Fourth of July

We celebrated the Fourth of July with Suzzi, Larry, Dawn, and all of our kids... none of whom are kids anymore! We had a delicious meal with festive drinks that were tasty if hard to drink and hung out by the pool. We saw a beautiful sunset and many (illegal) fireworks. We had a wonderful time. 

Fourth of July 2026 (affiliate link)

The pictures I took around the table inspired this page. Because there was so much empty space above and below the smiling faces, I cropped all that off before printing my photos. The six photos you see were printed as two 4x6" photos, which I then cut into thirds and separated with a journaling block.  

Southern California Road Trip

Today's layout documents the road trip that Steve and I took in January 2025. It was inspired by the Numbers challenge at A Cherry on Top. We could choose odd (1, 3, 5, 7) or even (2, 4, 6, 8), then had to use those numbers of elements on the page. 

Southern California Road Trip (affiliate link)

My page is even. There are two patterned papers, a four word title, six word label stickers, and eight photos. Even with eight photos, there are a lot of memories that didn't make it onto the scrapbook layout. I am so glad to be documenting our travels here on the blog in addition to in the album. Together, they help me remember all the wonderful places we've been and the fun times we've had together.

New Year's Eve 2025

We usually host a small get-together for New Year's Eve, but Trevor and I were flying home from Boise that evening. So instead of having friends over to our house, we asked them to meet us at Dos Coyotes near the airport for a non-traditional New Year's Eve dinner. The food was excellent and it was great fun to end the year with some of our very favorite people. 

Celebrate NYE (affiliate link)

I'm frustrated with how the metallic stickers scanned. In real life, the gold is shiny and you can barely see the clear part of the sticker. On the scan, it's the opposite. Oh well. The layout is complete. It's in the album and up on the blog. Mission complete!

New Year's Eve 2024

This is the second layout I made for the final game of Bash Bowl VII. I only earned two points for my team this time: a point for ephemera and a point for the Project Life cards. We put up a valiant effort, but congrats to the Scrappin' Banshees for taking Game 3 and the series. 

New Year's Eve 2024 (affiliate link)

This page will be next to the Christmas 2024 layout in the album, which also features a single horizontal photo matted in black, with Project Life cards holding the title and journaling. So I wanted to make sure the two pages didn't resemble each other too much. I think the use of gold and green here, along with the different layout of elements, helps make this layout distinct. 

In the journaling, I mentioned one of the activities we did on New Year's Eve: solving a Hindenburg-themed mystery puzzle. You can see it in the photo on the table in front of us. It was challenging, but the story and the mystery were engaging and the puzzle was fun to solve. And we learned a lot about the Hindenburg itself. I had no idea it was so roomy, with such elegant spaces for the passengers. And I certainly didn't know there was a smoking lounge. That seems like a colossally bad idea, but apparently it was strictly monitored. Anyway, if you're the type of person who likes puzzles and mysteries and learning and history, I think you'd enjoy the puzzle too. 

Southern California Travel, Part 1: UCLA and Culver City

After dedicating almost all our vacation time for the last 10+ years traveling to all 50 states as a family of three, Steve and I picked Southern California for our first trip as empty nesters. Our fun-filled travel adventure included our first visit to Disneyland in 10 years, two bucket list items, and a variety of educational attractions: museums, tours, and more. We had a great time and I'm really excited to tell you all about it!

Because I blog about educational travel, I was given admission tickets, media rates, discounts, and other benefits for some of the places we visited during our trip. A few places we went are free for everyone, while we paid full price for the rest. This has no bearing on my reviews. Everything I am sharing is something that I recommend without hesitation. If you notice any gaps in my narrative, it is because I didn't love that particular attraction, restaurant, or hotel enough to recommend it to you, regardless of how much I paid or didn't pay.

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Before talking about our trip, I want to say that my heart goes out to everyone who suffered any sort of loss due to the wildfires that devastated parts of Southern California in January. I can't begin to imagine the challenges that so many people have faced. The scope of the destruction and the impact on so many lives is beyond my comprehension. 

Three weeks before we were set to visit, the Bunny Museum burned to the ground. We'd been really excited to visit this mecca for bunny lovers, as it had been on our to-do list for 9 years and we would finally be able to see it for ourselves. I followed their Facebook posts closely as soon as the fire broke out, hoping it would be spared. It was heartbreaking to hear that it was gone. 

Source

The Bunny Museum will be rebuilt on the same spot. If you want to donate money, there is a GoFundMe page. They are also accepting donations of physical bunny-themed items. If you would like to donate for general wildfire relief, Lutheran World Relief delivers critical emergency aid to people in need.

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UCLA and Culver City

On Monday, January 27, Steve and I got up early, planning to make the 383 mile drive from our home to UCLA via I-5. We'd obviously been watching the news carefully; as the fires continued to rage and new ones broke out, I had to make a lot of last-minute adjustments to our planned itinerary. I-5 had been closed due to the Hughes Fire just five days earlier. I was quite surprised on the morning we were set to leave home that I-5 was closed due to snow in the same location. 

We hedged our bets, opting to drive as far as we could on I-5, hoping the road would open by the time we got there so that we wouldn't have to take a 2+ hour detour. We also moved our things from the car we'd planned to take to the one with 4-wheel drive and chains, just in case the road was open but with chain restrictions. Fortunately, by the time we got there around 2:00 pm, I-5 over the Grapevine was open and clear.  

Our destination: the University of California at Los Angeles. Ronan is a senior at UCLA and we didn't want to miss the opportunity to visit him before he graduates. Steve had never been to the UCLA campus and I was there very briefly 35 years ago, so we appreciated having Ronan as a tour guide. 

    

UCLA is, obviously, an outstanding school. It is ranked #1 of the nearly 2000 public universities in the United States. (That pains me a little bit to say, as my own beloved alma mater is ranked #9. UC Davis does have an edge over UCLA in at least one metric: the campus is much, much larger. At 5300 acres, UCD is the largest of the UC campuses. UCLA is the smallest. It is 12 times smaller than Davis, at 419 acres.)

The UCLA campus is very pretty, with a lot of impressive-looking buildings and beautiful landscaping.

We'd hoped to visit the Fowler Museum, but unfortunately they are closed on Mondays. 

We'd also hoped to visit the Mathias Botanical Garden on campus, but it too was closed by the time we got there. Darn. We were able to see a bit of it through the fence. Very nice!

We did get to see the Murphy Sculpture Garden. Ronan said that it's a really popular place for students to hang out and study when the grass isn't wet. 

There's a vending machine stocked with free COVID tests and a station with masks and wipes. Smart. 

This is Cafe 451. Ronan brought us here because it is located in Young Research Library, where Ray Bradbury wrote his famous novel, Fahrenheit 451 (affiliate link). 

This is the Inverted Fountain. During orientation, incoming freshmen touch the water in the fountain and become a "True Bruin." Legend says that they can't touch the water again until graduation, lest they risk failing a class and having to stay for an extra, unexpected term. 

We had dinner at the outstanding Plateia Restaurant at the Luskin Conference Center on campus. 

Steve and I split an absolutely delicious cacio e pepe pizza. It was the first time I can remember eating a pizza with lemon zest, but now that I have, I'm a fan. 

Plateia is a gratuity-free restaurant. It prides itself on providing their staff with a fair wage that is not dependent on tips. I wish all restaurants did that. 

After a very nice visit, we said goodbye to Ronan and drove 5.9 miles to our hotel in Culver City. That translated to 41 minutes of incredibly stressful driving (for Steve) and navigating (for me). Los Angeles drivers are absolutely insane, weaving in and out of traffic, inches from other cars. We live near San Francisco and drive in Bay Area traffic all the time, so it's not that we're not used to crowded roadways.  LA drivers are on a whole different level. 

And parking! Yikes. Not only is parking difficult to find, but when you do find it, expect to pay a lot. Whatever your budget is for a trip to LA, take 10% off the top to pay for parking, then plan on what's left when you make your plans for hotels and attractions. 

I wish I could recommend the hotel we stayed in that night, because it was in a great location. But between the paper-thin walls, tiny room, and inexplicably stupid bathroom design, I will not be recommending it. This is what the bathroom looked like from the bed. 

Not only is there no privacy for the person using the toilet, but there was no way to use the bathroom light without lighting the bedroom too, since there is a PANE OF GLASS instead of a wall. And no - there was no curtain to pull or any other way to provide bathroom privacy. I can't fathom what the designer was thinking. 

Fortunately, we were only there for one night. And as I said, it was in a great location for our next day's main activity. I'll tell you all about that tomorrow. 

Celebrate 17 Together

Steve and I usually celebrate our anniversary with a quick getaway for the two of us. We pick a town within an hour or two drive, drop Trevor off with grandparents, and spend time exploring the town, eating well, and just hanging out enjoying each other's company. It's something we both really enjoy and it makes our anniversary special. 

In 17 years of marriage, we've done that 14 times. We didn't go anywhere for our 2nd anniversary because I was 9 months pregnant. We were in COVID lockdown for our 16th anniversary. Rather than have another anniversary celebration at home for three, we decided to celebrate our 17th anniversary with friends instead. We hadn't seen Suzzi and Ronan since we'd evacuated to their house in August 2020, so it was wonderful to spend time with them for a happier reason. 

Celebrate 17 Together (affiliate link)

I started out with the intention of making the layout entirely black and white so that the photos would really pop. I wanted the title to be 'Celebrate 17 Together.' When I looked through my stickers, I realized the teal 17 was the perfect size to go with Celebrate and Together. Rather than having a single teal element, I added that thin cardstock strip to the left and a tiny heart sticker next to the caption on the photo of Steve and me poolside. I'm really happy with the layout.

Hopefully we can get back to anniversary getaways in 2022 for our 18th.

Evacucation

I shared our August evacuation story from the LNU Lightning Complex fire after we returned home. This is the scrapbook version. 

Evacucation (affiliate link)

Actually, this is Part 1 of the scrapbook version. This tells the story of the evacuation-turned-vacation ("evacucation") and what a great time we had with the friends who took us in. I'm planning a second layout that focuses on the actual fire and how close it got to our house. 

I made this layout for the Pensieve: Memories in Review challenge at Victoria Marie Designs. The challenge was to preserve a memory in detail. Most of my layouts do that, as I'm a big fan of using lots of photos and plenty of journaling, but I made this one specifically to meet the challenge. I tried to show (through pictures) and tell (through words) about the emotions as well as the facts. I'm very happy with the finished page. 

NYE Together

Last year, my parents got Steve a pasta attachment for Christmas. He tried it out a week later at our New Year's Eve party, successfully making two different kinds of delicious fresh pasta. Other than the pasta, our NYE was pretty much the same as it always is: great friends, lots of board games, and watching the ball drop at midnight. It's my favorite way to ring in the New Year. 

NYE Together

We won't be hosting NYE this year. In fact, our NYE is going to be as different from our usual routine as possible. It'll be just the three of us, at a place we've never been, with nobody that we know, yet plenty of people around us. (No, definitely not Times Square. You couldn't pay me to deal with that kind of crowds. There will be a lot fewer people around us that than, and I'm guessing many of them will be quite a bit shorter than me.) I've been working on our outfits, which feature some new-to-me Plaid products (affiliate link). Any guesses where we'll be? I don't think any of you will guess in a million years and I'm not telling until after the big night!

Bear Valley 2019

We spent a fantastic weekend in Bear Valley with Trevor's godparents back in July. I was really excited to scrap the trip because Paper House Productions had sent me the PERFECT paper to use with my photos. Check it out:

Bear Valley 2019 (affiliate link here and below)

I don't normally use papers like this "Call of the Wild" paper; it bugs me to cover up so much of the design with photos and I don't like the paper competing with the photos. But in this case, they complement each other beautifully. The title on the patterned paper didn't work for me, so I covered it up with the strip of brown and used it to house my journaling. The rice paper border helped ground the journaling. I put my own title in the upper right, then added a visual triangle of stickers as the final touch. 

Bear Valley 2018

Usually when I get together with my friends to scrapbook, I will bring a huge stack of photos and spend the day cropping them down, deciding on their physical layout on the page, and selecting patterned papers for each page. I can do all of these easily while chatting. I bring home the big stack of incomplete layouts to do the title work, embellishing, and journaling later. In the case of the title and embellishing, this is because I don't want to schlep every letter sticker and embellishment I own to a crop. With journaling, I have to concentrate in a way I can't when I'm chatting.

Or so I thought.

During our most recent scrapping get-together, I challenged myself to completely finish at least one layout, including journaling. I brought along a few sticker sets and some all-purpose die cuts and forced myself to use them instead of waiting to see if there was a better option at home. I did my journaling on strips, which I glued to the page, instead of writing directly on the layout. That way I could correct a mistake if I needed to, since I wasn't giving 100% of my focus to the journaling.

I am really happy with how my layout turned out.

Bear Valley 2018 (affiliate link)

I was so proud of myself for successfully finishing a page away from home that I kept going and ended up with two other pages 100% done. I'll share those soon. Yea, me!

Rice-Dyed Eggs

We just returned from our annual spring break snow trip to Bear Valley (at approximately 7000'), where Steve's parents own a cabin. We're never quite sure what to expect when we schedule the trip. It's pretty much a given that there will be 10+ feet of snow in the subdivision and the roads will be closed. This means we park at the lodge, use sleds to drag our luggage up the hill to the cabin, and dig our way in. In 2011, we had to dig DOWN to get to the front door on the second story. This year, the roads were not closed and there was no digging. In fact, other than a tiny patch of snow on the shady side of the cabin, there was no snow at all.

No matter where you are, you've probably heard that California is in a drought and that the snowpack is dangerously low this year. In fact, it's a record-breaking year... and not in a good way. This is around 7200'. No snow there, nor on the mountains in the background.

The ski resort at Bear Valley (8000+ feet) makes snow, yet this is what it looked like when we were there last weekend. It's unbelievable. It usually looks like this in late May... or even June or July. 

Fortunately, they were still operating, so Trevor and his friend Ronan did get at least a little bit of snow time one morning. The place was practically deserted, so it wasn't too difficult to ski around the large dirt patches. We left around 1:00. What little snow was left was getting slushy.  

Usually when we go to the cabin in the spring, the boys build snow forts, go sledding, and pretty much spend all day every day outside in the snow. They amused themselves (and us) by trying all the snow activities they'd usually do in the small patch of snow behind the cabin. Their attempts at sledding were hilarious.

One nice thing about the lack of snow (other than being able to drive up to the cabin and not having to dig our way in) was that we could do some geocaching. (Needless to say, we don't geocache when caches are covered in 10-20 feet of snow.) This little fellow with a brown bushy tail nervously watched us search for a nearby cache. I think he's a marten.

We also did lots of Easter activities. Jonna had sent me the link to a video (no longer online), suggesting that we might try it at the cabin. I was skeptical as to whether it would work or not, but agreed to try it, knowing that an utter failure could make just as good a blog post as a success would. I played the video for the assembled group, then asked them whether or not they thought it would work the way it did in the video. Jonna was optimistic, while Ronan and Trevor were both doubting a bit. Nobody was sure it WOULDN'T work, but no one else was as confident as Jonna.

While Jonna got out the rice she'd brought, I pulled out food coloring and the eggs I'd brought for our Easter morning omelets. Immediately there was concern. The eggs weren't hard-boiled. I dye raw eggs all the time without issue, so I'd never even thought that I should hard-boil them for this application. Would raw eggs withstand the shaking as well as cooked? We'll see!

Issue #2 arose when we realized we didn't have lidded cups. We decided to use cling wrap instead of a lid and hope for the best. Ronan and Trevor each put rice into a cup, then added food color. 

They put the cling wrap tightly over the cups and shook to distribute the dye throughout the rice. Then they gently peeled back the cling wrap and placed an egg in the cup. They shook it, gently at first, then more vigorously as they realized the shells weren't going to crack.

They fished out the first eggs... success! They were gorgeous and perfectly mottled. They tried other colors and combinations of color. Success all around. Rice dyeing for the win! 

We let the eggs sit until the dye dried, then brushed off the extra rice bits. They were so pretty! We made all of these shades with just the four little bottles of food color (red, yellow, blue and green).

Tomorrow I'll share the egg 'recipe' I used for Easter breakfast.

Embrace Imperfection

I wrote this blog post as a member of the Design Team at Flamingo Scraps and wanted to share it here.

Here's a layout I made on National Scrapbook Day:

I made it during a 2 hour Scrapbook.com challenge. In order to allow enough time to scan, stitch, upload, and link, I really only had about 90 minutes. I've mentioned before that my scrapping process often involves letting a layout sit half-done for weeks. It is unheard of for me to start completely from scratch and have a finished layout in under two hours.

Part of the reason is that I like my layouts to be as perfect as possible. For example, see the word 'valley' in the title? It drives me crazy that it is crooked, but I didn't have enough time to fix it.  Notice the little heart sticker in the top left? It isn't quite the right shape. If this weren't for a challenge, I would have pushed the layout aside and come back to it later when I felt like designing and cutting out a better accent. The spacing between the pictures isn't totally even, and I don't like the columns of verticals in the center next to the column of horizontals on the right. The layout is a little plain, the design a touch boring.

Despite all that, I do like the layout. Yes, there are some things that could be better, but it's just fine. The most important thing is that I've found a home for the pictures and recorded the story of our first winter visit to Bear Valley. If I didn't embrace imperfection, I would hardly ever get anything done!