Day 15: Afinado!

I spent all morning painting the bathroom with its second coat. I am so exhausted I am going to sit here in my chair for hours upon hours and not do a thing. And I'm pretty sure I'm going to feel good about it. Picture tomorrow.

Day 14: The Color Purple

Today has been a long day but it seriously flew by.

Adam and I took a walk with Coco down the street to Lake Michigan. It was beautiful to see the beach so close to our home.


It was a cloudy day but a whole 50 degrees out. Beautiful!


180 degrees from the above shot - right over that hill is the street we live on.


Coco running around!


When we came back I watched two tutorials on stamping from my favorite scrapbooking site Two Peas in a Bucket. You can view the free tutorials here. I love learning new ways to use what I already have. I learned of a new tool that she used and next scrapbooking shopping trip I plan to get it!

Then we spent $600. All on stuff we needed for the house. A lawn mower, a hose, a sprinkler, a ladder, deck stain stuff, an extension cord, paint for inside, a large push broom... things like that. So it added up fast. As soon as we got home I started painting the bathroom. Three hours later and 20 minutes ago, I had this masterpiece:



It still needs another coat or two but Adam and I think it looks so much better than before! I celebrated with a delicious Not-Hostess-But-Store-Brand Cupcake:


Off to make Adam give me a back rub (or at least crack my back) and then bed.

Day 13: Glee

I meant to post on Day 12 and Day 13, I really did. I just got into a mini slump and let it slide. Yesterday I did nothing useful. I watched 9 episodes of Glee. That's it. And I ate a LOT of junk food.

Day 12: Addictions

I have an addictive personality. Anyone that knows me can clearly see that. This has been a bad and a good thing. It's good when it comes to games because that means Adam has someone to play games with all night long. It's good and bad when it comes to scrapbooking... good because it gives me a creative release but bad because it's so expensive.

Last night when I couldn't sleep I started to think about scrapbooking and what embellishments would look good with what wedding photos I have yet to scrap. In one project I envisioned using baker's twine, which looks something like this:


And I thought I could use a work-around with plain white and red sewing strings to make my own homemade twine. Yeah, it didn't really work out. I took over two hours to try to justify buying some for my project and in the end the twine won.

I worked on a few layouts today and have some good basics down:



And I also started to make some embellishments for a new layout:


My addictive personality is also bad when it comes to food. I eat like I don't care about my weight. But I do. I used to be a smoker until I moved to Wisconsin to be with Adam. He helped me ween myself off so I could quit. Eating healthy like I did when I weighed 50 pounds lighter is harder than quitting smoking. I've struggled with my weight since my teenage years. I would work out religiously - doing a minimum of 500 crunches a day. Shortly after high school I slowly gained about 60 pounds and wasn't able to lose it until my first marriage ended. Since Adam and I's wedding in July I've gained back the 50 pounds I lost two years ago. It's been getting me down a lot recently and I've been trying to make myself feel better by eating copious amounts of Starbursts. Oh, the irony.

**I wrote this post on the day I was supposed to post it, on 4/7. It's now 4/9 at 9:30 pm and I cannot remember where I was going with this last paragraph. I'll leave it as is and maybe in a future post I'll continue my train of thought.**

Day 11: Craftilicious

I've been in the zone all afternoon. I tried to continue on Cari's wedding card but I just set it aside. I'm at a road block and I need to step away from the project for at least a few hours. I tried to make a scrapbook page but I had so much shizz on my desk that I was just getting frustrated. I saw a bunch of boxes in the corned and I started organizing.




Viola! (is that how you spell it?) A clean scrapbook room!



What, you don't think this is clean? HA! For me this is squeaky clean for my crafting area!

In my organizing/cleaning I saw heaps of loose ribbon and I remembered something I saw on one of my favorite sites, Damask Love. You can read about her much more creative project here. I did my own cheapo version and I'm pretty dang proud of it.



I started with part of the top of a box that I cut off and used my handy X-ACTO knife to cut notches on the side.







I'm waiting to get a 10% off coupon for Lowe's before I get the paint. Paint is expensive and adds up! Once this room is painted I plan to get the room a lot more organized and tidy.

I DID do some actual crafting today. I scrapped the epic pictures of Erin rocking out hard core.


I will end with my stapler:

Day 10: Vigorous Volunteering

I started off today by waking up to soothing ocean sounds from my alarm clock. Bright and early at 7:30 AM. I volunteered all morning for an organization called Americore. They basically go to schools and have events to prevent kids from doing drugs, smoking, drinking and having sex. I did some pretty menial tasks. They asked if I wanted to come back. I took her card... I'm not sure yet. I wanted to see where my other volunteering opportunities would take me and to see if I felt like I did something worthwhile with my time. In the afternoon I met with a lady who can pair me up with some 50 different non-profit organizations in the county. She has a ton of opportunities and is going to refer me out to like 6 organizations.

As far as creativity went today - I got in "The Zone." I say that to Adam whenever I kinda don't want to be bothered or at least interrupted by other projects because I'm really into what I'm doing. This usually refers to scrapbooking but can also come in handy when I need to clean. Or do laundry. Or really anything. I started a wedding card for my really great friend Cari that's getting married on May 6th. Since I lost my job I can no longer afford the plane ticket out there. Super sad frown. I'm not going to show you the card because I'm not sure I like where it's going, but I can show you some ideas:


See that flower!? In the center with the little circles punched around the edges!? I MADE THAT SHIZZ! I learned from this video on YouTube. I like her accent.

I also was on a mission to make cinnamon roll icing like from Cinnabon or Pillsbury. The recipe I had was dull/bland. And I DID IT. My Rhode's Rolls Cinnamon Rolls (say that 3 times fast) turned out pretty good. It was a little doughy but I kind of like them that way.


Nomnomnom!

I also took some pictures of Coco. None of which turned out well:



Tomorrow: more "Zone"-ness and fold the damn laundry! That shizz has been laying there for two weeks! GAH!

Day 9: Productive Day

I love productive days. Makes me feel a sense of accomplishment. It's like me telling myself "It's ok you don't have a job. You can still make good use of your time even though you're not earning money for it."

I made a ton of phone calls which included a phone interview for a position I applied for several weeks ago that I honestly do not want (Customer Service position).

I also got to venture inside Manitowoc County Jail. For my "Big" background check, Utah requires fingerprinting, and they do that for free at the jail. It smelled weird and the lights were funky and made me dizzy. The non-police people were like something out of a Hollywood movie. Creepy. Saw an inmate in the orange jumpsuit. Just an odd event of the day.

Tonight I decided that it's a great time to paint. Our house is spectacular and has some fabulous paint colors except in two rooms. The bathroom has the 90s sponge paint in odd hues of blue and my scrapbooking/workout room is bright-arse green. With my phone interview today it got me thinking that I really cannot afford to procrastinate on some projects I decided I wanted to do when I became unemployed. Painting is one of those projects.

I stopped by Lowe's before they closed and found a wonderfully knowledgeable lady in painting to help me. I got some pint-sized paint samples and I put a coat on. I'll put another coat on tomorrow and I want to see in daylight to see if I like them still.


Accent wall: red(ish). Greyish brown on other walls.



Purple in the bathroom. A dark color to contrast with an overload of white.

Day 8: Lazy

Sundays are great days. Great days to do literally nothing.

A few days ago Adam told me he wanted homemade pizza for dinner. Ok, that's super easy. I just have to take a handful of Rhode's Rolls and set them out the counter in the morning so they can de-thaw and rise during the work day. Only problem is that my huge bag of rolls were all stuck together and I couldn't take just a few rolls out. I had to de-thaw the entire 70-some rolls. That's a lot of rolls for 2 small-ish people.

The pizza turned out ok. Then I had to make pizza today too. Even yet I had a ton of rising dough that was about to explode out the package in my refrigerator.

I improvised. I made some cinnamon rolls and a dozen extra-hugely-ginormous garlic rolls. We have so much bread I don't know what to do with it all. I've eaten two rolls and we haven't even touched the cinnamon rolls yet. I didn't have any milk so I couldn't put any glaze over the top when they came out of the oven. And I'm still not even sure that they turned out ok - I haven't tried making cinnamon rolls from Rhode's Rolls before. That's on my to-do list on Tuesday.

As for my picture today, I tried to capture a precious moment but the camera turning on ruined it. I tried to take a cute picture of the Coco snuggled in Adam's lap while he was playing Pokemon on his DS.




The whole evening was spent at Adam's parent's house watching TV. That's a treat for us since we don't have cable/dish. I found a new show that I love: Holmes on Homes. Or Holmes Inspection. Something like that. I just flat out love HGTV.

We ended the night with a new movie, The Kids Are All Right. Adam played his Pokemon game throughout the movie. It's a super awkward movie. I noticed Jerrod (Adam's brother) and I looked away at the same times throughout the movie. At least it wasn't as bad as The Hours. That movie will go down in time as the worst movie I have ever picked.

Day 7: Losing Streak

I know this 365 Project is starting off a little weird with not actual photos, but I promise it will get better and more interesting!

Today Adam and I slept in until like 1. And yes, we know that's sad. Then literally, all day long, we played a computer game.


I wouldn't expect anyone to know what the game is, so I won't bother trying to explain the concept. Just know it's addicting. The games are played online in teams of 5 vs 5 all around the world and last anywhere from 15 minutes to 90 minutes. So that means sometimes you get people on your team that don't speak English. That makes for a really interesting game. Adam and I played this until we went to bed and lost every. single. game.

So sad. Hopefully we have more productive weekends in the future...

Day 6: Um...

Dude. I worked out. 30 whole minutes on the treadmill. 150 or something calories. I'm so proud! I'm gonna work off this weight so fast I won't even know it hit me.

I also found an awesome website. Askforit.com.

I didn't do anything interesting and it's frikken freezing outside so instead I will inspire you with a card I made last month for Adam's Dad's 50th birthday.

I wanted to make it masculine but I find that really difficult to do. I initially started to make a dark blue and orange card since he's a Bears fan, but it was turning out super tacky. I scrapped the card and started again. I started by hand cutting circles and aging them with ink.


Then die cut letters to spell out "happy birthday" and used some wood cutouts for "50" and aged them also with ink. Glued everything together.


Once I cut off the circles on the sides I was done.


The inside was a bit awkward but I didn't care, I liked it.


I find cards to be challenging - moreso than scrapbook pages. I love this lady. She makes minimalist cards and is so inspiring!