spot on the web that explains it.

I posted my scrapbooking goals and would like to refer back to that post and mark things off as they are completed. I also plan to post goals for other areas of my life so it would handy to know how to do.

Thanks.

Scrapbooking Goals for 2008

I ran across this thread on a scrapbook forum and decided that if I wanted to get lots done this next year, that I should write down my goals and put them where I can see them. I realize this is an ambitious list, but I have various categories of goals within the list: one time things, ongoing things, decorating ideas. Some of them are various subgoals that need to be completed to complete larger goals. I will be printing these out as well and posting them in a prominent place. Disclaimer: these aren't in any type of order, just my random thoughts at the keyboard when we got home at 11:00 p.m. last night (plus a few I added this morning).

1. Complete 1 page per day (so annual goal of 365 pages completed)
2. Set aside part of each day/each week to work on scrapbooking/projects
3. Print pictures monthly
4. Print kids own pictures monthly
5. Pull out cards and memorabilia to finish baby books and finally complete them
6. Journal weekly, even if on laptop to be printed
7. Get backlog of digital pictures printed
8. Buy flash drive to back up photos
9. Store back up CDs offsite
10. Pull out college photos, memorabilia and sort chronologically
11. Power layout DH's college album (now that I finally bought the album)
12. Complete several altering projects
13. Post layouts on blog
14. Post altered items on blog
15. Migrate email folder with craft ideas to laptop
16. Install Memory Manager on laptop
17. Buy new laptop battery
18. Paint office to turn into scrapbook studio
19. Repurpose entertainment center for scrapbook storage
20. Rearrange/repurpose office furniture
21. Hang framed photos
22. Move small bookshelves to girls' bedrooms
23. Purge large bookshelves so they can hold all books
24. Finish various vacation albums in process
25. Work on albums from 1990-1994 when we met
26. Finish kids albums that are in progress (2000-2006)
27. Work on family albums from 1999-present
28. Go to Okoboji Overnight retreat in February
29. Possibly attend St. Ansgar retreat in April
30. Host Scrapapalooza here (or nearby)
31. Do more things with photos/papers - photo cubs, tags, etc. from blog posts I have saved
32. Buy proofs and negative from wedding photographer
33. Complete wedding album at a retreat
34. Take a couple scrapbook classes (locally and online)
35. Teach a scrapbook class
36. Read a couple scrapbooking books
37. Get supplies out of totes and into furniture for storage
38. Work on and complete house building album
39. Add to house album as it get redecorated
40. Get more of DH's photo from when he was growing up
41. Scrapbook DH growing up
42. Make album with Christmas photos and cards we receive.

There it is! And it is BIG! But I need a plan if I am going to make it happen!

My challenge to you is to do the same for what you want to do!

National Treasure 2 Book of Secrets

http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/nationaltreasure/

Hubby and I did something we've never done before: went to a movie on opening night. We secured a babysitter yesterday (about 24 hours before we needed her) and went out to eat at Luciano's (italian) Restaurant. This is the same restaurant where hubby and my family and his folks surprised me for my 40th birthday back in April.

The food was wonderful. Hubby had Lasagna and I had Amaretto Chicken Penne with Almonds. It was exquisite: penne pasta, mushrooms, toasted almonds and grilled chicken in an Amaretto cream sauce. I brought home the leftovers and will enjoy them tomorrow. We also had Roasted Stuffed Mushrooms with an herb cheese stuffing.

The movie was full of action, no blood (shown) and lots of snippets of humor. I was happy to see that they kept all the same actors as the first movie, other than the villain (and he wasn't quite as bad a villain as they had in the first). I would highly recommend it. The clues in this one weren't quite as good as the first I thought, but still fun and suspenseful.

Will be taking the kids soon. Hopefully it will come to our smalltown theater soon, as I spent $17.50 for our two tickets. I don't want to do the math to take the three kids, hubby and self. Ouch. I am thankful for the $4.00 admission at our theatre and cheap night on Tuesday.

Scrapbooking Set ups and Rooms

While I don't have nearly as much as many scrapbookers out there, I have plenty of supplies, so storage and organization can be an issue. I went surfing the web tonight to look for ideas to set up a more permanent spot for my supplies, than in the bags that I take to crops. I found this link and it is full of great ideas for storage of specific kinds of tools, supplies, albums, etc. Also if you are lucky enough to be able to devote a corner, closet or even a room to your scrapbooking obsession, there are more ideas than you will be able to shake a stick at, but it is fun to DREAM!

Check it out:

http://www.trinitycrops.com/links.asp#Scrapbook/Stamping%20Rooms

I am hoping to convert our small office which is housing two large bookshelves, two small bookshelves, 2 desks and a 4 drawer filing cabinet into a scrapbooking area. There is quite a bit of wall space and I can convert several of my office organization aids for use with scrapbooking. I actually found some gorgeous paint in the oops area at Walmart that I plan to put on the walls. I will post some pictures when I get it completed.

A Little Holiday Fun!

Hubby and I with Rudolph who is all decked out!

A Place to Declutter Toys

I read about a unique way to swap toys on one of the blogs that I frequent. I must preface the rest of this post, with the fact in our house, we celebrate all our three children's birthdays in a span of 5 weeks, with Christmas smack dab in the middle. About November, I start sorting through the toys, etc. trying to purge down a number that we can live with, knowing that there will be more things coming into the house. As they are getting older, there aren't as many toys coming into our home and gifts are more useful, or part of a collection (not toy collection).

At any rate, I have used a similar site for books called Paperback Swap http://www.paperbackswap.com, which recently introduced Swap a DVD and also has Swap a CD.

The two sites that I just found out about are:
Toy Swap www.toyswap.com
Toys to Trade www.toystotrade.com

Of course, a simpler alternative would be to organize a toy swap in your area. No one has to pay shipping and you can check out the condition of the toy before you buy it. I think I might try to do that next year.

In the same vein, our homeschool group organized a clothing swap prior to one of our meetings earlier this year. It was highly successful and what was left was donated to charity. With the price of everything going through the roof these days, it's great to see so many resourceful people come up with ideas like these.

I have heard of people having good luck with Freecycle and Craig's List, but given the rural area we live in, it doesn't work well for us.

Trade-Away!!!

Cute Things Kids Say

Tonight as we finished our supper of ham, my son said, " I love ham and turkey and hamburgers and steak!" I responded , "you wouldn't make a very good vegetarian." To which he responded, "I am a meatetarian!" Given that we raise beef, lamb, chicken and turkey to sell, I am glad that he is!

Moments later, I was sitting on DH's lap. My son says, "That is so cute!" My husband asked, "What is cute?" My son replied, "All that love stuff!"

Something I Hadn't Thought Of

I just saw an ad on TV for www.familysecure.com

While I haven't yet checked out the site, it has never occured to me that there is identity theft going on affecting our children. If you think about it, kids are a perfect target. It will be years before they realize that someone has ruined their credit and the theives will have long moved on to someone else.

The commercial had various examples: He doesn't even have his license yet, but he just defaulted on a $10,000 car loan; He's not in school yet, but he has creditors calling him; She has a .331 batting average and $23,000 in credit card debt (9 year old girl).

Evidently, the company monitors your entire families credit and if something comes up on your children, they alert you. If you suffer a loss, they have a $2,000,000 (policy -? I don't remember what they called it.

I am guessing this is on the rise, because with the internet connected to nearly every computer anymore, our kids social security numbers are in hospital databases, school databases, etc and are easier for the theives to find.

Another thing to keep track of.... all this technology is giving me a headache.

Happy National Chocolate Brownie Day - One Day Late

I guess I have been slacking on the job here, but I don't know how I missed this. Anyway, yesterday (December 8th) was National Chocolate Brownie Day. So in honor of that, some time this week, make yourself a batch of your favorite brownies and wash them down with your favorite beverage (or some ice cream!).

A New Look for my Blog....

Whaddya think?

I like the combinations of pink and brown that are so popular in clothing, scrapbooking and decorations. So I decided I would try it on for size. Makes me think of candy for some reason....maybe because I have a big sweet tooth. Looking forward to the assortments of candy that we are usually gifted with. My chance to try out lots of chocolates.

Speaking of chocolate, I ran across this blog and for all you Loopers out there that love chocolate as much as I do, now we have a place where there are CHOCOLATE REVIEWS!!!! It is very descriptive and has pictures too! In the words of Rachel Ray "YUM-OH!"

http://www.chocablog.com/

Digital Cameras Make Some Things Easier

I was just thinking that in many ways, digital cameras make a lot of things much easier. Here is a brief list:

1. Deleting bad pictures instead of paying to print them.
2. Sharing via email (otherwise they would have to be scanned, attached, etc.)
3. Being able to make all kinds of cool things, like photocards, calendars, etc from the comfort of your home, then sending them online to be printed and shipped to your door. (And not having to drag the kids out to do that errand.)
4. Instantly documenting something (ie. car accident - take pictures immediately for the accident report and insurance filings)
5. Sharing something from the event via camera phones with others that can't be there.
6. Printing pictures at home directly from your computer.

I am sure there are many others, but these came to mind for me. I was able to compose and send off for my Christmas cards. I was able to make up photo calendars. If I wanted to, I could have poster prints, mouse pads, mugs, coasters, etc made. You can also upload your photos to online storage and then share with family across the country and around the world. You can share the picture of your newborn within hours of the birth.

I realize that everything doesn't need to be instantaneous, but it is nice to see the results right away, especially if the picture didn't turn out. You can still take another one before you leave the location you took it at.

Remembering Our Troops

My sister just sent me a link to the most moving YouTube video. She had warned me to have a box of Kleenexes handy and boy was she right. Please share this with your circle of influence that people don't forget our loved ones serving abroad.

Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=ervaMPt4Ha0&eurl=&iurl=http%3A//img.youtube.com/vi/ervaMPt4Ha0/default.jpg&t=OEgsToPDskJC6PE_T-_1SyS8Cf--_rsN&autoplay=&rel=1&border=0

This was put together by a 15 year old girl named Lizzie Palmer and it has been getting huge amounts of hits.

It would be nice if my readers would post in the comments and list those they love and others they know that we might be able to remember them specifically in our prayers.

Mall Shooting in Omaha

As I stopped by the church office on my way to music practice tonight, the church secretary showed me a news story that had popped up on her computer. A 19 year old man wrote a suicide note to his family, tell them he was going out in style. He went to the Westroads Mall, the largest mall in the state of Nebraska and began shooting. There are 8 others dead, plus 4 or 5 who were wounded, beside the shooter, who turned the gun on himself.

We were just in Omaha yesterday. We were across the street at another store, but you can see the mall once you step outside. We have customers that live just a couple blocks from the mall where this happened. What a tragedy! I am saddened for many reasons:

1. That this young man felt that he had nothing to live for, that life wasn't worth continuing. It reminds us that there is a lot of witnessing that we should be doing. That we might share the words of life with those that are hurting.

2. That so many innocent victims were killed or injured. My heart goes out to their loved ones left behind. The advent of our Lord is such a time of joyful anticipation, and each year this memory will be strong in their minds as they look forward to the coming of our Lord.

3. That our culture glorifies violence and sensationalism so much, that a person would feel that this is how he needed to end his life, to become famous for something...a sad commentary on what our culture has come to indeed.

My prayers go out the victims/families and of course the young man's family. They must be feeling a tremendous amount of grief (and even guilt - though they are not guilty of anything, I am sure this tragedy will make them feel guilty with the suffering and loss of life that accompanied it). I pray that God will comfort all those involved in their time of need. I pray for all the healing that will need to come in the days, weeks and months ahead.

New Coach at Nebraska

In case you weren't following it (and I am guessing many of you weren't), today at 4:00 p.m. there was a press conference announcing the hiring of Bo Pellini as head football coach at Nebraska. He and Turner Gill (former Husker quarterback) were in the running. Either man would make a fine choice. Here's hoping that the team's winning ways will return after a very disappointing season this year!

Go Big Red!!!

Favorite Christmas Memories Meme

Paula tagged me so I have given it some thought and I came up with a few special memories:

One memory that is not attached to a particular year, was the first thing that popped into my head. I grew up on a farm and my dad would always give the animals extra hay and feed on Christmas Eve. Nothing particularly symbolic about it, just that as we were celebrating Jesus' birth, it was my dad's way of sharing the celebration so to speak.

Another memory is something that we do on my side of the family. Every year for quite some time now, we exchange names and set a dollar limit for gifts. Then as soon as we had eaten, Christmas Eve, we would all gather in my grandparent's livingroom and open our presents one at a time. Rather than a free for all, we take turns starting with the youngest first and going all the way to the oldest. Sure it takes longer, but everyone gets to share what a thoughtful or perfect gift it was. It has generally been pretty easy to figure out who is next in age, that was until all my sisters married within a 5 year period. My 3 brother-in-laws and one of my sisters have birthdays pretty close to one another so we always have to stop and figure it out. Of course with all these marriages, there are now more children being added, which is always such a blessing.

Another memory was the night we were sitting in our livingroom and there was a knock at the door. I went to answer it and was surprised to see that Santa was at our door. Our kids were 2-4 years of age I think and boy were they ever surprised. He came in and talked to them and gave them a candy cane while we took some pictures for their scrapbooks.