Winding Down and Gearing Up

Before I start my usual rambling, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge all the men and women who serve and have served our country so that we can continue to enjoy our freedom. Thank you for your service and your sacrifices.

This Memorial Day weekend I am acutely aware of those sacrifices because I'm thinking about my cousin, Dan Anders, who lost his son, Mabry Anders, in Afghanistan on August 24, 2012.

I can't seem to find the words to express my sadness and gratitude for the sacrifices that have been made that allow us to be free, so I'll just leave it at that, and say thank you.

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I'm happy to report that I've pulled out of my funk, and several weeks ago I started getting that itch to make a list of all the things I want to change for next year. I think it's called inspiration. I have so many ideas floating around in my head of all the things I'm going to accomplish this summer for next school year.

The first of which is going to be to PAINT MY CLASSROOM! So excited about that. My principal said yes. My first choice was purple but he vetoed that because it's one of the colors for our rival school. I can see his point, so TEAL it is!

Friday was the last day of school for the kids in our district, and I go back for a teacher work day after Memorial Day. Even though I go back for one day, this weekend pretty much marks the beginning of my summer vacation.

The biggest goal that I have for this summer is to make a sizable dent in my picture backlog and get back to digiscrapping my photos. I stalled at the end of 2008, because WORK, so I'm a good four and half years behind. My goal is to complete two pages a day, which works out to be 168 pages total.

Yesterday I sat down and had a little binge session to kick off my summer and banged out 26 of those pages. I sat at my computer for so long, my butt actually cramped up and fell asleep. That's a big cramp, let me tell you.

In order to accomplish my goal I'm going to be using Digital Project Life. I've been incorporating my blog into my digital books because I tell so much of my family's stories through the blog, that it's super easy to just copy and paste those blog posts into my book. Any pictures that I have sitting in iPhoto that didn't make it onto the blog, I will put into Project Life templates.

This was my first Project Life page and it was super easy. Well, super easy after I went through the tutorial for beginners on JessicaSprague.com. I've never used a template before, so I felt like I needed to be walked through the process. I'm glad I did too, because I learned a lot and probably saved myself hours of bumbling around.

I love the Jessica Sprague tutorials because they make using Photoshop attainable for those of us that need to have it spelled out.

If you're not familiar, the cool thing about Project Life is that is simplifies the process so you can quickly get your pictures and journaling into your albums without having to buy and store a lot of expensive supplies. Not to mention the surface area scrapbooking requires.

So that's my big goal for this summer. I have lots of other little plans, and I'll be sure to share some of those with you. I should be posting more than what I have been this school year, but it probably won't start right away as I have some catching up to do with the fam. We need some bonding time. Some of that is going to involve camping, which isn't my favorite because DIRT. Yeah, I'll deal, but INDOOR PLUMBING. I super love indoor plumbing.

It isn't easy being an OCD Freak.