I’ve been frenetically scrapping the past few days to make a few little creative snacks to throw on ebay and hope for the best. Many of the tag books are smaller versions of the pages I’ll be teaching in my classes; I had to do something with the scraps, after all! I’m tickled with how they came out, so I hope you guys will check them out, at least for ideas and inspiration!
Since I’m basically incapable of creativity when I’m dealing with bad anxiety and depression, I haven’t put anything up in months! Now I’m doing SO MUCH better, but I’m nervous about getting back in the ebay game. I’m a little worried that my stuff won’t do very well, so if any of you wouldn’t mind mentioning my auctions to a friend or two who might be interested, I’d appreciate the leg up.
So here they are! Thanks ever so much for looking! And let me know what you think!
Posted by Lou on June 28, 2006 @ 5:17 pm | 9 Comments
Maggie fussed until 11.
I puttered around until 12.
I laid in bed, wide awake until 1.
Chris woke me up at 3 when he tried to come to bed.
Maggie came in the room crying and demanding a drink and a snuggle spot on the bed at 4:45
I listened to Chris snore until 5:15.
At 5:30 I dreamed I was being attacked by aliens.
At 6 Jonas came into the room with a bad bloody nose. Once that was cleaned up, he crawled into bed and took my pillow.
I tried to sleep in 6 inches of space, with no pillow and 4 cold feet on my legs and one loud snorer two feet away until 7:30 when Jonas got up and wanted help putting a DVD on.
I’m tempted to check myself into a hotel just so I can get some sleep.
Posted by Lou on June 23, 2006 @ 3:44 pm | 9 Comments
A few weeks ago I took a position as a teacher and designer at a local scrapbook store. Since then, I have been a ball of creative energy, dishing out project after project for my classes, hoping beyond hope that somebody would see them hanging on the wall at the store and like them enough to sign up to experience my brilliance and psychotic creative method first hand. So far, there are a few. Not many, but a few. Apparently the summer season is slow, and these classes aren’t for another month, so people still have plenty of time to register. (If you are local and reading this, dude, throw me a bone. Stroke my ego. Humor me. Sign up.)
Right now I am completing three sets of class projects. There is a very cute mini album, and two layout classes. Each class will have two layouts, and currently, each class only has one. Or maybe I should say one and 2/3rds and 1 and 1/4th, because that’s about where I am on these.
An interesting fact about me is that I am incapable of doing anything mediocre. I either go way over the top, or I suck eggs. Sink or Swim. Get well or Die. There is no Middle Ground, no Happy Medium. I am both the Rock and the Hard Place. Get my drift? Owing to this interesting personality flaw, some of my class projects are pretty intense.
I purchased a new toy last Friday. It is a device that punches three sizes of small holes and can also set the back of an eyelet. All you have to do is push it down and let it click. It is infinitely easier to use than any other kind of hole punch system I have ever had to use, so I thought I’d add a little something to one of my layouts. After I designed my own three layer die cuts, and lacquered them, and dangled them from jump rings and ribbon to create charms, and inked every piece of paper in a two mile radius of myself. . .well, it just needed something more. So, since I had my handy dandy new toy, I decided to make a series of hole punch flourishes across the bottom 1/4th of the layout. It is a watermelon themed layout, and so when you punch holes in the pink paper and put black paper beneath, it looks like seeds. Cute, no? And simple.
After you figure that each flourish has about 40 holes, and there are about three flourishes, and I had to punch a template for my students to use before punching the actual layout, I have punched more than 280 holes in the past twenty four hours. Doing any repetitive motion 240 times is masochistic, and not advised by most athletic trainers. My arms are killing me. My wrists ache. I actually worked up a sweat making the template. Scrapbooking is not supposed to be aerobic. That’s one of the many reasons why I enjoy it.
However, the layout looks fantastic! When I get the title on, I’ll post it.
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Posted by Lou on June 21, 2006 @ 11:40 pm | 8 Comments
Several years ago, when I was about fourteen, I joined the school swim team. I did this because people kept badgering me to do something athletic, and I have always enjoyed swimming, so I figured it couldn’t be too bad.
I found out very quickly that what I enjoyed doing in the water was not swimming. I enjoyed splashing around, jumping off of docks and swimming about three yards at a time. I liked the water, not the exercise. This enlightenment notwithstanding, I decided to give this swim team thing my all anyway. I did laps for three to four hours a day, for several weeks until my body was more toned than it has ever been, and I had developed deep, dark circles under my eyes due to the over work. I started eating everything in sight, because that much swimming truly works up an appetite. I even bought the team swimsuit two sizes too small, because it was the aerodynamic thing to do. I shaved my legs more in those few months than I think I have the rest of my life. I slapped the edge of the pool and screamed my lungs out in encouragement to my fellow team members at our meets, even though they really couldn’t hear me from under water anyway. I even got naked twice a day in a locker room filled with other women! In short, I totally played the part, and I think I was fairly convincing, up until it was my turn to race.
Something interesting about me is that although I love to win, and I thrive on being “the best”, I don’t thrive on competition. Actually, let me rephrase that with a little more honesty: I am completely chickenshit when it comes to competition. My legs quiver, my mouth goes dry and I just pray to get through it without making a total fool of myself. Most of the time, I don’t even care about doing well, I just want to live through it. My first race was no exception.
As I took the starting block, my mother was in the stands cheering me on. To fully understand the rest of this story, it should be noted that at the beginning of every race some yells, “Ready!” and then there is a loud, electronic “BWAAAAMMM,” which stands for “get set”(lean over and put your butt in the air so you are ready to dive off of the block), and then someone fires the gun which means, “get in the water and start swimming”.
My mother watched me shivering on the starting block. The guy said “ready”, and I was. Then that buzzer went off and scared the living daylights out of me, and I fell off the block and into the pool. The person behind my mother commented to a friend, “wow, she’s nervous,” as I climbed out of the pool and got back into position, dripping wet, and very shaken.
Once again, the guy hollered, “ready”, and then the buzzer screeched loudly, and I, once again, fell off my block, into the pool, in fright. The commentator behind my mother said, “wow. She’s really nervous!” My mother, who hadn’t publicly admitted that she was the mother of the soggy ball of nerves climbing back onto the block for the third time, had to agree.
This time, I prepared myself better. After all, falling in once was understandable, twice, humiliating, but a third time, well, a third time would be just inexcusable. This time when the buzzer sounded, I held on to the block with a death grip, and when the gun went off, I left my block a good two seconds after the rest of the competitors, for fear of falling in again. I was so flustered I ended up being disqualified because my foot scraped the bottom of the pool during one of my laps, so an auspicious beginning, it wasn’t.
Needless to say, I didn’t last long on the swim team. Oh, I had a few good races (mostly the short, relay races where the win didn’t depend entirely on me), but on a whole, I was losing weight and beginning to look just plain sick from all of the exercise. After being encouraged by several teachers, family and friends to quit, I did. And I didn’t miss it at all.
Posted by Lou on June 13, 2006 @ 5:42 pm | 6 Comments
You know how usually when you get sick, you feel it coming on? You have a day or two of feeling not quite right, and then it hits? That’s not how the stomach bug I got yesterday was. I was half way through getting ready for church when out of no where, my guts exploded, and I went in an instant from “feeling good” to “someone please peel me off of the bathroom floor.” Seriously. Fevers spiked, intestines moaned, and the worst migraine I’ve had in years hit in about five seconds flat.
So you could say that yesterday wasn’t a very good day. . I haven’t gotten bugs like this since I was a little kid, but apparently since I now live with two darling disease carrying children, I get to catch everything they bring home. Such an advertisement for motherhood!
But something very funny happened yesterday. Something that just may take the disgusting slapstick routine cake. If you have a weak stomach, I suggest you stop reading, but for those of you morbidly curious enough to wonder what happened yesterday, here you go.
You know how when you’ve got the trots you discover that time is truly of the essence? Well, yesterday I was in the living room when it hit me that my guts were about to blow, so I took off at breakneck speed to the bathroom, buttocks clenched, because I knew it was only a matter of seconds.
The bathroom was crowded with Chris and Maggie and I dodged them both, heading to the toilet. I would have made it too, had it not been for the huge puddle of water on the floor. The second my feet hit that puddle, my legs flew up over my head and I landed flat on my back, with Chris catching my head at the last second. Not surprisingly, bowel control isn’t something that comes easily when you find yourself flying through the air, and as I fell back to the hard tile floor, mine gave way, and I now know how it must feel to wear a diaper. It feels gross.
And yet, while laying on the bathroom floor, covered in bruises and sick while Chris asked me what the heck I was doing, I had to laugh, because really, it was hysterical. As disgusting as my predicament was, seriously, you can’t make crap like this up, and so I laughed about it for the rest of the day. And when you’re puking your guts out and glued to the toilet, having something to laugh about is a good thing.
Posted by Lou on June 12, 2006 @ 5:36 pm | 9 Comments
Filed in: Me
The other day I bought a purple workout outfit. I accompanied Chris to the Reebok outlet to buy him a new pair of shoes. I usually steer clear of athletic stores, because I don’t have a sporty bone in my body. I also don’t wear sneakers. I think they are ugly and bulky and I tend to trip over my own feet when I’m wearing them. They also accentuate the size of my massive feet, and I really don’t need any extra attention drawn to the fact that I am walking around on size 10 canoes. (Yes! And I’m 5 foot 3; clearly descended from Hobbits.)
While I have never been chubby, I have also never been one of those lithe women who can look like they weigh 98 pounds while wearing a flowing caftan. I’m short and curvy, and I’m basically ok with that. While there are plenty of clothes that accentuate the positive points of my figure, spandex isn’t one of them, and spandex seems to be the fabric of choice for most workout apparel. However, I couldn’t help but love the cute yoga pants with the embroidered flowers and the matching shirt that was actually a shirt and not a bra masquerading as a shirt. After all, they were purple and on sale. I wasn’t swayed by the fact that they were a “moisture management system” designed to keep you cooler, drier and more comfortable, because I’ve never had any reason to be concerned about sweating before.
I made the mistake of mentioning to Chris that I thought they were really cute, and he jumped on the opportunity to suggest that I go work out at the gym to which we have a free pass and live directly across the street from. I mentioned that I had been thinking about taking a pilates class, and the next thing I knew, I’d purchased the clothes and committed to working out. (Well, as committed as you can get when you have the receipt carefully stashed in your purse and the assurance that you can return the stuff if you change your mind).
The next day I ventured across the street, and for the first time in my life, entered a gym, where I signed up to take a pilates class three times a week. Upon informing Chris of what I was doing, he advised me to go buy a sports bra. I tried to beg off, because I really loathe bra shopping, but he insisted, so I went and tried on a few sports bras with absolutely no success. Would someone out there like to explain to me why most sports bras don’t have underwire or why instead of creating two breasts, they smoosh them into one bubble-like uniboob? I really don’t get it. I decided that my usual bra was good enough, and that wearing a sports bra would be crossing lines that, in my case, should never be crossed.
I have always had this image of a gym being a place where hard bodied athletic people converged, lifted heavy objects and flexed. I was very intimidated by this, knowing that even in my non spandex work out clothes a few rolls of post baby pudge were pretty visible. Any time I have ever tried working out, it has been in the privacy of my own home, and usually to a Sweatin’ to the Oldies video, and that’s not intimidating at all, because I could be 300 pounds and still be more attractive than Richard Simmons.
I walked by several ripped airmen on my way into the gym, and totally expected to walk into a room of toned, tan, sporty air force girls who could run for miles without breaking a sweat. Instead, I was very happy to find that my classmates were mostly older air force wives who were just as out of shape as I was. Talk about a morale boost! Unfortunately, this doesn’t help the fact that most of the exercises we’ve been doing are killing me. Having not been on speaking terms with most of my muscles for many, many years, it has been a full body assault, and I’ve enjoyed every minute! I figure if I keep this up for a few months I’m going to look pretty darn hot! After all, no pain, no gain, right?
Posted by Lou on June 8, 2006 @ 8:41 pm | 10 Comments
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