Monthly Archives: January 2013

Liebster Award for TellingFamilyTales – Part 2b

Posted on by
Liebster-Blog-Award

Liebster-Blog-Award (Photo credit: dont ✗ kaysiao)

I’m finally getting to the next step in the requirements for my Liebster nomination. On this step I have to come up with 11 questions to ask those that I nominate for a Liebster. So here goes.

  1. What is a favorite story from your childhood?
  2. What is your favorite toy from childhood?
  3. What is your favorite toy now?
  4. Tell us about a favorite family tradition.
  5. What is your favorite thing to eat?
  6. Which do you like best, dark, milk or white chocolate?
  7. What is your favorite color?
  8. If you had an extra $1,000,000 what would you do with it?
  9. Where would you go for a dream vacation?
  10. Name five things in arms reach.
  11. What is your favorite color?

That wasn’t quiet as painful as I thought it might be. The next step, linking 11 blogs to nominate is going to take some work. I’ve not spent much time yet checking out other blogs. Now I’ll have to do it and that will be a good thing.

 

Shutterfly Booked – Arrived

Posted on by

There was a bright orange box sitting by my front door today. It was from Shutterfly. It is always fun to have a book arrive and get to see the hard copy of what I created on the computer. I’m happy with the results. Since it is 8″ x 8″ inches it is bigger than Blurb‘s 7″ x 7″ book that is a favorite of mine. Another difference is the cover is glosses while the Blurb cover has a matte finish. I tend to lean to the matte but there isn’t anything wrong with the glossy. Overall the Shutterfly book seems to be of a good quality. So if having complete control of you design isn’t something you care about Shutterfly seems to be a good choice. But I’ll be sticking with Blurb and their PDF to book workflow because I didn’t like not having the control that I’m use to having when doing a Shutterfly book. I will keep them in mind for other projects though.

Candy Class at the Gale Center

Posted on by

If you have followed my blog for a while you might remember when I did this class last year. This year it was much smoother. I planned a project that was much more adaptable different ages and that helped a lot. We had more than 50 people tonight. It is fun to see all the different ways they designed their project. The main project was to cover an initial with candy but since there wasn’t any registration ahead, we had some other shapes if we didn’t have enough of the right letters. I also like exposing new people to the possibilities of creating beautiful things with candy. There is something fun and happy about anything made of candy. Maybe that is why I like it so much.

20 Questions – Favorite Things Book

Posted on by

http://www.blurb.com/books/3310398?ce=blurb_ew&utm_source=widget

20 Questions

I found this simple little book today. I so love this idea. It is so simple but gives such an interesting snap shot of growing up. It is just a list of questions about a child’s favorite things to be answered each year from age three to eighteen. Here is how the author, Nicole Reaves, describes her book.

Capture memories from your little ones childhood with this birthday interview book. Here is how it works :

Every year, on or around your child’s birthday, you ask the same 20 questions listed within the pages of the book and fill in their answers. Questions like : What is your favorite color? What is your favorite song? Then, add a photo of the child on the opposite page. Easy, right? Repeat next year and for the next 14 years. 16 years in all.

Think of how fun it will be to look through this memory book in your child’s teenage and young adult years! See how much they changed from year to year. When it’s full, keep it for yourself, or give it to the interviewee.

This book was designed to be a fun way to record and remember simple memories from the childhood of your kids, grand kids, nieces, nephews, godchildren, or any little one in your life.

20 Questions (Pink)

My Joy Jar

Posted on by

P1040284

I had so much fun doing something every week last year for my 50th birthday that I decided I wanted to something this year but of a different sort. I think the seed got planted when I was doing research for Gift Idea #49 – Memory Jar. One of the ideas was to put slips of paper in a jar as things you want to remember happen each day. The next piece came when I was listening to a talk by Dieter Uchtdorf called “Of Regrets and Resolutions”  One of the things he suggests we decide our own happiness. And I believe he is right. I think these two ideas combined somewhere in my brain and the “Joy Jar” was born.

I took an old canning jar that I really like and added some ribbon and tags in the happy color, yellow. I also collected a bunch of yellow tags and pieces of card stock to write my joyful moments on. My plan is to post a list of my Joy Jar moments each week (hopefully on Saturdays) for the rest of the year. So here goes my first list:

  • bright sunshine
  • Yakira is in phase 6
  • seeing Zodaic and Kai romping through the snow in the backyard
  • Bill and Zodiac playing
  • taste of good ice cream
  • how good heat feels after being outside on a cold day
  • eating pomelo
  • Zodiac’s cute little face
  • 99 countries visited my blog in 2012
  • a brand new year (2013)
  • eating Lindor chocolates
  • visual image of Lotus (a puppy in training) wearing ankle socks in pink and yellow because his raiser thinks his feet are cold
  • Zodiac’s joy
  • aurora borealis
  • thinking of our trip to Alaska
  • homemade pizza
  • being back inside our warm house
  • cuddling with our cat, Gandy
  • Tillamook yogurt for $.59 each
  • seeing Zodiac and Gandy looking out the window together, Gandy in his tower and Zodiac with his front feet on the bottom part of the tower and his body underneath.

I had fun doing this. I’m looking forward to the coming weeks. What has brought you joy this past week?

 

 

 

This Week’s Pupdate

Posted on by

Yakira – photo by Lisa Thompson

I was so happy to see the number 6 by Yakira’s name on this week’s phase report. She made it through the holidays without missing a beat. On not so good news the other puppy from our club that was in for training has dropped off the report so he must have been career changed this week. I’m always sad when I puppy doesn’t make. They always have a good life ahead of them but it is still disappointing when they don’t have what it takes to be a guide dog.

On the home front Zodiac is doing really well. Thursday was his 10 month birthday. He is starting show more and more maturity. Just in time for a new puppy to join the family. We will probably find out when in the next week.Zodiac really enjoyed having Kai with us for a few days. He was better than I expected. Kai is growing up nicely.

Zodaic in front of the “official” puppy portrait wall

I finally got Yakira’s official portrait back from Pixels. The wall has seems kind of bare the last few weeks. I got it done before Christmas but the exposure needed to be tweaked because the lighting on Yakira wasn’t as bright as on the other puppies and she just looked like a black blob. They redid it for me but I told them I didn’t need it before Christmas. I still remember many years ago when we I was a picture framer and how crazy things got during the Christmas season.

Liebster Award for TellingFamilyTales – Part 2a

Posted on by
Liebster-Blog-Award

Liebster-Blog-Award (Photo credit: dont ✗ kaysiao)

So for this part of fulfilling the requirements for a Liebster Award I will be answering the questions that my nominator (Mom of  Maybe someone should write that down. . . ) put together. Here goes:

1.  If I weren’t blogging about this stuff I would be…

. . . lets see, probably taking a nap.

2.  Who are you named after?

family tradition says that I’m named after my dad (Ray) and my uncle (Lynn).

3. I would like my epitaph to read as follows:

that I made the world a better place because of how I lived my life.

4.  Favorite quote:

this is a tough one, I’m not sure if I have a favorite quote. There are lots of sayings that I really like but not sure that I can attribute them to a single person. My current favorite that I’m trying to live each day is “Find Wonder & Delight”

5.  Something I will never understand is…(no fair using “Math” I’ve had a lock on that answer for years)

. . . how anyone can be mean to a puppy.

6.  If  I could run around all day everyday, dressed any way that I pleased I would wear:

a comfy pair of jeans and a big sloppy sweatshirt.

7.  What class do you wish you had paid more attention to in school?

I can’t remember ever thinking that. Maybe I just didn’t pay enough attentions to even know that I was missing out on learning something. I sometime wish that I was better at learning languages but I’m not sure that paying more attention in class would change that.

8.  Do you write full-time?

I’m not sure I even write part-time. I don’t consider myself a writer. I only do it because there isn’t a choice.

9.  What’s your dream job

playing around with new and creative projects and getting paid for it.

10. Where is your dream Writer’s Corner?

my dream (non)writer’s corner would be a comfy window seat with just the right amount of sunlight and gorgeous views of mountains and/or the ocean and/or a pasture with horses grazing.

11.  What’s the craziest thing you have ever learned about your family?

That years ago it wasn’t uncommon to reuse the name of a child that died young. It seems crazy to me to think of more than one child with the same name.

Now I can check one more thing of my to do list. The second part of this requirement will be coming soon. With any luck, tomorrow.

Liebster Award for TellingFamilyTales – Part 1

Posted on by
Liebster-Blog-Award

Liebster-Blog-Award (Photo credit: dont ✗ kaysiao)

Last month Mom (also know as Kassie) of Maybe someone should write that down. . . nominated this blog for a Liebster Award. Not unsurprisingly I didn’t have a clue what a Liebster was so I had to look it up. Liebster is a German word meaning dearest. I’m thinking it should be renamed to the Yakira award because Yakira is a Hebrew name that also means dear or precious. Anyway I’m getting sidetrack. The basic idea behind the Liebster is to promote small but hopefully up and coming blogs. To accept this award there are four requirements.

  1. post 11 things about myself
  2. answer the questions the nominator made up and create 11 questions for the blogs that I will nominate for a Liebster
  3. link the 11 blogs I choose to nominate
  4. go and tell the nominees that they have been nominated

I’m going to tackle this task list in four parts so stay tuned for me to fulfill all the requirements. I’d like to procrastinate posting 11 things about myself but it doesn’t make much sense to my semi-orderly mind to go out of the order above, so here goes.

  1. I was born in Hawaii (yes, I’m a Navy brat)
  2. I’m the youngest in my family (I have two older sisters)
  3. I’m much taller than average (over 6 feet)
  4. I love all flavors of ice cream (except maple nut – it’s a childhood thing)
  5. growing up my dad told us that we were tall because we ate spaghetti
  6. I played the flute in Jr. High
  7. I won the gold medal in high jump at the state track meet when I was in high school
  8. my basketball team went undefeated my senior year of high school
  9. Starbursts and Skittles are my favorite candies
  10. I once did a multimedia (slide show) project in college that was just photos of hundreds of Skittles
  11. I used to own a custom picture framing shop with my sister

I’m so glad I survived that step. It wasn’t nearly as painful as I imagined. Check back tomorrow for the next task, answering Mom’s 11 questions.

2012 in Review – Blog Stats

Posted on by

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for my blog. Having been blogging here for a good chunk of the year I found all this stuff interesting. My favorite stat is that people from 99 different countries came to my blog last year. Wow! The power of the internet to connect people from all over the world is way cool. 99 different countries to my tiny little blog. I’m looking forward to growing in 2013 and lots of new blogging adventures.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 6,700 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 11 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.