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!

Jan 9th Photo/356

Jan 8th and 9th brought a visit from the man in brown. The UPS man delivered two packages from Creative Keepsakes over the last two days! Yesterday, he delivered the December kit which has been in route for over a week and a half, but wasn't delivered due to poor weather conditions. The Dec kit is called "Little Stories" and comes with 12 little board books. I ordered it to do a little book once a month to cover our lives in '09. In fact, I was going to call the set that, "Our Lives in '09". After I ordered it, I found out about "Project 365" through an email newsletter which sounded like a lot of fun and I wanted to do it instead so I ordered it on Jan 1st. Today the 365 kit was delivered! It is pretty cool! I couldn't wait to open the box. Becky Higgin's this is a great idea and will be very simple to follow as long I continue to follow my photo routine. See Becky's blog entry about understanding the concept of Project 365 and how scrapbookers and non-scrapbookers can succeed in documenting 2009m using this kit: http://www.beckyhiggins.com/blog/2008/12/understanding-concept-of-project-365.html

Now that I have both kits so I'm going to do theme albums for each month with the "Little Stories" kit as follows:

• All about albums for the months of Jan, March, April, September, and October because those are the birth months for the people in our family.


• Feb: Skiing


• May: Livestock Shows


• June: Camping


• July: The Pool


• Aug: Back to School


• Nov: Thanksgiving


• Dec: Christmas

Then I'm going to work on the "Project 365" Album daily. I'm very excited! Here is a picture of both of the kits I've received in the last two days. Plus, I even tried the manual settings for the first time on my Cannon SLR when I took the photo. Thank you UPS man and Becky Higgins!

Canon Rebel EOS XT, manual, no flash

Project 365

Well, I ordered my Creating Keepsakes "Project 365" Kit of the Month on Jan 1 at about 9:30 am and it looks like it may be delivered today according the UPS tracking system. Yeah! I would have liked to have it in hand on the 1st, but at least I will have it this week. Unfortunately many other scrapbookers will have to wait as Creating Keepsakes had a lot of issues with their online ordering system and many people couldn't even order the kit and now they are all sold out. Becky Higgins has shared that people should be able to get them at a later date and is encouraging people to take pictures. Other scrappers are skipping the Creating Keepsakes Kit of the Month and just creating their own. Personally, I have been snapping away until I get my kit and then decided that maybe if I blogged about it on a daily basis, I would continue to take pictures so today I will have seven blog postings, one for each day that already passed.

The hardest part of this project so far is trying to figure out what types of things I should put in my album. This is where my perfectionism comes out. I want the perfect shot of the day and what if I take a picture earlier in the day and then something else happens so I have been taking several shots a day, downloading them to my computer, deleting the bad ones, choosing two or three of my favorites, uploading them to my Snapfish account, captioning them and then selecting a favorite of the day using the favorite tool for future printing. So far this is working quite well and is keeping me well organized. I will probably print a week at a time as I can send them from Snapfish to my local Walgreens which is on my way home from work. I have also come up with a captioning system at the site that has helped me. I name the image 365 (the date without characters) an image title and time/place/situation. For example: "365 010109 The Big Thaw" outside of the shop at my house. It is working well.