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To my mother on her birthday:

I truly hope you know how special you are, how much you are loved and how very much we miss you!

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Family Sharing Motherhood

I’ve decided what my favorite hobby is. It’s creating. I love creating things. New recipes, crafts, graphic arts and especially anything and everything with my computer. I wish I had more time to just sit here and create.

While at the beach this summer I enjoyed a wonderful afternoon with my daughter collecting seashells. I didn’t want to deal with the fuss of figuring out how to clean them well enough to take them home only to sift through the broken ones and wonder what to do with them anyway. In the end most would get thrown out. Now, if I were my grandmother I would collect enough of the same type to make fun things like jewelry boxes, rock people and jewelry. But I’m pretty impatient and need more immediate results. So I made shell art instead. At first the kids weren’t sure what I was doing but as I got it going they all joined in watching and collecting. A few even made some of their own. I took a picture which is easier to bring home than a bunch of smelly shells on a plane and came home to the second wave of creating on my computer. I’m thinking about using it for some greeting cards or stationery.

When I sat down yesterday to work on some scrapbook pages I found myself spending more time designing layout elements than putting together pages. I love creating things with my own hands. Here’s some of what I came up with:

You can’t see it with these small images, but the papers have really fun textures and designs as do many of the frames. Now, if I could just bridge the gap in printing and program quality conversion I’d be hooked. In the hour I spent scrapbooking, only a few minutes went to putting a few pages together and the rest went into coming up with design sets and elements. Oh the things I could do with just a little more time to spend at my computer! What’s your favorite hobby?

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Scrapbook Sharing Potential Inspiration

Need I say more? No, but I will because it’s my blog and I’ll blog if I want to. *giggle*

Consumers continue to experience the great rip off. It just slays me how companies constantly reduce the quantity, size and/or quality of their products yet their price tags only experience growth. Hmmmmm. Most of the time they’re pretty sneaky starting reduction in small increments so you may actually wonder if it really used to be bigger or if you just have a hazy memory. Another favorite is to go straight to packaging where they’ll reduce the quantity to make it fit. Then they’ll slap an ad on the front saying something like 30% more free! Free my arse, we’re paying more for less but this is supposed to give us a warm fuzzy about it. Another great tactic is to change something and then wait for a period of time reintroducing the old as new. This morning I saw my first Trix commercial showing round shapes as new. I nearly laughed myself silly all the while my kids are looking at me like I’ve finally lost my marbles. I guess it is new to them, but hopefully they’ll join me for a giggle when in a few years they reintroduce the fruit shapes as new.

I feel like the leading lady in the movie “Misery”, you know the part where she’s screaming about getting ripped off when the cliff hanger of your favorite movie or show ends with a car going over the mountain but the next show continues changing it so the car never actually went over. I know that feeling of wanting to stand up and scream to the entire audience that you’ve just been ripped off that they just changed it to trick everyone. In fact, it was the first thing that popped in my head when I took this picture showing how the double stuff Oreo is now what the original was. Maybe they’re gearing up for the introduction of the triple stuff cookie so we can finally get a real double stuff again.

I don’t mean to sound so pessimistic but what happened to letting inflation just be more for the same? I’d even be okay paying more for more. But I’m really growing tired of paying the same and/or more for less. Pretty soon the normal size roll of toilet paper will have all of three squares and we’ll run out of words beyond “mega.” *laugh*

Rest assured that it’s not your imagination that packages are getting smaller or products are not all they used to be. It’s part of the great consumer rip-off….errr corrective….errr deception program. Ah call it whatever you want, just know it’s real. *wink*

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Shopping Food Blogging

Well, I think I just received a sign that I wasn’t suppose to share the last post I was working on. I went to hit save and got an error that the page couldn’t be found like a hiccup in my connection or something. I had actually been debating on whether or not to post it anyway but knew I needed to get some of my thoughts out so had begun a post on it. Wonder if that’s Murphy or divine intervention? Maybe they’re one in the same.

So I’ll just leave it at this…if any parent out there has experienced a child calling 911 please feel free to share your thoughts with me.

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Parenting Motherhood Blogging

Since living in Arizona (making this my 9th year I believe), I’ve seen some pretty incredible rain and electrical storms. We even had our satellite dish struck with lightening once. But yesterday afternoon we got a rain storm unlike anything I’ve ever seen. My daughter’s comments are so timely toward the end of this clip!

The water came down in such torrents and so quickly I had it coming into my house through the front door! Within a few minutes my entire towel was soaked.

Here’s one neighbor wading through the water to retrieve his garbage barrel. There were several that lined the end of the culdesac when the storm was over and I saw people walking them back up to the top of several streets last night!

This truck driving through helps give an idea of how deep the water on the street was…and all this within about 15-20 minutes!

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Sharing Weather

Spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn’t finished the last books! I can’t sit on some of my thoughts any longer. Don’t worry though, I’ve pointed out when/where you can start skipping. *wink*

You can’t please everyone all the time. That’s just reality. But there’s no way getting around the amazing phenomenon created by J.K. Rowling’s series on Harry Potter. Call it whatever you want but at the end of the day millions of kids and adults alike have jumped into books and that has been unprecedented in my lifetime. The movies are added fluff and have captured an audience all their own even for those who have never read any of the books. I don’t think anyone can argue the success of it all.
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If I wasn’t taking photos, you may have found me doing shell mosaics with the kids…..

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I’ll let the reader fill in the blank here. I realized a little bit ago that I’m pretty slow these days. I was thinking I was doing a fair job keeping up on my blog reads, etc. But I missed something last week in one that I read. The funny thing is that I know I read it because I commented on it but today I happened to notice something I’d missed before. My friend Angel wasn’t just being nice, she was forwarded a blog award to me. Boy do I feel sheepish!

Apparently, I’m good at schmoozing:

Thanks Angel! I think I’ll take the schmoozer trait as a compliment. And in that spirit, I’m going to forward it to my friend Kelly. Now Angel also tagged me for another meme that seems centered around the number four. So here’s my answers. I’ll just invite anyone who wants to play along to join in on their blogs.

Name Four….
Jobs I’ve had: Maid, hair stylist, office administrator, business owner
Movies that don’t get old: The Bourne series, Tommy Boy, Princess Bride, Batman Begins
Places I’ve lived: Southeastern Idaho, Fort Collins Colorado, Chandler Arizona, Mesa Arizona
TV shows I watch: Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, 24, The 4400
Places I’ve been on vacation: NYC, Long Beach Island, Hershey Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Favorite foods:Chips & salsa, fondue, french fries, seafood
Websites I visit: Gmail, iGoogle, Facebook, HopeToAdopt community

Now, just because I fell behind I’m going to step it up a notch by doing my Wordless Wednesday early! Ha!

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Blogging

It was a full weekend of reading for us. We bought two Harry Potter books on Saturday and started reading that afternoon. I had too many interruptions with dinner and bedtime routines to get more than about halfway before bed and finished last night. But Blake stayed up until the wee hours of Sunday morning to finish. He was a little anxious for me to get through it yesterday. I won’t give any spoilers at this time but I have to say I was happy to be proven right about my theories. I have decided that I need to go back and re-read books five and six again because there was a lot that came up in this one that I couldn’t quite remember.

We also took in the most recent Potter movie while on vacation. It was everything I expected and I enjoyed it. I was a little disappointed that we didn’t get to see more of the Weasley twin’s mischief but you simply can’t fit much more than they did into the time window for a movie. It’s so fun to go back and see some of the early shows when the trio were so young. It’s always kind of weird to watch actors grow up with a series. It’s also interesting to see what it does to your reading experience once you have an actor’s rendition of a character in your head. Pre-movie was a time when you had to create the image of the characters in your mind but with the movies coming out during the book series it flip flopped - at least for me. In the later books I could see and hear the actors like Snape and Rita Skeeter in my head as I read about them.

It’s been such a fun and interesting journey with Harry Potter. There was so much hype about it when they first came out that I had no interest in reading it whatsoever. But then about a week before the movie came out both my husband and I decided maybe we’d read it as we’d already heard so much speculation about what they’d have to cut out to make it a movie. There was a book sitting at his mom’s and I picked it up to start reading. I didn’t put it back down until I was finished. It was a fast and engaging read and we were both really glad we’d read the book just days before the movie came out so we’d understand more what was going on. After that it was easy to want to read the next book installments even though they continually got longer and longer.

As we talked about it yesterday a little my husband pointed out something very important. It was that these were written as children/youth books. Therefore some of the storyline and developments were more basic than I may have liked, or at least as my imagination flourished, as the series progressed, but to keep it in perspective I think it was right on. The fact that it could engage so many adult readers is a tribute to the style of writing and story in my mind. For more fun reveiws visit Blake. *wink*

Anyone else out there a Harry Potter fan? What has your experience been?

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