Actual glaciers,not snowbanks!

So,
we drove by this little piece of snow that the sign said was a glacier, Les and one of the other guys decided that they needed to check it out alittle more closely. I had to put on my 70-250mm lenses to get in closer but left the faraway photos to show perspective!

Some more photos

Jackson Glacier

More Mountains

There was the prettiest little waterfall behind the campgrounds in Waterton. I took about 100 photos of it from all different angles but this one shows almost all of it in one frame!

Then a couple of days later, we did the highway to the sun in Glacier Park, in the States. It took us pretty much the whole day, we started at 10 am and I think we were back at our campgrounds by about 5 pm. There was some construction going on so there were a couple of waits but there were also many places to stop and take little walks to see waterfalls and glacier creeks, I guess you would call them.

Frustration!

We were enjoying our first day of a long awaited holiday when my cell phone rang and interrupted a perfectly fine morning of coffee and beautiful scenery!! We were at Waterton National Park, away from work, phones, computers, and any other problems associated with them!! OR so we thought!! The first phone call came from dh's sister, where are you, are you okay, everything cool in your world?? Why do you ask, we say. Oh, just got an email saying you were in London and having some trouble and needing some money!! WHAT!!!! Well, that just threw my lovely holiday into a stress coated mind meltdown!!! Not only had someone taken over my email account, Hotmail had locked me out as well!! Which, I suppose, was a good thing at the time but it has taken me until tonight to convince them that I am the real person that belongs to this account. In the meantime I had started a new account and reasked all my friends on facebook to become my friends again because, facebook is hooked into your email and I was locked out of there as well!! We had many phone calls over this email, most of them from very concerned family members and friends. My biggest concern was that whoever got into my email could get into other things as well, and I had myself quite stressed over this for a day or 2. We finally got to a place where I could plug in my own computer and not use a WI-fi tower and I managed to set my mind at ease in regards to other things.

So now I am sort of back to where I was but with all my passwords changed and I hope a smarter outlook on how easy it was for someone to hack into my email. I will be much more cautious now about where I am when I log in!

Now, for some really pretty pictures:

Some new layouts

I haven't really been doing them in chronological order but here are some of the layouts that I have done for my travel album. I included the itinerary page because I wanted to show just how much we saw in the 2 weeks!!

There weren't alot of windmills in Holland, apparently they are going the way of the elevators here on the prairies.

This guy was worth taking the tour for all by himself! He was great, informative, interesting and funny!!

Another member of the tour group got this photo and kindly sent it to us as we didn't leave the same time as them, we stayed an extra week after the tour was over. They took this in the morning when they left the hotel, we were still sleeping!

I have sooo many photos yet to go through and make a decision of which ones to print and put into the album. It 's going to take me a long time to get this album put together. As well, I have alot of "stuff" that I saved over the tour that needs to somehow be fit in! Like tickets, and maps and things like that!

Sorry for being MIA

Sorry for being totally off the blogging world map but it's something that I just don't think of doing for myself. I love stalking, er, I mean looking, at other people's blogs but I just don't think that I have anything very interesting to blog about so I don't!!
So we have been back from our whirlwind european tour for about 3 weeks now. The tour company does not lie when they say the word "whirl"!! We saw alot of things in 2 weeks. There were many places I wished we could stay little longer and some places I was glad we were getting back on the bus in 45 mins!! I have finally started going through the photos and deleting the really bad ones and seeing what I could do with the others. I had bought PSE8 before we left and I got the book PSE8 for Dummies, so that I could figure out how to use this program abit more. I am still in the learning process, so alot of my photos have been touched up with Picassa instead.
I have around 3000 photos to go through so bear with me!
I decided the other day, I really should get started on
scrapping some of them before I totally forgot what and where
they were about. I also did a couple of layouts of our sweet little
granddaughter.

We sometimes have her here with us for the day and there is nothing more fun than playing with a 2 year old! Teaching her all the ways to have fun in the snow!! Just watching and listening to her chatter and learn new things. Or to listen to her tell her stuffed animals stories or instruct them on proper etiquette!! It's hilarious.

Another Try at Digital

Well, I tried another lesson with the digital scrapbooking CD. This time we started from a blank page instead of using a template so it was alittle more involved. The concepts are starting to make sense to me now but it is taking along time for me to remember all the little details involved in making a page. I really think I enjoy the actual physical actions of glueing and cutting and arranging to the digital versions. I am thinking maybe hybrid might be a good way to go and I have done abit of hybrid already because I have the Print Artist program and have done up journalling for my pages for along time now and in the beginning I made titles and printed out some graphics alot, before I started buying all the cute,matching stuff! Sooo, I think I will continue to learn because I like learning new things, but whether or not I will go digital remains to be seen. I am looking forward to learning more things on PSE8 in regards to photo manipulation though. There is a whole new world out there I think!!

I did it!!

Well, this took just about all day to do!! I broke down and bought Photoshop elements 8 yesterday out at Costco and today I spent pretty much the entire day, watching the extra CD on introducing scrapbooking with PS8. I followed along with the instructions, watching most of the stuff twice before it soaked into my poor, aching brain!! But I have now officially made my very first digital scrapbooking page!!! I did take a few breaks to throw some laundry in and take a run to the library but other than that, I have been at this pretty much all day today! I am not all that sure I like this enough to totally immerse myself in it but for a page every now and then, it could be an okay thing to do!

New Project

I have doing a different project lately. My reason? Monkeyface is getting her own "big girl bed" so I thought that I would do another one of my many hobbies and make her a quilt. I chose a simple one because I didn't want it to take too long or me to run out of steam before I got it done!! Sometimes I think I suffer from ADD because if something doesn't come together easily and quickly for me, I lose interest and start something else that looks like it might be more fun. The result?? I have a house full of unfinished projects!! Oh, I have lots of finished ones too but I do have quite afew unfinished ones as well. One of my New Year's resolutions, every year, is to finish up some of them!! And I usually do get a couple done before, yes, you guessed it, I lose my focus. Anyway, I digress. Here is the lovely Princess Quilt to go on the Princess's new bed. She has a lovely, freshly painted room with all the things in it that a little princess would need. The other grandma helped out with that too!! She has a little princess deacon's bench with baskets underneath for toys and a princess picture for on the wall!! Her mom bought her princess sheets for her bed too!! She had her first night in her bed on Saturday and apparently did very well. She stayed in bed all night!!




And then I went shopping last week to the LSS and
bought some new MME paper. I know, I know, I am supposed to be
using up my stash but this stuff was sooooo pretty, I couldn't resist! We babysat Monkeyface last week I think it was and Grandpa took her outside to play with her. She was soo cute in her little snowsuit and she just loved being in the snow. Grandpa made alittle hill for her to slide down and she just had so much fun with that! We really should get a toboggan and go onto a real hill with her, I think she would have a blast!! They built some snowmen too and made snow angels but those will be on other layouts!!

A New Education

Okay, so if you would have asked me a year ago who Dora and Diego were, I would have looked at you and said, huh? But this year, I know exactly who they are and I have probably watched most of the episodes of Dora, more than once! So when I read a poster in the mall that Dora was coming to town I asked my dd if she thought Monkeyface would like to go and see them. So yesterday, off we went to the mall. I got there before the designated time and I saw a very long lineup. Now, I have always said it isn't what you know but who you know that counts in this world and again, I was proven correct!! There, in the front of the line were 2 of my scrapping buddies and they called me over and told me to stick with them, they are the pros of children's stuff, they had been there since 8:30 waiting, had even packed a picnic breakfast!!! Now, my hat is off to these ladies, they knew their stuff. Monkeyface seemed alittle overwhelmed by all the people and I had been alittle nervous about taking her into the mall as she tends to like to run, usually away from me!! But she stuck right close and when she saw Dora coming down the hall, she was sooooo excited. As they lined up for photos and there were a few others that had won contests I think, that got to go ahead of the lineups, she talked a mile a minute about Dora and Diego and where was Boots, and look she had her backpack on and oh grandma, there's the map, you get the picture, right? then, came time to go on stage and get her photo with them, guess what, no way was she going, no, no, no, so I hauled her up there and stood with her almost glued to my leg!!! And, then as we left, she turns around and waves and says, bye Dora!!!! Fear seemed to be forgotten already!! oh well, she didn't really like Santa either!! When I asked her later why she was so scared of them, she said, "Diego, too big!!!" So I guess, from afar, they looked okay, but up close, they were just too big! All in all, it was a great day spent with my dear little Monkeyface. I got to have her for the entire day and she is soooo much fun. She seems to have learned something new everytime I see her.

Only in Saskatchewan!

I think it was just last week that we were at -35 C with a -45C windchill and now today, as well as the past couple of days it is +1 or 2 with snow melting everywhere, mud splashing on my van and everything looking like spring is just around the corner. Of course, all of us older Saskatchewanites know that this is just a teaser. There will be more snow and cold weather, guaranteed. It's like taxes, it will happen. However, we will enjoy it while we have it!! I won't enjoy the extremely filthy van I am driving but I guess it comes with the territory! I ran out of windshield washer fluid the other day. Dry as a bone! Barely made it to Canadian Tire to get some more! The shelves were looking pretty empty so guess there were alot of people in the same boat! I stocked up with a few bottles of it, just to be sure. We have more than 1 vehicle so I figured I should be prepared.

I was surprised this morning!!

This is one of the layouts that we created in a workshop that I attended at Saskcrops this past fall. This event is put on by our own Leica Forrest here in our own little city. The workshop was taught by none other than Vicki Boutin. Now, I am always in for learning new things and I love mini albums so I signed up for pretty much all of her classes, and I fell in love with everything we made!! So I started stalking her blog!!!

Another lovely layout that we created.

And the ultimate mini album, that was way too taxing on my brain for sure!!! We almost worked up a sweat during this class, we had no time for much small talk during this one!! Anyway, what I am getting to is this.... I was perusing the realtime thingy on the side of my blog (I am sooooo very technical when it comes to computerland you know!!!) and I am wondering why I have all these hits that are orginating from the Vicki Boutin site so I go over there and OMG!! there is my name!! She has picked my name for the RAK that she had on her blog last week!!!! WOW, me, that's fabulous!! So, I am getting something from her in the mail!!!! I forgot that I had even left a comment, it's that age thing I think, out of sight out of mind. I should almost leave a list of where I have been because I am so bad for just hopping around and admiring everyone's blog. I really need to find out how to fix mine up alittle cuz everyone else's looks so neat and mine, well, mine is just what it is because I have no idea how to change much. I just learned about linking stuff to it not that long ago. I try to mention if I scraplift or use a sketch but I have a hard time doing the link thing so I hope that everyone is tolerant to some degree for us technically challenged people!!! I really don't think that I have the most interesting blog but it is something new for me and I do like to try and learn some new things now and then!! And it's a way to share some of things that go on in my life. Facebook is getting used abit more I think nowadays instead but I do try to keep up here as well. Some weeks I don't do very well but I do try!! and then there's today, 2 posts!!

Some new layouts

I don't really make resolutions for the New Year because that just gets me into trouble because I can't maintain them past the first week, but I did have a talk with myself and I told myself that I really cannot buy anymore scrapbooking stuff until I use up some of my existing stash. so I did do a few layouts during the christmas week and am now posting them here.
The layout of us under the falls is my second attempt at making a collage with multiple photos and then printing it out as an 8x10 to scrap. I kind of like how it turned out as it was easier than trying to fit multiple photos on a page. And it gets all the photos that I wanted printed onto 1 page instead of 2 or 3!!

I do windows layout was inspired by a sketch from the Scrapdango's site, they do kits and have a forum that I hang out on sometimes.

Helping my grandpa layout was inspired by a december sketch on pagemaps. I am liking how it turned out as well

The layout of monkeyface helping with the dishwasher was the first attempt at putting together a collage and printing it. She was so funny that night, she looked so serious as she punched the buttons on the dishwasher and then turned and said to me "ta-da" which in her lingo means there I's done and it's ready to go!

The Princess is 2!

Our little girl is growing up so fast!! We celebrated her 2nd birthday yesterday. She had a princess themed party complete with a castle cake made for her by her auntie. She had the concept of blowing out the candles down pat but couldn't quite get it done all by herself, she needed alittle help! I have about 300 photos of this momentous event but have pared it down to 3 for downloading on here! I will have to go through them again and find the good ones for a scrapbook page next!