Family Olympics

I scrap out of chronological order. I tend to do the 'easy' layouts first, the ones with 1-3 great photos that tell a clear and finite story, like a first day of school layout. There aren't tons of photos, the topic is obvious, and the story tells itself. Easy. I procrastinate scrapping events, trips, or celebrations with tons of photos. It's hard narrowing down the photo choices and to squeeze onto a single page. It can also be hard deciding which story (or stories) I want to tell. 

Such was the case with the layout from our first Family Olympics in 2013. In addition to there being lots of photos with many different potential stories, I'd left the group photo out of the layout about my niece Allison's baptism, which was the primary reason my relatives were visiting. I was so annoyed with myself. I wanted to scrap the photo, but I didn't want a second page about the baptism. 

I ended using it as the focal image on this layout, titled Family Olympics. 

The journaling tells the story about our first-ever Family Olympics, but I used the group photo from the baptism, the photos of baby cousins Allison and Teagan meeting for the first time, and the older cousins playing together too. They don't support the story directly, but instead are part of the fun times we had together over that long weekend. I'm happy to get this one into the album.

Twilight 2014

Another layout into the album. This is last summer's Cub Scout Twilight Camp.

As usual, I squeezed a week's worth of photos into one layout. It was hard to narrow them down, but I think these give a good overview of Trevor's favorite activities. Heck, now that he's a scrapbooker, he can use any photos I didn't scrap on his own pages!

Hello to 43!

Today is my 43rd birthday! I'm really excited. I like celebrating my birthday and always have. For my first 39 years, I celebrated March 12 with presents and cake, perhaps a party, special outing and/or dinner out. But starting in 2012, I've turned a day of celebrating into a year-long adventure of sorts. That year, I challenged myself to do 40 Things that I'd never done before. They weren't big or expensive or outrageous, but they were awesome. I had the best year. Project 41 followed. It was fantastic. Discover 42 didn't turn out as I'd hoped, but I'm glad for what I did accomplish. 

    

So what will I be doing this year? I'm calling it...

43 New-to-Me!

The idea came to me just after we'd just returned from our Canada adventure, where I had tried a variety of local, regional and national specialties (most notably, poutine). My nephew would be traveling to Australia for his Make-a-Wish trip soon and suddenly I was hearing about interesting Australian foods everywhere I turned. I asked my sister to bring home a bunch of uniquely Australian foods for me to try. She promised to do her best.

When we went to my niece Allison's birthday party a few weeks ago, Kari had this delightful spread for us to sample:

From left to right:

• Chocolate Brownie Tim Tam (delicious)
• Original Tim Tam (excellent)
• Salted Caramel Tim Tam (outstanding)
• Pineapple Lumps (fantastic)
• Kangaroo Jerky (completely disgusting)
• Vegemite, spread on a cracker (ok)
• Emu Jerky (only slightly less disgusting than the kangaroo)

A note about the Vegemite. Everyone else thought it was revolting and couldn't even finish their small sample, so they sent me home with the whole tube of Vegemite. It was a bit too salty for me to just spread on bread and eat, but the flavor was fine. I've done some googling and found a lot of recipes that use Vegemite (or its British cousin, Marmite). I'm going to do some experimenting and see if I can convince my parents, sister, BIL, nephew, husband and son that Vegemite is not awful.

Once we finished tasting the above items, Kari remembered that she had tucked the Pineapple M&Ms away and got them out. Yum! I'm not sure why they aren't sold in the US. They should be.

When we saw my mom the following week, she shared three Uncle Toby's Yoghurt Topps with us. I liked all three flavors and would happily have them again.

Tasting all these interesting Australian foods for the first time was so much fun! So, during my year of being 43, I'm going to try 43 foods that I have never had before. And, of course, I'll document it all as I go. I am so excited!

I've done some googling and found some promising items. I've poked around the ethnic groceries in town and seen a lot of unfamiliar stuff that is intriguing. If anyone has a suggestion of something I should try, please leave it in the comments! I'm up for just about anything as long as it isn't seafood or insects. Or too spicy. Ideally, I'd like suggestions of things you actually like and think I'd like. In the spirit of celebrating, it'd be nice if I didn't spend the next 12 months grossing myself out.

Happy birthday to me! 

Farewell to 42

Tomorrow is my 43rd birthday and it's time to say goodbye to 42. It's been an interesting year with plenty of good stuff, but also a medical problem last summer that really threw me off course. I'm doing better now, but it's an ongoing battle. Medication is preventing the episodes of blindness, but the anxiety remains (though to a lesser degree). I'm still very limited in where and how far I can drive without panicking. It's been pretty awful, actually. I haven't been motivated to do much with my yearlong project to Discover 42. And that's OK.

I had such an amazing time with my 40 Things and Project 41 that it was inevitable that one of my yearly projects wouldn't be quite as awesome. Discover 42 wasn't bad. I did get rid of 42 pounds of stuff and learned a lot of fun facts about the number 42. I watched some cool 42-related movies. Most recently, I've challenged myself to get rid of 42 inches of paperwork and other stuff from the files.

As I mentioned before, we have two filing cabinets that are rapidly filling up because we regularly put stuff in and almost never take stuff out.  I'm slowly going through every file and weeding out everything that can either be scanned and recycled or simply recycled. It is taking a really, really long time. But I am making progress. Visible progress. I decided I would keep going, measuring the discards, until I had discarded a staggering 42 inches.

While donating 42 pounds of unwanted belongings was easy, recycling 42 inches of paperwork is hard and really time-consuming, especially stopping to scan anything sentimental or potentially important and shred anything with private information. For the most part, it has not been fun. But it's been very satisfying to reclaim that wasted space.

Here's what 6 inches of old appliance manuals (that we can now find online) and warranties (long since expired) looks like.

Goodbye, 3" of outdated maps!

Farewell, 1.5 inches of paint chips! 

So long, last 1" of store-bought greeting cards that have been languishing ignored in my craft room for the past decade when I started making my own cards!

I've also said good riddance to really old phone lists, service records for a car I no longer own, recipes featuring ingredients Steve can't eat, and a bunch of other stuff that has no place crowding up our lives. I passed 42" and I'm still going. I'm not even close to done. Ugh. The good news though? Along the way, I found my missing ballroom dance portraits! Hurray!

So long, 42! I'm looking forward to 43. Tomorrow I'll tell you all about my plans.

America Collages

Trevor has been hard at work on completing as many of the Cub Scout Belt Loops as he can before the Academic and Sports Program ends. He only has a little while left before the May deadline. As of now, he has earned 24 of the 25 Academic Belt Loops (Weather is the only one he's missing) and 20 of the 28 Sports Belt Loops (missing Basketball, Flag Football, Hockey, Horseback Riding, Skateboarding, Softball, Ultimate and Volleyball). He's earned 15 out of 25 Academic Pins and 4 of the 28 Sports Pins. 

We've been keeping a close eye on the requirements as the deadline looms. The last time Trevor and I went through the book, we noticed that he was very close to earning several of the Academic Pins. In the case of the Citizenship pin, he was only missing one requirement, to create a collage about America. An art project! Needless to say, he wanted to drop everything and start collaging that minute. Also needless to say, I was just as eager to start a collage of my own!

I donate our old magazines 2 or 3 times a year, so I usually have a decent stack of magazines on hand. In addition to magazines, I got out white drawing paper to use as a base, scissors and glue sticks. With our supplies ready, we each grabbed magazines and started tearing out images that reminded us of America. We didn't pay too much attention to each other as we were gathering images, so it was fascinating once we stopped to look at each other's piles. Trevor had chosen many images of California, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, our state flower (Golden Poppy), our state bird (California Valley Quail) and an advertisement for the Jelly Belly Factory. He had images of landmarks, animals, flowers, and foods from the rest of the United States... but only places he had been! I, on the other hand, had a more diverse set of images, which accurately reflects the fact that I've seen a lot more of the US than Trevor has. I also had a lot of words and phrases in my pile. Trevor had exactly one: Home.

Once we had our images torn out, we cut them neatly and started arranging them on the paper, using the glue stick to adhere them.

Trevor had a somewhat unconventional approach to collage. He put down a base layer, then covered it completely. He added a second layer completely covering that. I told him that usually you can still see bits of the first layer in a collage, but he ignored me and declared his work to be exactly how he wanted it. I do have to admit that it's cool, even if you can't see 75% of the items he chose to represent America. Here's his finished artwork:

I started with a base of scenic images representing different parts of the United States. Then I layered words and images on top. Here's my finished artwork:

Trevor was interested in why I chose phrases like 'chase your dreams' and 'can do' and 'savor freedom' on my collage, so it was a lot of fun to share my thoughts about our country with him. He liked that I'd put local wine, sourdough bread and chocolates on my collage. He noticed Disneyland, Dorothy and the quail (which, unlike him, I did not cover completely).

This was such a fun project to do. Thanks again, Cub Scouts, for inspiring such a great activity!