From the Vault- Project 52: Week 38

I am, as usual, behind on sharing my pages. Here’s a page I made back in October.

When I was looking for something to scrap about for Week 38, there wasn’t an event that stood out. But there was an overall techy theme, so I went with that. Also, more blue!

Journaling reads- This was a pretty cool week for tecnology in our house. We downloaded iOS8 and played around with that. Jason had been obsessively reading about the difference in size between the iPhone 6 and 6 plus. He told me that some people on the forums were making mockup phones to scale so they could decide which one to get. He said that jokingly, but I actually thought it was a good idea, since I always carry my phone in my pocket. So the next day he came home with a printout for the 6 plus and cut it out for me. I then proceeded to stick the cutout paper in the pockets of different pants to see if it would fit. I was excited to see that it fits in most of my pants. I guess that’s one plus for being a plus size lady- bigger pockets! One other fun techy thing that came out this week was the Project Life app. I was surprised at how much I loved it! It was super fast and easy. I made three LO’s in a really short time that afternoon. Definitely an excellent week for tech.

Credits: Project 2013 January by Connie Prince
Template by Connie Prince (retired)

*Project 52 is my attempt to do one page every week about a “current event”. These LO’s will tell longer stories about an event or theme, and be placed in my Library of Memories system. They are separate from my Project Life pages, which are more of an overview of our week. Here are more of my P52 pages.

Five Pages | NSD Part 2

Last week I shared five pages from NSD. Here are the other five LO’s I did that day.

Last week I shared my first five pages for NSD on May 3rd. Here are pages 6-10.

This page was way out of my comfort zone. design wise. I love how some people can strategically place bits of paper and tags and small embellishments across the page and make it look natural. I have a hard time doing that. I need clusters or grids. Or maybe even a template, though I’m using those less and less these days.

I was inspired by Heidi Swapp to write five special things about someone, so I did this page about the Little Man. And yes, helpful is spelled wrong. But when Jason pointed it out to me I decided I liked it that way, full of help- like full of win. I am the boss of my scrapbooks and I always put a “wrong” thing in nearly every page. I might have mentioned before, but it does double duty by helping me let go of perfectionism and by being a fun game for future generations. I can see them gathering around a table playing “Spot the eff ups in Crazy Aunt Jen’s scrapbooks”.

Journaling reads-5 awesome things we love about you. You are funny, helpful, polite, smart, artistic.

Credits: February 2014 Storyteller by Just Jaimee

This one was inspired by the shapes in Jennifer Wilson‘s page. I’ve been pinning hexagons forever so I took the plunge and finally made a LO. I’ve wanted to make a page about our favorite tech for years. I took most of these pictures just to make a page one day and found them pretty easily using the “tech” keyword in Aperture.

Journaling reads- My iPod, the little camera, the Logitech remote, our MacBook Pro’s and iPads, and Jason’s iMac were some of our favorite and longest lasting tech gadgets. They have all provided us ith years of entertainment.

Credits: April 2014 Storyteller kit
January 2014 Storyteller alpha by Just Jaimee

This is one of my very favorite pages I’ve ever made. Inspired by Katrina Kennedy. I loved her page so much I straight up copied the whole thing. This was also one of the more difficult pages because of the journaling. Not finding words, but omitting capitalization and punctuation. OMG so hard! It makes it somewhat difficult to read, but I actually like that because some of it is pretty personal. You have to work to read it.

Journaling reads- thirty nine years old and loves being near the water wishes he had more time for video games and comic books binge watches HGTV eats the same thing at every restaurant wants a boat and a motorcycle one day is the hardest worker I know shows love freely and openly to those he cares about avoids conflict whenever possible loves Dos Equis and Abita is a champion snuggler plans every detail so he can afford to be spontaneous craves home cooking after trips opens doors for everyone hardly ever cusses except in traffic is incredibly patient drinks sprite and iced tea holds my hand all the time wants five more minutes needs words likes superhero movies is in desperate need of a space to work misses making music starts planning for the summer ten months ahead of time is a great peacemaker makes me laugh so much is owed a dog someday is master at the long-arm selfie loves walks and swimming watches sunsets slows down to let me catch up leads the way has an affinity for sock goblins has the best heart is generous to waiters rarely complains gets mad on my behalf needs a vacation has the best hands wants to introduce us to the joys of camping is good cop is an excellent analogy maker sees the bright side is a realist hates clutter loves me is awesome

Credits: February 2014 Storyteller
April 2014 Storyteller by Just Jaimee

LO number 9, and I was getting super tired! This one was inspired by the great advice from Maggie Holmes. Keep a journal and use it for your journaling on your pages! That’s something I do for at least half my pages. I almost feels like it’s cheating a little because it makes my pages get done so quickly. I use Evernote and Momento to keep track of my thoughts and page ideas. Then just copy, paste, and poof, your page is 25% finished. I did the journaling for this page last month for My Details. The photo is from a random grocery trip. You can tell I was conflicted. Half healthy food and half garbage 😛

Journaling reads- When we got back from New York last year, I knew I had to make some big changes. I felt like garbage the entire trip and it put a damper on what could have been a fabulous week. I felt like garbage because I was eating garbage. I had been for a long time, but my body picked that week to rebel against me.  When we got home, I committed to Eating Clean for a week. It was pretty miserable and I was hungry all. the. time. But the thing is, I actually really love a lot of healthy foods. This was around the time I started my love affair with asparagus.  The first week didn’t kill me, so I tried another week. I started feeling lighter, and my heartburn was almost completely gone.  On week three I started adding back foods I used to eat like beans and fruit. My body was still pretty happy and I was a lot less hungry. I slowly added foods, paying attention to how the affected my body.  I learned a lot from this experiment with Clean Eating. Turns out that this life-long dairy lover can live happily without dairy. Now we go months without buying milk. We’ve only recently started buying cheese again. (My family thinks I’m a crazy person for not drinking milk every day) I don’t eat Clean every day, but eating habits have improved a lot in the last year.

Credits: April 2014 Storyteller kit
January 2014 Storyteller alpha by Just Jaimee

Ok last page! This is number ten for NSD, and a LO request from Jason. He wanted three photos of the progression of the gorgeous sunset we watched on 4/26 in Key Largo. He Never requests scrapbook pages so of course I had to make it! I have a feeling this is a preview of photos that will go on our walls at some point.

I think one thing I learned during this NSD is that the simplest pages can make the biggest impact. I love clustered up pages full of ellies, but some photos can stand on their own, like these. 

Credits: April 2014 Storyteller by Just Jaimee

I think this post can be in the running for Longest Post Ever. Damn I’m wordy! That day was so much fun. Can’t wait to do it again next year!

Random weekend stuffs

Pretty nice weekend. Nothing too exciting or earth shattering, which is a relief. It was my first weekend out completely sans crutches! I’m a bit unsteady still and I have absolutely no stamina whatsoever. We’re going to take walks in the evenings this week to hopefully build that up.

I got some good mail from Megan at the nerdnest.com. A journal for December Daily! I’m pretty excited to start, but I guess we need to get through Halloween first.

Speaking of Halloween, the decorations are continuing to go up. And I’m working on a pretty awesome Halloween box for the Little Man. I’ll do a post on that once I’m finished.

Jason is loving his stereo. It’s making the long commute a lot more bearable. He can play things directly from the iPhone through bluetooth now. He still likes the roadster, but unfortunately the radio stations fade in and out a lot between home and work so it was becoming a hassle.

The Little Man is now in student council! He didn’t talk a whole lot about it, because there were more exciting video games to discuss. But we think it’s pretty cool.

MK is being a pain in the butt, waking us up too early, scratching at the blinds and making a lot of unnecessary noise. Not sure whats up with her.

Oh and also in news that is only important to us, Jason installed my brand new super awesome antimicrobial magic toilet seat this weekend. It’s magical because it’s “anti-slam”, which means instead of slamming closed like a regular toilet seat, when you drop the lid, it slowly and gently floats down into place without making a sound. Like the feather in Forrest Gump. 🙂

We’re making plans for the holidays, which will involve NASA, so I’m super excited for that. I miss my space shuttles!

I think that’s about it. I’m so ready to get back into my normal routine of cooking and house stuff and being a bit more active. Lot’s of fun stuff coming up in the next couple of months.

iPhone 5

I got the newest iPhone this weekend. Best Buy has a great buyback program and they took my old iPhone 4 back for $150, so we only ended up paying $50. Pretty sweet. (My phone was in excellent condition thanks to my Otter Box and we still had the box and all the cords and such, so that’s partially why I got such a good price).

So here’s my review.

Pros:
Speed. So much faster than my 4, especially the camera. Huge improvement there.
Siri. I know it’s a gimmick, and still technically in beta (I think), but I really hate to type, so anything that let’s me easily dictate instead of typing is a big plus. I’ve used Siri several times today already, mostly for setting timers and texting.
Camera. Not only super fast, but great picture quality. The thing I was most looking forward to is the ability to do panoramic photos. I haven’t been able to do any just yet, but hopefully by next weekend I’ll be a bit steadier on my feet and I can try it out.
Ease of switching phones. I backed up right before I left home that day, so all of my info was ready in the cloud to start using right away once we bought the new phone. There were some hangups, most notably with my iTunes music and podcasts. I ended up having to plug the phone in to finish transferring everything over. But overall it was super easy and I don’t think I cursed once.

Cons:
Siri. The network isn’t exactly zippy 100% of the time. I had to tell Siri who my husband was at least three times before it stuck, due to network timeouts.
Screen size. I know everyone was drooling over the larger screen, and I thought I would too. But it still feels awkward to me, especially when taking screenshots. Probably something I’ll get used to though.
Headphones. I take issue with the apple commercial featuring the headphones. It’s annoying and arrogant. (I know Jason is rolling his eyes right now). So I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the new design anyway. I have weird ears. Headphones never stay in. Ever. So the new headphones went to Jason. Which makes us both happy. And if anyone has any headphone recs, I’m all ears 😛
Podcast app. I know this is an OS thing, and not strictly in iPhone 5 thing, but let me just take a minute to jump on my soapbox and say, I HATE the podcast app. I have been a podcast junkie for years, and have spent a lot of time carefully curating smart playlists to maximize my podcast enjoyment. And the stupid Podcast app took all of that functionality away. They broke something that was just fine. I tried to work with it, I really did. But it pissed me off to the point that I deleted the app entirely. Now my podcasts come through the regular iTunes app again. It’s a little buggy now and then, but much better than the stupid stupid stupid Podcast app.

To be honest, I didn’t want to upgrade at all. I was still mostly happy with my old phone. But Jason found the buyback offer and it was hard to pass up. I’m loving the speed and the camera the most right now. All in all, I’m really happy with the new phone.

High Five for Friday

Teal Toes for Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month.

Decorating for Halloween.

Hot drinks.

Finally getting a box out to the Little Man.

This guy. Always.

Honorable mention goes to the iOS update.  (Although it’s currently wrecking havoc with my calendar synching).  But yay photo stream!

The master at work

I got a new laptop last week. Jason got tired of listening to me cursing out my 4 year old macbook pro. It still works, but it’s terribly slow for things like iPhoto and PSE. Plus I was running out of room. I’m a digital hoarder. The first step is admitting you have a problem, right?

I am so grateful to have an awesome husband who wants me to have pretty things. And who knows that by “pretty things” I don’t mean jewelry :P. Also very lucky that he is the master of the hard drive switcheroo.

So here are a few pictures from the unboxing. Note how awesome the box looks against the backdrop of my favorite skirt ever.

 

MiK is an apple fankitty. Okay really she’s a fan of boxes in general.

I just had to add this one. He took a lot of pics of the unboxing with the big camera.

Here’s the new hard drive.

Making the first incision.

The guts.

Consulting Dr. Google.

Transplant is complete.

It’s aliiivvee!

Unfortunately after all that hoopla, the laptop in the above photos had to be returned due to a faulty iSight camera. We went Saturday to exchange it for this one.

I liked that series of photos though, and Jason did the same had drive switching again. He’s getting a lot of practice switching out hard drives recently.

I’m enjoying my new laptop a lot. It’s pretty speedy, and will be even more so after he bumps up the memory in a few weeks. My old laptop eventually be repurposed as a media center computer.

If this post wasn’t nerdy enough for you, you can check out Jason’s blog, where you can hear all about the new iOS update and see lots of pretty pictures. 🙂

Memory Monday- Ever-changing travel tech

I was listening to an episode of Paperclipping Roundtable where they talk about things that have changed in our lifetimes. This is such a huge topic! But it started me thinking about one aspect of technology that has changed so much just in the few years I’ve been married, which is travel tech.

We live in south Florida, and almost all my family lives in Nashville, so we’ve made the trip between those two places a lot, not to mention a couple of road trips to West Virginia and Louisiana.

Our first road trip to Nashville was in 2006. For directions we used a printout from Map Quest and an atlas. And we thought we were pretty high tech! I actually still have those Map Quest directions stuck in our atlas in the car. I’m surprised we made it quite honestly, because I am not the best navigator in the world.

Since then we’ve had two GPS’s. They have been great to have on long road trips. Nuuvi is a much better navigator than I am. And I love that you can do little extra things like check elevation.

For shorter trips, or just finding things around town, Jason uses the iPhone maps. I don’t like them, but he’s the driver in the family, so I guess he gets to choose :P. Hopefully they will get better since Apple stopped using google maps.

It’s so interesting to me how technology has changed in the relatively short time we’ve been married. I think I’m a little old fashioned in that I think I will always want a dedicated GPS device. I’m probably in the minority though, because most people seem fine with having that on their phones. Can’t wait to see what the next six years will bring us.

High Five for Friday

I’m linking up to Lauren at From My Grey Desk for another installment of High Five for Friday.

This has been a mostly quiet week, which is nice after the past couple of months. It’s refreshing to not have 1000 things on the to-do list marked Urgent. So here’s my list of top 5 awesome things…

1. My Dad. It was his 61st birthday on Sunday. I wish I could have seen him and given him a huge hug! It’s really nice to be able to have a great dad who loves me and listens to me, not being judgey or giving unsolicited advice. Just listening. 🙂

2. IKEA shelves. We got another Billy on Sunday and it’s really making the living room look like an actual room. We’re looking into pantry solutions, and found one I’m really excited to get in a few weeks!

3. Time Out Free App. Any little bit of productivity I’ve gotten done on the computer is because of this one app. It reminds you to take breaks to relieve eye strain from prolonged computer use by graying out the screen every 10 minutes for 30 seconds. It also reminds you to take longer breaks each hour. It’s completely customizable and I just realized this week that you can turn it off by default if you have certain programs open. So I won’t get cranky if my screen grays out while I’m in PSE. Yay!

4. Nutella and strawberries. Need I say more?

5. Scrappity Doo Dah’s Birthday Celebration. It’s the last week of fun, sales, and freebies for SDD’s 3rd birthday. It’s been a whirlwind, but I’m glad I got to participate 🙂

And that wraps up another week of awesomeness!

“Jason Is Great” Week

I was a week late in celebrating Jason’s birthday. I am a bad wife. 😛 In my defense, his birthday was the day after we moved and we had already planned to celebrate it later than the actual day.

Here are a few of the highlights…

I made this. It’s my first piece of “homemade home decor”. I’m not really into the whole handmade scene, but I’m definitely willing to dip my toe in. And the more I see, the more excited I get to start making fun stuff for our new place.

(Frame is from Target. Fonts are American Typewriter and Lobster 1.4)

I also made Sausage Pasta from this recipe from All Recipes. My photos were bad, definitely not blog-worthy. One of Jason’s favorite recipes.

I made this lemon cake recipe from Ina Garten. It was good, but a lot more lemony than I was expecting. I guess that happens when you use real lemons 😛 Unfortunately it was way too much cake for us and I had to toss most of it. Note to self- half all future baking.

I also made Fish Tacos. So tasty 🙂

The last Favorite Meal I made consisted of Apricot Dijon Chicken and Broccoli gratin.

The “week” ended up stretching a little longer than expected, but it was nice getting to cook all of his favorite meals.

As for presents, he was going back and forth between an Apple TV, the TiVo Premiere and a bluetooth for the car. He ended up going with the Motorola Roadster 2. He’s really liking it and it helps a lot on the longer commute. He’s able to use Siri to call and text me, and listen to Pandora through the radio.

I think overall it was an okay birthday experience. I didn’t get to do everything I wanted to, but I think our cheaper holidays make us more creative. And I can mark off one more thing on my 52 in 52 list.

Monday Awesomeness

Kind of like High Five for Friday… only on Monday.

1. Week in the Life. Yeah I’m doing it. I’ve attempted it a couple of times, but never with an end result in mind. Now that I found the amazing book that Nettio made last year, I’m super excited to get started today. Curious about WITL? Learn all about it on the Ali Edwards project page.

2. Jason’s new bluetooth car thingy. Jason got the Motorolla Roadster 2 for his birthday and is really enjoying listening to it on his commute.

3. Pillows from Target. I have never in my life bought decorative pillows until I saw these. And fell in love with their sappy beige-y prettiness. Unfortunately I couldn’t find them on the Target website to link.

4. This awesome Family Photo Collage from Bed Bath and Beyond. We got this last week and I’m SO excited to put it up!

5. Swimming. We went swimming for the first time in months. It was great getting in the water again. Jason is pretty insistent that I learn to doggy paddle. For some reason I feel more comfortable with swimming with my head underwater and I’ve never learned to do anything above the water. I think I’m backwards. So he’s been trying to get me to do the doggy paddle thing and I’ve been somewhat resistant. Conversations go something like this-

Me: But I look stupid! *flailing around, kicking my legs and wagging my arms in an incredibly uncoordinated way*
Jason: You don’t look stupid. Stop trying to look cool. You really won’t look cool if you drown. Cool people can goggie paddle.

So in my continuing efforts to be one of the “cool” people, I kept trying. And I flailed myself all the way to the 6 ft. deep end! Twice! Well once and a half. I kind of panicked a little the second time. But still, progress!