School's Out for the Summer so Let's Live

School is out for me. Yay! My youngest daughter still has a month to go, but my older daughters are out too. In fact, my middle daughter is on her way home from San Francisco. She drove down with a college friend and is flying back tonight so she can start her summer job tomorrow. My oldest daughter graduated from Whitworth University a week ago, flew to Oregon for training and starts her new job tomorrow. It has been a crazy month, but now I am back and hopefully I will have some time to craft.

Trying to create a little more time in our lives this summer and hoping to take a little stress out of my life, I bought a membership to a cool meal planning resource that I learned about from Becky Higgins and Stacy Julian. It is called E-Mealz. They have several meal plans to choose from including a portion control plan that figures in Weight Watcher's points. You can even choose which stores from which you wish to shop. I chose the Walmart plan for right now. E-mealz is even recommended by Dave Ramsey. It is pretty inexpensive. It was $15 for 3 months. In my opinion that is very affordable plus our weekly dinner bill is suppose to be around $75 a week if I am feeding a family of 6. Hopefully mine will be a little lower since I typically feed around 4 people or less and I have a freezer full of meat so I shouldn't have to buy much. The best part, it should also free up some money for scrapbook, crafting and decorating! Yay!

i.Scrap

Well, I did it! I dove in and just signed up for the i.Scrap mini album project with Stacy Julian on Big Picture Classes. Stacy is the co-founder of Big Picture Classes (BPC) and was the editor of Simple Scrapbooks, one of my favorite publications although it is no longer in print. To top it off with a big red cherry, she lives right here in the same town I do! I am so excited! I think it is just what I need to get a little motivated to scrapbook right now. I need to create. I feel a need to create. This will get me off the couch so to say. Plus, it is online so I don't have to leave my snowy driveway except to go to work and pay for said scrapbooking classes and paper addiction.

I love this project album because it is about "I" statements. We have to come up with nine photos and "I" statements to go with those photos. What I like most about the project is that it focuses on me and allows me to tell my own story which I said in an earlier post is so important. No one else can tell people who you are or who you were or if they do, I know they will get it wrong. It also allows me to go through a years worth of photos and figure out which ones I really love. It is almost like scrapbooking my year in one little album. I haven't come up with my photos yet and I haven't gotten my i.Statements figured out, but you better bet that I will be thinking about it all day when I should be doing other things. Bonus: I get to go do a little retail therapy after the loss of my paper in the laundry room flood. I am soooo excited about this project. Did I mention that already?