MOTS is not that way. She loves to bring things she sees on Pinterest to life. And if she keeps cooking, I will continue to encourage this habit!

She found this recipe on Pinterest and followed the link back to SkinnyTaste to grab the recipe. She made me a list of ingredients to pick up at the store (after checking to see what we already had, of course) and then made dinner. And provided everyone with the nutrition information. Nice.

Hers turned out pretty well.

Sorry for the lack of composition and poor quality. I am no food blogger. And I was trying to hold off the hungry family long enough to get a quick phone picture! It sure was tasty. I made her promise to make this again. It was way more filling than our usual spaghetti and didn’t seem to be any more labor intensive either. Of course, I won’t complain about a night off from cooking either!

So, I am the queen of procrastination. Seriously. I put the PRO in procrastinate.

In fact, I was telling Party Boy the other day about how I talk myself out of working out. I’ve been running off and on since October and I still haven’t crossed the line of looking forward to running. I think all those runner that pretend to love it are either crazy from over exposure to endorphins are just plain lying to my face. Anyway, I was saying that I can find any reason not to run.

“Oh, I have some where to be in 12 hours. Better not try to workout now.” Because you know, 30 minutes to run and another 30 minutes to shower and get dressed will easily fill a 12 hour day.

“Darnitall, all of my running shorts are in that laundry basket over there and I don’t feel like folding clothes to find them. Oh well.” Laundry is my kryptonite.

“Aw, I forgot to charge my phone last night and it only has 78% of its battery left. Bummer. No run today.”  Nevermind that 78% battery life would last for probably an ultra-marathon of 30+ miles.

This is a truthful representation of my aversion to working out.

Add to that my love for food? And yeah, the scale isn’t budging.

So, what’s a girl who hates working out to do? Do better.

I am starting with a post-it note – It’s only 30 minutes.

I can do 30 minutes. And I always feel better after. Always. EVen if I hate every minute – every step – every “walk now” and “run now” prompt. I need to get over it and just do it.

30 minutes. I can do this.

And yet, I would love to hear about your work-outs? How do you make yourself get up and get moving?

I added in a couple of other embellishments this week. The stickers on the title card are from the Funktography kit and the heart and “Just” word tag are from the Rainbow Joy kit, both by Miss Mint | Peppermint Creative.

Left Side

Right Side

Project Life is the creation of Becky Higgins. You can find the Digital Edition here.

Project Life Posts | 2012 | 2011

I had an important lesson in simplifying this week. And what I have to say about it may make things seem more complicated than they really are. Just hang with me, okay?

On Wednesday my External Hard Drive (EHD) crashed. I lost over 350 GigaBytes of data  going back to 2007 that had been stored on that drive. I can hear the collective gasp of horror from all of you over that.

I started using that EHD couple of months after Chaos was born when I entered the world of digital scrapbooking and consequently, the world of never having enough digital storage space.  Those Photoshop files and graphics are huge! And then there’s the pictures themselves. You can fill up a hard drive very quickly. I was just storing stuff on the hard drive and copying photos over to it when the thought struck, which was usually about every 3-6 months.

I felt pretty good about my system at that point.

Hard Drive Horror Stories

I was an everyday user of my EHD for several months before an article caught my eye, detailing the horror of losing a hard drive. These things can’t and won’t live forever it seems. This was a revelation and a little horrifying to me. I started to dig and found out that hard drive crashes were far more common than I had previously thought.

The hazards to a hard drive are endless – shock from a fall, liquids, old age, over heating. All are enemies to digital content. I moved from horror to outright panic. All of my scrapbook pages, photos, files… all of it just 1 and 0′s and susceptible to loss of a catastrophic nature.

The other problem that I heard about was computer drives crashing, but the most recent back-up was weeks or months old resulting in huge amounts of lost data. Yikes!

Digital Storage Options

I spent several days with my BFF Google researching the options. There are a multitude of possibilities, spanning the range from fairly simple to extremely complicated and cheap to extremely expensive.

No Back-up

Some people are totally comfortable with not backing anything up. If the drive crashes they’ll just buy a new computer or drive and start over.

CD’s and DVD’s

Possibly the cheapest and simplest option I found available. Most computers come with CD and/or DVD burning capabilities. All you supply is the blank disks.

Pros: Fairly cheap, easy (you can google instructions for your operating system)

Cons: You have to store the disks, preferably off-site to avoid natural disaster and accidental damage. CDs and DVDs can lose data too. Scratches and age can make them unreadable. Most importantly, you have to remember and make time to back up your files. I can’t even imagine backing up your entire system this way.

Thumb-Drives or USB Flash Drives

These can run anywhere from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars depending on how much capacity you want.

Pros: As solid state drives these are less susceptible to crash. In fact, I don’t know if you can crash a flash drive. They can still be corrupted I think and you would still need to be careful when formatting.

Cons: They are small, which could also be a pro, but for me would be a con – I’d lose them! They also don’t currently have the capacity to back-up a full system, at least not affordably. That could change as solid state drives gain in popularity and ease of use. You need to remember to use them and store them off-site.

External Hard Drive

Slightly (or way) more expensive than CDs or DVDs. Still fairly easy to manage.

Pros: You can buy enough storage to greatly expand your hard drive capacity and make a back-up of your entire system. Some EHDs offer software to manage automatic back-ups of your data. If you are a Mac user some drives can be used for Time Machine back-ups.

Cons: Can be expensive, depending on how much storage you want or need. Will need to be stored off-site to avoid damage or disaster. Susceptible to anything that would negatively affect a hard drive.

Off-site Back-up

Sites like Crashplan, Mozy, Carbonite, My Other Drive and more offer storage space for your files on their servers.

Pros: They’re housing your data away from your house – so no risk of fire, flood or dropped media. Some offer automatic back-up that runs quietly in the background on your system.

Cons: Can be expensive. Some require manual uploads. Backing up an entire system can take days or weeks even. Some only allow the back up of one computer, or won’t back-up an EHD.

How I Protect My Data

Knowing my options led to some digital soul-searching and number-crunching. I didn’t want to become ultra-paranoid, but I needed a plan. I didn’t want to break the bank, but I felt that keeping my photos and files safe was worth some expense.

I decided to use a couple of different options to protect my digital files. My first line of defense is an EHD. My old Western Digital MyBook was a 500 GB drive (RIP) and it  housed important files, archived digi-scrap supplies and back-ups of my photos. My new Western Digital My Passport Studio 1 TB drive is a complete system back-up utilizing Time Machine. It will also house some archived data once I start cleaning up my laptop hard drive.

I also use My Other Drive to host an online back-up of important files and photos. I have the 500GB plan and so far, so good. I have found their set-up easy and fairly quick. I can usually upload a month’s worth of photos in a few hours overnight. Downloads of individual files have been pretty simple and fast as well.

On the first of every month I back-up all of my photos from the previous month to both the EHD and My Other Drive. I also scan the files and any other data I have on my computer and decide if any of that needs to be backed up. I upload all of my scrapbook pages to Persnickety Prints as well as My Other Drive. I have a repeating calendar reminder that pops up and tells me to do this, so at any given time I am only in danger of losing a month of photos if my laptop dies. Knowing this, I also occasionally upload my photos after a event when I have taken lots of pictures! Simplifying my system saved me a lot of heartache!

Having a redundant back-up is why I did not shed a tear when my EHD crashed this week. I just unplugged it and began looking for a new drive. It was that simple because I had a plan.

*Please note: I am no I.T. Expert, nor do I play one online. This information is just my own opinion and my own plan. 

Going to a wedding…can I wear jeans? Thankfully we knew a lot of cowboys, so jeans were occasionally okay.

Out to dinner…dressy jeans.

School…jeans.

Well, you get the picture. She wanted a skirt, a dress, culottes. Anything but jeans. I wanted jeans.

I usually won.

I can still remember back to school shopping. Picking out new jeans. Dark blue and still crisp. There was really only one kind of cut – mostly straight leg. Sometimes you could get a taper, and later on Z Cavaricci offered a nice taper.

Now, we never went for high dollar jeans. I still don’t unless I find a new pair in a resale shop. But even then I was really pretty careful with my jeans. Besides, the school had a dress code that frowned on holes in jeans. Mine usually made it through the year, though only sometimes barely. And then the summer would roll in and I’d cut them off and wear them for shorts. See? Jeans are the perfect wardrobe article for a budget.

The other reason I was so careful with my jeans is that I hated those stupid sticky knee patches. They were awful. Still are. My kids have some experience with those because they are way less careful than I was.

That Was Then…

My kids love jeans too. A couple of years ago MOTS got some up close and personal experience with one of those knee patches after she wore her 2-day-old jeans to church and decided to see how far she could slide on her knees across the carpet.

But, of course, holes in jeans are par for the course these days. The patch stayed on for as long as it was able and then got ripped out and thrown away. The hole got bigger and eventually, when it got warn enough we cut them off and she had a nice pair of shorts. But nobody really has a problem with “pre-worn jeans” anymore. In fact, I think you actually pay more for jeans with holes than you do jeans without holes.

Which brings me to last fall when I put a pair of jeans on Chaos and they fit more like capris. Time for new jeans! We headed out to local bastion of Pre-K fashion – Target – and I bought two pairs of jeans and a dinosaur shirt (his pick). One really dark blue, crisp pair and a pair that looks pre-worn – little cuts and holes with a second layer of denim underneath. They’re really pretty cool.

Last weekend in Houston his pre-worn jeans became part of the conversation:

Aunt: Chaos, I really like your jeans.

Chaos: Thanks.

Aunt: Your jeans have a bunch of holes in them.

Chaos: Yup.

Aunt: Why are there holes in your jeans?

Chaos: Cause they’re cool.

Aunt: Did you put all of those holes in your jeans?

Chaos: No! They’re new jeans. New jeans have holes!

Yeah. Not always kid.

These are not the jeans you're looking for.

It was really exciting for Party Boy, who has been a runner for way longer than I have and is a big fan of Ryan Hall. The girls were excited to be at the front and enjoyed cheering, and Chaos slept through most of it.

I always try to capture the weather periodically through the year, especially when it’s out of the ordinary for our area. No difference this week. Weird weather.

Left Side

Right Side

Project Life is the creation of Becky Higgins. You can find the Digital Edition here.

Project Life Posts | 2012 | 2011

Here is one of my recent scrapbook pages -

Snow Happy

Winter of the Mountain and Star Struck Templates Vol. 4 by Trixie Scraps Designs

See more of my scrapbook pages and projects in the gallery.

I knew there had to be a better way, and that if I was going to keep up with this project I’d have to find it. I needed layouts to come together quickly and easily, or I’d be sunk. Some weeks I have time to play around and I want to spend that time working on my layout, not locating pictures in a disorganized mess! Other weeks I need to get the layout done in a few minutes here and a few minutes there – again, no time to waste looking for the pictures!

Last summer I took the Finding Photo Freedom class from Stacy Julian at Big Picture Classes. I still stand by my assertion that it was the best money I have ever spent on my scrapbooking/photography. I currently have over 10,000 photos spanning 60+ years and I can locate any one photo in less than 30 seconds. Seriously.

iPhoto Organization

It was all of the photo organization from that class that gave me the inspiration to organize my Project Life Workflow. I use iPhoto ’09, but any program that allows you to use keywords on your photos will work for this. In iPhoto you can enable keywords by clicking View > Keywords. To keyword photos you can hover over any photo and see “add keywords” underneath the picture. Click there to open the keyword text box.

Several times a week I plug-in my phone and/or my camera and import all of the pictures I have taken since I last plugged in. Sometimes it’s only a couple of pictures, other times, hundreds. It just depends on the week.

Once the import is complete I get to work. I always take a few minutes to keyword each set of pictures right after they are imported, that way they are done and I don’t have to worry about it. I use lots of keywords, but there are 2 that I want to focus on today – Project Life and ProjLifeComplete.

As I scroll through the recently imported photos, any that I think I might like to use in my Project Life layout I tag with Project Life. Simple, right?

See the Project Life keyword?

Smart Albums

I also created a Smart Album called (can you guess?) Project Life. Smart Albums are quite possibly the best things ever for photo organization because they allow you to set parameters for what photos they display. My album grabs any picture that I tag with the keyword Project Life, which makes it so easy to find the pictures that I want to include every week.

In Photoshop I click on my Photos folder, and then the Project Life Smart Album. All of these photos are ones that I have keyworded throughout the week for this project.

After I complete my layout I need to get those photos OUT of my Smart Album to make room for the next week’s photos. I created a second keyword, ProjLifeComplete for this. Any photo tagged with this keyword is excluded from the Smart Album, regardless of what other keywords are there. As soon as I finish a Project Life layout, I go back to iPhoto and add the keyword ProjLifeComplete to the photos that I used.

Here’s my Smart Album set-up – you can create your own Smart Album by clicking File > New Smart Album, and setting whatever parameters you’d like.

It’s this one little thing that takes me 15-20 minutes per week that saves me hours when I go back to make each layout. So, even if you feel behind, this one little trick could make all the difference if you choose to pursue Project Life for your albums. If you are already doing Project Life how do you organize it?

Project Life is the creation of Becky Higgins. You can find the Digital Edition here.

Project Life Posts | 2012 | 2011

No matter when you decide to start, it is possible to cover a full calendar year in your Project Life. I know it may seem overwhelming, but don’t panic, and most importantly, don’t talk yourself OUT of this just because you feel like you are already behind. You’re not.

2011 Project Life Cover Page

My Experience

In January 2011 I started noticing a new trend in scrapbooking – Project Life. I tracked it back to Becky Higgins and I was immediately in love with the idea. At the time, though, Project Life wasn’t available as a digital product. I have been fully digital since 2008 and I wasn’t too keen on inviting paper back into my scrapbooking, regardless of how neatly it is packaged.

I continued to follow a few people who were doing Project Life and I just fell in love with the everyday photos and the journaling and the fact that they were still scrapping photos traditionally. It was everything that I wanted out of this hobby – a way to share our everyday life, but free me from the self-imposed guilt of having all. these. pictures. on my hard drive – not being displayed. Or enjoyed. Or remembered.

Around March of 2011 I realized that I could create a couple of digital templates that would mimic the look of paper Project Life and I could create pages digitally, using my very own supplies, and do my own digital Project Life.

Random 2011 Project Life page

Late Start

For whatever reason, I really have a hang-up about starting these kinds of projects on January 1st. I’m sure many of you do, too. I immediately threw out the idea of doing Project Life from March 2011 to March 2012. I wanted all of 2011 in one album, dang it. So I started digging back into iPhoto. I was amazed that I had photos to cover a weekly spread for every week starting January 1, 2011.

I bet you do, too. If you took pictures at all since 2012 officially started you have enough pictures to start Project Life 2012. Right now.

I am speaking from experience here. I started Project Life 2011 in March, caught up, and completed my 2011 Project Life album on December 31, 2011. It is so do-able. It’s why I stuck with it for 2012. It’s why I may use the format to scrap my old family photos. It works.

That I was able to complete a year-long project after so many failures at other long-term scrapbooking/photography projects is why I am so passionately encouraging all of you to give it a shot. It is possible to complete this project. And, no matter when you read this, it is not too late to start.

My How-to

Tomorrow I’ll cover my process – it’s easy (really!) – for keeping up with Project Life.

And for the record, I am not affiliated with Becky Higgins or Project Life in any way. I just love that I was able to be successful in recording 2011 and I wanted to encourage anyone that is on the fence about a project like this to give it a try. You can do this.

Project Life is the creation of Becky Higgins. You can find the Digital Edition here.

Project Life Posts | 2012 | 2011

I have been working towards actually running a 5k for several years now. It’s been a start/stop type of endeavor. Being a Mom, homeschooling, meal planning, cooking, laundry…well, everything came before running. Or excercising. I hate working out. I always have.

In 2011, I made it a goal to run in an organized road race. I didn’t make it due to the house selling and schedule conflicts while Party Boy was in school, but I did register for a race this coming February.

Getting Ready

I am not in the best of shape. I have never been athletic. So I knew I would need a gradual introduction to the world of running. I’d heard of Couch to 5k programs from several different sources, but wasn’t sure it would work for me. After some hemming and hawing, I decided to give one a shot.

I hated it. I had to watch the timer on the treadmill and try to remember when to switch from running to walking. It was tedious and distracting. It made a workout that I wasn’t enjoying that much worse. I started putting the workouts off. Then I quit altogether.

Clearly this was not going to be easy.

There’s an App for that

I was using Nike+ on my phone to track my excercise, but had limited myself to just walking. On a whim, I did a search on a couch to 5k app. I don’t know why I was surprised to find one (or many) as there are apps for just about everything these days.

What makes Run 5k my choice for training is that it tells me when to walk and when to run, gradually working towards running for 25 minutes straight. No more timer watching or distance guessing for me. I can listen to music or podcasts and the app will beep, then instruct me to run or walk. It also alerts me to the halfway point and when there’s one minute left.

Every workout starts with a 5 minute warm-up before starting the run/walk portion of the workout and ends with a 5 minute cool-down. Best of all each workout lasts only 30 minutes. This makes it easy for me to fit in my workouts 3 times a week. I know that I can sit at my computer for a half hour, or get up and run. And somehow, I never regret that 30 minutes on the treadmill.

This app also wins points from me because it will run in the background behind my Nike+ app, so I can keep track of my cumulative mileage and achievements. I love hearing Paula Rdcliffe or Dirk Nowitzki congratulate me on my run, a new record, or just for going out and exercising.

I still dont love running, but using an app does make it easier to track my progress and keep up with training. Maybe someday I will come to that magical place where working out is fun. Until then, I plan to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

___________________________________________________________

I am working towards creating a healthier lifestyle in 2012. See all of my posts here.