Guest Blog Post

Hey everyone!

Check out my guest blog post on Christian Web Trends!  I’m so psyched they published it!

http://blog.ourchurch.com/2013/02/28/church-websitefirst-impression-rose/

Thursday-Morning Tell-About

My Movie Queue: Hamlet, The Best Years of Our Lives, Cimarron, Wings, It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Top Gun, Bella, Stranger Than Fiction
Pages left to read in my current book: I am currently reading three different books.  I have 290 pages left in Julie and Julia, 113 in You Lost Me, and 566 in Anna Karenina
I have made: I have practiced crocheting doilies, but they have not gotten much better since the last time.
I have worked on: keeping the house clean in spite of being hurt and not feeling well
Food made: delicious skillet mac and cheese and strawberry oatmeal bars
Goals checked off: calling my mother once a week, writing a thank you note for the month.  unfortunately, I had made plans for having people over and the sister date for the month and both have fallen through from sickness, so I guess I won’t be checking those off this month since it is the last day of February
Games played: Carcassonne, hand and foot
Favorite Pinterest pin:

“Relax! I’m just kidding.”

Total Blog views since last Thursday: 158  (all time views 1,013!)
Number of snow days: 0
Movies Watched: 5: Grand Hotel, South Pacific, Shallow Hal, Pitch Perfect, Lawrence of Arabia
Books read: none finished this week
This week I love:  birthdays and the love of family and friends
This week I hate:  getting sick

Sick and tired of being sick and tired

As if I wasn’t dealing with enough already, I am now sick.  I woke up with a sore throat, which I have had for a few days, but this time I had a fever, plus nausea and I was feeling a lot worse.  So I called in to work and slept for a few more hours.  Since I still felt pretty crummy I decided to go to the doctor.  So now I know, I have strep and a sinus infection.  “….yay….”  I will be contageous until tomorrow night and will be sleeping and laying on the couch for most of the time.  I hope my parents still come over this weekend because I was really looking foward to it.

So here I go to make a baked potato, which if you did not know, is probably the best thing to eat when you are sick.  Or so I have been raised to believe.  But I’m not complaining, I do love potatoes.

For the Love of Scrapbooking

For those of you who read my angry post earlier, you know that this is take number two on this blog.  And I am sad because I know that it will not be anywhere near as good as the first one.  The first blog post, who knows where it is now, was a pure masterpiece.  It was wonderful.  Hopefully you still enjoy this, but you don’t know what you’re missing.  Anyways, here goes:
I love scrapbooking!!  The only problem is that I am always caught up!  As soon as I take some pictures, within the week I have printed them and scrapbooked them, and then I don’t have any more scrapbooking to do until something else happens.  One day I hope to have a great big room filled with scrapbooking supplies.  I have been scrapbooking since my first scrapbook in 2001.  Here is a page from that first scrapbook.

Yeah, not exactly a work of art, but it was enjoyable even when it didn’t look good.  The problem was, that I was so excited to have a scrapbook that I filled it up in one day.  So it is full of stuff that doesn’t need to be there, and everything looks bad because I didn’t wait to have the proper supplies.  I didn’t want to wait until my mom could take me to get some, I had to get it done then and there.  And you can tell by looking at it.  In the last 12 years I have worked much harder on my scrapbooks.  I have organized my photos, planned my layouts and designs.  Over the years I have managed to fill up 8 scrapbooks full of photos.  I love to get them out and look at all the pictures.  Scrapbooking is like decorating a room in your house.  You get to pick what color you want the walls, what pictures you want to put up, and what other decorations will fill the room.  And then you get to do it over and over and over again!!

I find that scrapbooking is very relaxing.  Over the years I have even researched how to make my pages better, and that has been really fun.  There is so much creativity that can go into scrapbooks.  I don’t like to just buy an album and slide my pictures into the sleeves.  Somehow it’s better to look at an actual scrapbook that I have made and see how I told the story of the pictures.  I really enjoy it.

The rest of this blog post will be me sharing some of my favorite scrapbook pages.  I hope you enjoy this little look into my scrapbooks.

This first page is from a scrapbook that I made of Adam and I growing up.  It is one of my favorites to pull out and look at.  It is fun to look at our cute pictures as little kids (and to envision what our children will look like–haha)

Awwwwwwww.  So cute, right?

These next pages are from my first serious scrapbook, where I took the time to plan out what I wanted my pages to look like.  These first pages I really like #1 because of the pictures and #2 because I thought I was brilliant by going out and getting real leaves to put in my layout.

This next page is a couple pictures that my sister and I took when she came to visit me at college.  I chose the color palette simply.  I only had two colors of paper left, and lucky for me they looked good together.  I like this page because of the depth I created by layering the pieces.  I think it helps to make it more interesting even though the stars and moon don’t exactly fit the pictures.  I am not sure what I was thinking with that.

This next page is really special to me.  When Adam and I were dating, one year before Christmas I went up to Wisconsin for a week to spend time with him and his family.  One of the days I was there we took a train into Chicago to do some shopping and see the sights.  Then, later Adam came down for New Years.  On New Years Eve we scrapbooked the pictures from our trip.  Adam came up with the design for this page.  It was fun to do some scrapbooking together.

These next few pages come from my “best” scrapbook.  This scrapbook has some of my best design and layouts.  At this time, I was subscribed to a scrapbooking magazine and I got a lot of inspiration from it.  If these pictures are too small for you to see, I think you can click on them and see them bigger.




Okay, so this is my favorite page ever!  I saw this layout in my scrapbooking magazine, and as soon as I saw it I knew I had to do it!  The layout was called “10 Things I Love About You.”  Since I was dead set on making this layout and I didn’t have any pictures that would work, I made Adam go out with me and take pictures on Spring day specifically for this scrapbook layout.  And you probably can’t tell, but there are tabs on each side.  On the backs of those Adam and I each wrote 10 things we love about the other person and I cut the page so they can be pulled out and read.

When we got married, we decided not to buy a professional album of our pictures because I knew I would enjoy a scrapbook that I made of our pictures much more, and so far I have no regrets.  Here are just a couple pages from that scrapbook:


Yay Scrapbooking!  I hope you enjoyed that look into my scrapbooks.  I certainly enjoyed making the pages and getting to show you my favorites and tell you about them.  And I am glad it finally worked.  Hopefully if you have never scrapbooked before you are at least interested now.  And if any of you love scrapbooking as much as I do, I am always looking for a scrapbooking buddy!

SOOOO ANGRY!!!!

I am so angry at WordPress right now!!!

I just spent an hour writing a wonderful post for you about scrapbooking.  The whole time it kept saving and telling me everything was fine.  Then, I hit save again!  And then I hit preview and it only showed one paragraph of my post and none of the pictures!! So I went back and it had deleted everything I had worked on except the one paragraph!!!  GRRRRR.

Well, I’m going to try it again.  If WordPress puts my work in cyber trash again I will give up and I might never blog again (that might be too rash…but I will definitely be very angry).

So please, hope with me that I get this post done, again, so that you get to enjoy it.

Stretch the Weekend

I wish that the weekend were several days longer than it actually is.  I wish that I had more time to rest and relax.  I usually have a lot to do over the weekend because it is usually the only time that I have to be productive because I am wiped out in the evenings.  That’s why the weekend needs to be longer, so that I have a couple days to be productive and also a couple days to rest and relax instead of trying to fit it all into just a few days.  Anyone with me?

Adam and I decided to celebrate my birthday on Friday because we are both busy today and won’t really get to spend any time together.  So, after work we went to Crazy Tomato for pizza.  It is one of our favorites, and it is pretty cheap.  You get an order of delicious cheesy bread just for sitting down and we got a large pizza for $11 and took three pieces of it home.  It was delicious.  Adam’s gift to me was some shopping money, so after dinner he took me shopping.  It was really fun, and I still have some money left over for some after birthday spending as well.  The only downside to the evening was that I wore these really cute shoes that pinched my toes and gave me blisters.  Adam said I was walking around the mall like someone had just chopped off one of my toes.  Then we just came home, played games, watched TV and relaxed.

Saturday morning I slept in a little longer than usual, which was good since I haven’t been getting very much sleep.  My arm was feeling good so I cleaned the kitchen and did laundry.  Now, don’t think I went crazy.  I was definitely babying my arm but was just trying to get some stuff done that I had neglected.  I watched another best picture movie, “Grand Hotel,” which I really enjoyed.  It is definitely one of my favorites.  I got all the laundry done, the whole kitchen is clean, we had chicken parmesan for dinner, we watched “South Pacific” and played some games, and I got to finish the night off by watching “Pitch Perfect”.  Yay!

Sunday we went to church, enjoyed some fellowship and potluck afterwards (and I didn’t die).  After church I did my grocery shopping, Adam preached the night service, I made some absolutely delicious macaroni and cheese, and I am so sad that I forgot to take pictures for you!  Then I made myself birthday cupcakes and we watched the Oscars.

And today is my birthday J  I have felt the love today.  Yay for another year.  I hope you all had as awesome a weekend as I did.  My only regret is that I didn’t take any pictures!

If you have noticed a lack of “crafty” posts recently, that is because I have discovered how difficult it is to craft without extra spending money, but I have some ideas and some stuff lying around, so maybe I’ll come up with something to share with you soon.

Tonight I will be working another 4 hours at the Phoneathon.  And coming soon, a blog post about my love of scrapbooking!

Oscar 2013 Contest Update

I beat my wonderful husband at our Oscar predictions game 🙂
There were 24 awards last night and I predicted 21 of them! Woot Woot.  Adam predicted 18.
How many did you get right?

My Oscar Predictions

I am so excited about the Oscars tonight!  Like I said in another post, Adam and I compete with each other each year to see who can predict the most correct.  So, here are our Oscar predictions, and I’ll let you know later who won and how many we each got right.  And don’t forget to watch the Oscars tonight 7 eastern time on ABC.

2013 oscar predictions   (lauren’s pick, adam’s pick, both)

Best Picture–Argo
*note–only three movies have ever won best picture without winning best director as well, and Ben Affleck is not nominated for Best Director
Actor in a Leading Role–Daniel Day-Lewis
Actress in a Leading Role–Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain
*note–Emmanuelle Riva and Quvenzhane Wallis (also nominated) are the youngest and oldest actresses to be nominated for best actress.
Actor in a Supporting Role–Christoph Waltz, Robert De Niro
Actress in a Supporting Role–Anne Hathaway
Animated Feature Film–Brave
Cinematography–Life of Pi
Costume Design–Anna Karenina, Les Miserables
Directing–Steven Spielberg
Documentary Feature–Searching for Sugar Man, How to Survive a Plague
Documentary Short–Inocente, Mondays at Racine
Film Editing–Argo
Foreign Language Film–Amour
Makeup and Hairstyling–The Hobbit, Hitchcock
Music-Original Score–Life of Pi, Skyfall
Music-Original Song–“Skyfall”
Production Design–Anna Karenina, Lincoln
Short Film-Animated–Paperman
Short Film-Live Action–Curfew, Death of a shadow
Sound Editing–Zero Dark Thirty, Skyfall
Sound Mixing–Les Miserables, Skyfall
Visual Effects– Life of Pi, Avengers
Writing-Adapted Screenplay–Argo
Writing-Original Screenplay–Django Unchained

So who do you think will win?

Sunday Mornings

I love Sunday mornings.  There is just something about them that makes them so peaceful.  When I was growing up Sunday mornings were always quiet and focused.  We didn’t watch TV, we listened to worshipful music while we were getting ready, and the time was devoted to preparing ourselves to go to church.

I miss these days.  Sunday mornings now have become busy and hectic.  I would like to try and get up earlier and do more preparing to go to church.  I think it would do a lot for my attitude and mindset.

I hope you have a blessed Sunday morning.

Life Update and Funny Friday

I thought I would take some time to update you on my life this morning.  I feel like I haven’t written very much this week.

1-Have have found a new website that I looovvveee!!  It is called goodreads.  It is a website where you can put in all the books you have read, rate and write reviews on them, list the books you are currently reading, and the books you want to read.  I love it.  It is pretty addicting.  And my “to-read” list is growing faster than I can keep up with it.  I added the goodreads widget to the right, so check it out.

2-In case you did not already know, I got the scholarship to attend the Religious Communicators Council annual convention free of charge April 4-6.  I am so excited!  It is going to be a great time of networking and learning.

3-I went to the doctor yesterday about my shoulder.  It turns out they did find tearing in my MRI.  It is not in the labrum, which I do not know if that is good news or bad news, but it is in my bicep tendon.  And the only way to fix this is to have surgery.  There are temporary things they can do to relieve the pain, but nothing will fix it but surgery.  After surgery I will need to be in a sling for 6 weeks and then do 6-8 weeks of physical therapy.  We don’t know when the surgery will be yet, but we need to save some money before it can happen.  Also, since I need to be able to drive to Indianapolis for the convention in April and cannot do that for 6 weeks after surgery, the surgery will probably have to be after the convention in April, so my guess is that it will be sometime in April.  Which is good because hopefully we can have a good chunk saved by then.

4.  I have been dreaming of babies all week!  It has been so crazy!  I have been finding a lot of cute baby stuff on Pinterest for whenever Adam and I decide to embark on that adventure, so maybe it has gone to my head…

5.  I have been working the Emmanuel Phoneathon for a few nights this week and will be doing it a couple nights next week.  It has been lots of hours of calling, many hang-ups, but still good conversations and donations.  It has been a good experience so far.

6.  This is going to be the best weekend ever!  I get to have a birthday celebration with my husband and the Oscars are on Sunday!  Yay!  And then either Thursday or Friday of next week my parents are coming down for my sister’s opera and to celebrate my birthday.  I am excited to spend some time with them, and they are bringing us some furniture that I’m really pumped about!  It’s also potluck Sunday at church, which is a lot of fun fellowship, but also a little stressful for me, so let’s hope that goes well.

7. Random fact:  I have been seriously craving pizza all week and I’m hoping that this weekend, with some birthday money, I will be able to enjoy some warm, cheesy, yummy pizza.  Hmm…I wish I was close enough that Joe Bologna’s would deliver to me!

And now, Funny Friday:
Hope that made your friday even better!! I know it did for me 🙂