Takin' Care of Business.....Photo Business that Is

I'm often asked to post more of my Scrapbook Pages so in the future I will try to do that on a regular basis. I've also been asked to do tutorials on my digital scrap booking techniques but I don't foresee myself doing that........there are so many great ones on the Internet already. As anyone can see, though, I do have my own style......very simple, not too cluttered.....most of the time designed to chronicle and tell the story of my family's life during each year. I like to focus on the photographs without too many frills and doo-dads. You can check out other pages I've posted by going to "Scrapbooking" under "What Would You Like to Read?" in my sidebar. I'm always admiring all types of styles of scrapbook pages, and have learned so much from so many talented designers. But ultimately I think it's best to go with your own style........ and in my case I like to actually get pages done! It doesn't really count if all your gorgeous layouts are still in your head! In lieu of any tutorials, however, if anyone has any questions about my techniques you can e-mail me (address on the sidebar) and I'll certainly get back to you.

Here are two pages from a trip we took a couple of years ago to beautiful Prescott, Arizona. It's about an hour and a half north of the Phoenix area, and among other things, has some of the best antique stores and shoppes in the country. Here's a short snippet of that trip I captured one afternoon while we were there.

And as you can see, I like to throw in a little whimsy on occasion! We never found out who the man was but you just wouldn't believe how much he was enjoying his ice cream cone on that hot day in June! :)

Life gets busy and our weeks go by so quickly, and that being said, I'd still like to encourage you to find some time this week to do a few scrapbook pages. If you're like me you took a LOT of Easter photos over this past weekend......take a few minutes to do something with them, whether its adding them to your scrapbooks, making a mosaic with them or simply getting them off your camera and into an "Easter 2010" file on your computer. You know you'll be glad you did.

Enjoy your week,

Today I'm linking with everyone at:

Scrappy Saturday

Motivate Me Monday

Mosaic Monday

Market Yourself Monday

A Rare Summer Picnic

Since this week Jim and I will be busy celebrating our August 14th Wedding Anniversary, I will be AWOL from my computer the rest of the week. That being the case, I am linking to several other sites for this post and they are listed at the bottom.......please be sure to check them out! :)

As many of you know I'm hooked on Scrapbooking.............

I've gotten several e-mails lately asking when I was going to post more of my scrapbook pages so I've decided to feature pages from a spur-of-the-moment picnic we had a short while back. Here in the desert there are virtually no picnics after Memorial Day or then again before Labor Day, primarily because of the heat. That's my world. Now picnics and BBQ's around backyard pools are an entirely different story......here in Phoenix people live in their pools all summer. No, the kind of picnics I'm talking about are the" picnics- in- the- park" type of meal. Some years you can't even be sure it will still be cool enough by Memorial Day. Fortunately, in this particular year it was still relatively cool, and when we realized this we headed to Cortez Park at the last minute with a few friends.

As I've said before I now do digital scrapbooking exclusively. While I loved doing it the paper and paste way I found that with the volume of photos I want to scrap it was so time consuming that I would never stay caught up. I scrap chronologically with a scrapbook for every year. I keep each page fairly simple by arranging the photos with whatever clipart strikes my fancy at the time. I don't use this many "talk bubbles" every time but in this particular layout I wanted to use humorous conversation to move the story along.

We had a lot of fun with this insanely large frisby. None of us were used to doing this anymore so it was quite comical in itself.......a fact that was not lost on our teenagers!

You see? Teenagers.....gotta love 'em.

I create the layouts using Photo Shop, print each one out on my regular printer as an 8x8

page, then add to my 8 x 8 sized scrapbook. I also love the fact that I can make CDs of each years albums and keep them in a safe place as a back up "just in case".

The end of a long day......time for a nice siesta under the trees.

I'm leaving you today with a recipe that I took to that impromptu picnic that day...... Janie's Baked Beans. Now these beans are quick,easy, and definitely not baked. They can be prepared on top of the stove or in an electric skillet with not much effort. You can serve them warm, but I much prefer them cold. It's a good idea if you're taking them somewhere other than your own backyard that you chill them first, put in a plastic container and pack in your ice chest. These go so well with any kind of outdoor meal. Yummy and foolproof.

Janie's Quick Baked Beans

I call them this because this started out as

my baby sister's recipe a long time ago....

then I took it over :)

Ingredients:

4 slices bacon, diced

1 chopped onion

1/2 bell pepper, diced

I can pork and beans (31 oz)

3 Tbs dark mollasses

1/2 cup brown sugar

2 tsp prepared mustard

1/2 tsp tabasco

1/3 cup Ketchup

2 Tbsp Worcester Sauce

In electric skillet or large frying pan saute first 3 ingredients until they are tender. Mix other ingredients in, cooking over low heat. Simmer until well seasoned. Serves 6.........but I often double, triple, or even quadruple this recipe for a large crowd. It is very forgiving......you can experiment with each of the ingredients until you get it just the way you like it.

Enjoy!

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Am I Cool or What? Part II

If you're not an early riser you probably shouldn't plant a garden where the summers are this hot. By early rising I mean about 5 am . This shot was taken at around 5:15 this morning. Not that it's easy. Not that it's fun. It's just that if you enjoy being outdoors, gardening, walking, running (a nod here to my son and daughter-in-law the marathon runners), or if you like having your devotions and/or breakfast outdoors, this is the only way to do it.

Don't hate me but I've always loved being up early.........everything is so fresh, so new-looking, and most importantly it's still so cool!

There's not an awful lot going on in my garden this time of year. Zuchinni is going crazy because it loves the heat, but everything else is to put it mildly, "languishing" , much like the proverbial Southern belle. I don't know why I even bother to plant anything in pots because it is so much work to keep them watered and shaded. My "Garden Guy" book is telling me its time to plant pumpkins for a fall harvest. I've always meant to......it's such a nice vision in the middle of July to see a lovely autumn garden overflowing with pumpkins! I have this vision every year, but so far I've never done anything about it........maybe I will this year......then again maybe I won't........it's just so hot!.

I'm alway grateful for my bouganvilla plants though.......they provide some of the few spots of color right now. Oh if everything were this easy.

The Pool Now when you have a pool you pretty much live in it all summer! Here I've pulled a couple of scrapbook pages from my archives.........

As I've said before, I like to keep my scrapbooking pages simple because I like the emphasis to be on the pictures.......add a few captions, a little humor......and you have a "cool" memory.

Night swimming can be a lot of fun too, with the added bonus that you'll sleep like a baby! On this page we had just gotten back from vacation and Christopher had some friends stay over that night. Always a full house in the summer.





 BONUS PHOTO!

Now, Joan, forgive me for putting this one in......I just had to.....look at how cute Stacey was!

The Lawn

I probably water the lawn around here too much. I just love to hear it I think! So refreshing.

Then I water the lawn some more...........

Of course I'm not showing you pictures of the front lawn right now.......the automatic sprinkler we have out front just broke.....and a little while without water around here and........well you don't want to see it! If we don't get it fixed soon I'll just have to resort to dragging the backyard hoses out front. Like I said, you don't want to see it. In the backyard it's different though. I have another dilemma. It's too hot for any of us to mow! Good excuse, huh? Yeah, I thought so.

Think about this though. Some days, when the sun is about to go down, if I'm lucky, it's cool enough to go outside, take a cool drink, and tackle that summer reading list. I love the sound of a summer reading list, don't you? Even if there's never enough time to finishing reading everything it's just fun to have one.





The Mountains Finally, if all else fails in the "keeping cool" department, we just might take off for the mountains............

................find a cool stream

...............and stick our toes in! Ahhh........

Keeping it cool.............

Take some time to go over to see Susan at Southern Daydreamer to read about lots of other outdoor adventures.

And for beautiful water photographs join them here!

More Blue Scrappin"

Since I got so many positive responses to last Monday's post, and requests to see more of my scrapbook pages , I thought I'd show a few more "blue" pages today.

Every year on the fourth of July we have a pool party, or go on a picnic, or do something that generally involves large crowds and lots of fireworks. Last year, 2008, was a little different. We wound up taking a long drive in the country, stopping by our favorite little General Store for lunch, and then.........well the pages tell the rest of the story......................

and then then rains came....................

(doesn't that sound like a great line from an old dramatic Hollywood epic?)

To see my Scrapbook pages from last Monday's post go HERE.

To check out other Blue Monday posts at Sally's you can go HERE.

February in Blue

It's already Blue Monday again. Sally is hosting this event so be sure to go on over to her place and check out all the other blue posts for today!

I guess you could call me an avid Scrapbooker. I don't think you would consider me a fancy scrapbooker though......I like to keep things fairly simple.....simple is good and is definitely a timesaver when you have as many photos as I do to scrap! I have a scrapbook for every year I have been married (since 1970, you do the math). I have to pause here and remind everyone that I was married as a mere infant! :-) Seriously I do have that many and I have grandiose dreams of creating a scrapbook about my life and Jim's life growing up....year by year since we are the same age.......showing what was going on with us at the same time even though we were coasts apart. So far that one is just in the "someday" stage.

Now to the reason I'm talking about scrapbooking on a Blue Monday! I scrapbook chronologically, month by month. The other day while showing a friend something from my 2005 album, I noticed that in the month of February over half of the 25 pages for that month were done in blue......so being the sharp one that I am I thought of a post for Blue Monday.

In 2005 I switched to digital photography and also to digital scrapbooking.....which proved to be both a time and a space saver for me.

Here are a few of the pages from that year.

The winter of 2005 in Phoenix was an unusually wet one. None of us complained, we just enjoyed the welcome desert rains. This first page shows photos I took while we were out, just hours after I bought my camera. I used the blue in particular to try to capture the feeling of those lovely afternoons that February.

By the way......it's true....I am married to a ham.

Since I consider these "family" scrapbooks, I always refer to Jim as Dad and myself as Mom, even though in real life we never call each other that. Pet peeve of mine when couples seem to have forgotten one another's names!

Two of our grandaughters and a day at Cortez Park.

Like father, like son.....Christopher has the same ham in him. Really, they both

humor me....... a lot!

We were all pretty wet by the end of the afternoon so it was a good thing we had a warm cozy fire, dry clothes, and warm cups of hot chocolate to go home to.

Here's another page done in blue...a special day in my Grandson's little life.

We had just enough of that famous Phoenix warmth to keep us from actually

getting cold! There were some beautiful sunny days too where we took advantage

and worked on some remodeling projects.......we finally replaced the arched nursery window we had put in when Christopher was just a baby.....replaced it with a larger one to let in lots of light into the newly enlarged family room.

Of course I couldn't leave out the page about our little brother-sister duo....

And finally........

.......... the last page of February for that year was a beautiful double rainbow that appeared across the field from our home. It was absolutely breathtaking. The month of March proved to be much sunnier and lovely in its on right.......but that February brings back special memories.....and I'm glad I have the photos to help me remember that February in blue.