as of RIGHT now...

simplicity

*from the AEzine challenge this week:

This week your challenge is to create something, anything, that celebrates your chosen word for 2007. Maybe a layout. Maybe a blog posting or a journal entry or a simple post-it note that you put somewhere you can see it each day. Make sure to journal about why you chose your word and what it means for you - the more you let yourself explore the more benefit you will receive in the end.

for my word I chose Simplicity. I want to bring more simplicity to my life. For the past few years I feel that things have been chaotic in my life. We've both started and stopped and then started new jobs again and still don't love where we are. Nate was working two jobs. We got married and I then realized just how much stuff we were bringing to this household together. SO MUCH stuff. With no place for it to go. Traveling became a hassle with Nate's two jobs...even a simple day trip to the city. Being the only one that could contribute to the running the household became a serious chore. One that I am not doing a good job at currently. With all this going on I could never achieve balance or contentment for my life.

I'm hoping to end all this cluttered chaotic life this year though. It's my main goal. To acheive a more simple lifestyle. To purge our life of everything we don't need or love. To just spend *simple* time together without complicated scheduling. To cook more *simple* foods.  To make the *simple* decision of what I want to do with my self career wise (ok...that one may be more complicated). I just feel that if I can make many aspects of my life more simple I may be a happier person for it. To have one set of glasses in my cabinets rather than 6 mixmashed sets. To be able to take a day trip without having to plan six weeks in advance. To get up in the morning and love what I do. To just have more simplicity in my life. That's all I want. I strongly feel that if things were more simple around here then balance would be better achieved. And with balance, for me, comes contentment:)

We've taken some  steps towards change already. Nate has actually quit his second job, even though the benefits were awesome (he worked for an airline part time...cheap travel is always a plus) he just wasn't around. We didn't actually get to take advantage of those flight benefits too often and when we did the results weren't always as fun as we hoped travel would be. And I feel travel should always be fun. And not complicated.Well...not always complicated:) I have started the purge process around the house...really getting rid of those things we just don't need. It's not going to be easy...achieving simplicity. It will take some work in the beginning...even a mind set change will have to happen...for all of those in this household. We haven't had a chance to just be as a family since Nate and I got married and I'm hoping that bringing a little more simplicity to our lives will make all of us a little happier in this journey together:)

jen

Ali's challenge and my Christmas Journal

This week Ali wanted us to scraplift another scrapbooker. So here is my scraplift of one of Elsie's layouts. AS you can see...my funkiness is not existent....especially because I was freaking out that all of her strips didn't go all the way across. And that she had flowers or stars at the end of ALL of those middle strips...mine is much more geometrical in it's style with a few embellishments thrown on in what I hope is Elsie fashion...I chose Elsie to scraplift beacause she is SO far from my own style. Her style is funky and young and mine all lines up nicely....it's the anal part of me at work...anyway...it was fun to try something new. I won't be repeating it though. I will say that I had fun mixing so many pattern papers...I don't usually have this many on one page:)

Also...today was the first prompt for the Shimelle Christmas Journal class.  I saw Ali do this last year and I LOVED her entries so I decided to give it a try this year:) For the first day we were to make an introduction/dedication page. Mine just states my reason for wanting to do this Christmas Journal along with Shimelle's manifesto

I like how it came out. I am excited to be doing the class if only for the reasoin that I made a promise to myself to spend 15 minutes a day reflecting on what the holiday season means to me.  I'm afraid that I won't be able to keep up. Life will get in the way as usual. But for now I'm being positive:) Today's page was easy...less than an hour and most of that was spent on trying to figure out what to write...

I'm also hoping that this will help me keep to my post a day in December that I was trying for. I always start out saying I'm going to post everyday and well..for those loyal 2-3 readers...you can see that I don't quite meet this goal. Erica made this a goal on her blog today and well...if she can keep it up so can I:)

Hope everyone is going to have a fun weekend. I'm laying low this weekend because next weekend is a big San Francisco trip for Alex's birthday. All day shopping and sight seeing plus staying over night on Saturday. Should be fun but busy:) Plus we may cut our tree down next weekend (I'm shooting for this weekend though...fingers crossed)

jen

according to my clock...

I am 14 minutes late for the AEZine challenge but that...is ok. I didn't even start a layout until 10:47 tonight. Given my past history and how long it takes me to complete a layout I was very happy that somehow I managed to pull off a layout in just over an hour. A layout that I used *stamps* on and even (gasp) embossed on. And you know what...it felt so good to use stamps and emboss and have imperfections on the page. Well okay...I'm still trying to deal with the imperfections on the page. I love stamps but they scare me...with all their imperfection and not so pleasant suprises right when you are least expecting them to happen. Like dropping them , or having the wrong color on the layout (even if you did check it first!) ... things that take my poor perfectionist personality some time to get past. I did tomight though and I really like the page. One of my current favorites:)

So, thanks Ali for once again pushing my creativity:)

jen

p.s. I didn't realize I had cut off so much at the bottom of the page. The journaling reads: You love the Farmer's Market in Monterey. The apples, the strawberries, sometimes the flavored honey sticks. You love to get Starbucks. You love the balloon guy. And the guy with the ceramic animals. BUT you don't love the vegetables. Especially the GREEN ones! That's okay though, I didn't always love them like I do now and someday you will feel the same way:)

aezine challenge

I have been wanting to participate in Ali's challenges for the past few weeks but something always came up. Luckily I was free to do this one this week:) I already wanted to do a photo collage of my daughter's 11th year so this challenge was perfect,  but she doesn't turn 12 until December so its still  a work in progress. Each small picture is from each of the months. The large picture was taken the day of her 11th birthday last December and starting in the top corner goes through the rest of the year until the last two months. I really loved this challenge because putting this collage together has already started my journaling thoughts and I have already written down some notes and I know exactly where I'm going to go with this layout:) I love when a layout comes together for me quickly and this one is going to be one of those:)

Thans Ali!

jen