Silent Sunday

Silent Sunday

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Silent Sunday

What is Silent Sunday? Click the badge to find out.

Want to join the fun and see more Silent Sundays? Here's the linky:

Love All Blogs

Silent Sunday

What is Silent Sunday? Click the badge to find out.

Want to join the fun and see more Silent Sundays? Here's the linky:

Love All Blogs

It's Almost NaNoWriMo Time

The past two years I have been able to donate to the OLL, and have felt good about my helping bring the joy of creative expression through the written word to 100's of 1000's of people. This year, I am unable to find the money to donate to such a worthy cause. Our budget just doesn't have the room. That's where you come in. You can donate to the OLL for me. And, as an added bonus, you can encourage, harass, and poke me with a stick if I start to fall behind, since you are sponsoring me and my novel. Now doesn't that sound like fun?

Second Sneak Peek at My Memories

Hmmm...Well I hope I'll be able to get this up before midnight. I've been having some internet connectivity issues and I'm not sure how long the connection will hold for.

As promised yesterday, here is a page I made all by myself using the My Memories Suite Digital Scrapbooking Software. This was blank, and I filled it in with everything you see.

Doing it this way was much more difficult. There were so many options it was hard to chose, and it was hard to make it look just the way I wanted. This one page took longer than the four I did yesterday, and I'm still not 100% happy with it.

Tomorrow, I'll tackle the other features offered by the software, and of course, Saturday is the big reveal on the review and the giveaway.

http://www.mymemories.com/

Sneak Peek at My Memories

Well, here we are at Wednesday already. I thought I'd give you all a sneak peek at what I've been doing.

These four pages were made using My Memories template layouts. Everything was already on the page, all I had to do was drag and drop the pictures into the spaces provided and add any text I wanted.

There was a small learning curve, but once I figured out what I was doing, it was pretty easy.

Tomorrow, I'll post some pages that I made all by myself without a template.

Stay tuned for more feature previews, and a review with giveaway on Saturday!

http://www.mymemories.com/

A Foray Into Reviewing

Recently I was contacted by My Memories to test out their software and write a review on here. I was shocked to say the least. Someone out there is actually looking at my blog! So after thinking about it for a few days, I decided to give it a try.

I will be playing with and reviewing photo editing software made by My Memories. The program can do so much more though. According to the site I can make videos and scrapbook pages too.

As a bonus for my readers, My Memories is also allowing me to give one copy away to a lucky reader and they are also offering a coupon for $10 off a purchase of the software at their online store. Simply copy and paste this code: STMMMS11009 into your cart at check-out.

I've downloaded the software and will take it for a test drive this week, then I'll post my review on Saturday so you can see how hard I was working all week.

In the meantime, go check out My Memories (www.mymemories.com) and take a look at all they have to offer.

Silent Sunday

What is Silent Sunday? Click the badge to find out and see more Silent Sundays.

Silent Sunday

What is Silent Sunday? Click the badge to find out and see more Silent Sundays.

Silent Sunday

What is Silent Sunday? Click the badge to find out and see more Silent Sundays.

Silent Sunday

What is Silent Sunday? Click the badge to find out and see more Silent Sundays.

Too Messy

I've found a new blog, and I'm in love. Aiming Low: Perfectly Mediocre is a site with guest bloggers, and they are normal everyday people who aren't perfect, and don't claim to be. It's AWESOME!! I don't feel crappy about myself after I've read a post there. If anything, I think, "Wow, I'm so glad I'm not the only one." Then I heave a great sigh of relief, and go back to my never ending, seemingly always growing list of chores.

Right now, they have a challenge running, Capture It-Too Messy. Basically, they want to see your mess. For me,  this was hard. Not because I didn't want to share, but because I couldn't decide which cluttered surface, or pile 'o junk to take a picture of.

I settled on The Angry Midget's room.

Play is hard work, but cleaning is "too hard".

So, that's my submission for the challenge. It's going from the 20-27th of May, so if you'd like to share your mess, hop on over to Aiming Low, and add your image to the linky. 

Silent Sunday

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Easter Past

Easter.

As a kid, Easter was a mixed bag holiday for me. It was great because we got a basket full of toys, jelly beans, bunnies made of creamy milk chocolate, and crosses made of smooth white chocolate. But then there was the trip to Grandma's house which meant church on Sunday.

 My brothers and I would ride in the back of our parents station wagon two hours down the interstate to my grandma's house. We were supposed to sleep, but I loved to lay on my back and look out the window at all the stars. There were always so many more on the road to Grandma's than in our back yard.

We would arrive late on Friday, play all day Saturday, color a million eggs Saturday night, then go to bed with images of bunnies and chicks dancing in our heads.

Sunday morning we would all get up early, put on our new church clothes and stiff dress shoes, and walk across the street to church. Easter church always seemed to be the longest church service ever.

First there was Sunday school, which was actually pretty fun. There was singing and playing, and coloring, and story telling, but then it was time to go sit and listen to the pastor.

The benches were hard, the speeches were boring, the pauses were long and in weird spots. He shouted random words - and they were never funny words.

But worst of all, we all knew that back home hidden in the house somewhere was a huge basket filled with sugary goodness just waiting for us to find it. That basket was the only thing that kept us from disintegrating into wild heathens. We knew we had to behave if we wanted to find that basket. It was our light at the end of the church tunnel.

Finally, the cue to rise for the final prayer would be given. We would stand there, me, my two brothers, and our two cousins, all in a row, twitching and fidgeting. Each of us planning our hunting strategy, wanting to be the first to find our basket. We would impatiently file slowly out of the worship area, down the ramp to the lobby where we would have to wait again for the grown-ups to chat and mingle as they filed out the doors. There were always the older ladies, friends of our grandma, who would fawn over us and how big we had gotten from the year before, how precious we looked in our dresses and suits. Then we were at the door, shaking hands with the pastor, wishing him a happy Easter, barely maintaining our civility. Then we were out the door and on the sidewalk, church and any semblance of decorum behind us as we ran full speed toward the street and grandma's house beyond. We knew enough to stop at the street, link hands, and look both ways before we darted out but as soon as we hit the gravel on the other side of the pavement, it was a free for all.

We would burst through the door, pausing only long enough to throw off our jackets if it was a cold year, then the hunt was on.

Grandma's house had all kinds of nooks and crannies for the Easter Bunny to stash a basket. We had an unspoken rule between the five of us, if we found someone else's basket, we didn't say anything, not wanting to ruin the fun for them. Once all the baskets were found, there was the group picture. The successful hunters.

I can still remember the smells and sounds even though it's been more than 20 years since my last Easter at grandma's house. Ham and scalloped potatoes in the oven, the grown-ups in the kitchen talking, laughing, the crinkle of Easter grass in the baskets as we rooted for jelly beans and robins eggs that sifted to the bottom, the dog's nails on the linoleum floor as she danced from one kid to the next waiting for her opportunity to snatch a dropped candy.

That was when life was so easy. We didn't know it then, but it was.