You may have noticed that there's no Project Life layout here today, and that's because for the last two weeks I haven't been in my scrap room!

Instead, I've been living here...

Our camper in Graham Cave State Park, Missouri

...and visiting here...

Badlands National Park, South Dakota

...and here...

Mount Rushmore, South Dakota

...and here...

Old Faithful, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

...and here...

Surprise Lake, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming

...and here...

The Narrows, Zion National Park, Utah

...and here...

Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona

...and even a really quick stop here...

"The Corner" in Winslow, Arizona

...and so many other places that I have yet to edit the photos for on our summer road trip vacation! We took two weeks and drove a massive loop around the western United States, covering 15 states in 14 days and visiting six National Parks, two National Monuments, and driving through more National Forests than I can count. It was fun and exhausting all at the same time!

With all of that going (all 4300 miles of it!!) I've had very little internet access, plus our Comcast cable modem was out for 6 of the 10 days leading up to the trip (they even had to come out and rewire the house!). So basically if you've sent me an email, private message, or asked a blog question in the last month, please be patient while I try to catch up on things! I had the blog pre-scheduled to post while I was gone, and now that I'm back I'm trying to get that caught up again, too. :)

I'll start the catch-up with some sneaks of the July kits from Citrus Twist- these were waiting for me when I got back home, and I'm excited to dig into them and start scrapping again!

Main Kit - "Sail Away"

Embellishment Kit -"Go Girl"

Project Life Kit -"Adventure"

Kit Add-On -"Travel"

Patterned Paper Add-On -"Summer"

Stamp Add-On - "Five Star"

And next week I'll have two Project Life layouts to make up for the lack of one this week. I was a crazy girl when I made my Two Peas video for July and made two weekly spreads using a super-simple style to try to help those who are feeling behind!

an international magazine pub

The upcoming CHA show has had me scrapping quite a bit lately, with both items for the show and projects for regular assignments racing across my scrapping desk. Unfortunately, like those Project Life layouts that I mentioned on Monday, I can't share any of it just yet! As a result this week will be a bit lighter on the creative side, but you'll see more projects start to pop up next week- along with coverage of all the new goodies debuted at CHA, of course!

I don't usually share my magazine publications here...though the fact that there have only been two of them ever might have something to do with that. :) I don't normally submit to magazines because I'd rather share them here with you guys as soon as I can rather than holding them back, submitting them, and waiting to see what happens. When I was approached by the Russian scrapbook magazine Scrap-Info, though, with a request to submit a Project Life layout for an upcoming article, I just couldn't turn it down! I mean, a chance to see my name in Cyrillic? Yes, please!

I turned my assignment in (thank goodness I could just send photos of my work and not mail the pages themselves to Moscow!) way back in June of last year, and over the weekend this beauty showed up in the mail! And, yes, Mom and Dad, I have a second copy for you, too. :)

The article is a Project Life-focused interview with both Leena Loh and I, and the fact that I can't read a word of it (though Darren, who speaks quite a bit of Russian, can!) hasn't dampened the excitement at all.

Thanks for stopping by today! I'll be back tomorrow with a new Lawn Fawn layout, and also a little behind-the-scenes look at what it's sometimes like to prepare projects for CHA. :)

2012 galaxy of lights + bridge street christmas tree lighting

Every November we always have one week in our photo library that looks suspiciously more like Christmas than fall! Ever since we started walking through the Botanical Gardens Galaxy of Lights instead of driving we end up going well before Thanksgiving, and I definitely won't complain about the earlier scheduling since it means we have more time to spend looking at everything and really enjoy it.

I've blogged lots of photos from the Galaxy of Lights for the past two years, so I'm not including as many photos in this post as in the past, but I still love documenting what's new and what was my favorite each time.

Basically, the local botanical garden that we maintain a membership to sets up some pretty amazing light displays every Christmas season. Starting Thanksgiving Day the display is open for to the public to drive through at night to see the sights, but for a few days before Thanksgiving they have nights just for members to walk through. I always tote the camera along, and it's fun to try to spot what's new (like the Alabama sign below) and also revisit some old favorites.

Not all of the displays are Christmas themed- there are nature displays (it's a garden, after all!), scenes out of nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and a few nods to local industry around here (meaning lots of rockets and general space-y stuff). Some displays are animated (and I'll admit that I shot way more iPhone video this year than last, meaning I took a lot fewer still shots), while others are lovely still-lifes.

My favorite part of the walk, hands down, is this magical section filled with curtains of light strands. Like the big displays, some of these are animated while others burn steadily, and it's filled with lit up snowflakes and deer, too. This year they even set up a fake snow machine halfway through, which made me a happy, happy girl. I may or may not have turned around and walked through the whole thing again. Twice. Yes, I love it that much!

This section is also a great place to experiment with bokeh and some of the more artistic effects you can get when you purposely unfocus your lens before snapping a shot. Note to self- play more with shaped bokeh next year!

thanksgiving 2012

This year's Thanksgiving plans went through some twists and turns before we all finally ended up at Cracker Barrel together for lunch, but that definitely didn't take any of the fun out of it! My family had originally planned to meet at my brother's house (where Beth was going to cook a delicious organic turkey from the CSA they subscribe to), but then Hurricane Sandy hit and Jon got sent off to New Jersey for a month to help with the recovery. We didn't want to leave Beth with the job of cooking for everyone and taking care of a two year old on her own, so we all decided that we'd meet up somewhere and let someone else do the cooking.

Cracker Barrel is crazy busy on Thanksgiving Day, and there's a bit of a longer wait if you have a larger party. Darren and I have gone by ourselves before and only had to wait 20 minutes or so for a table, but it took an hour for our party of 8 to be seated. Totally to be expected when there's a big crowd, and it gave everyone a little "Sophie time" (that's Dad browsing toys with her above).

It also gave Mom a chance to shop for a little present for Sophie Clare, who was quite exuberant as she opened it.

What little girl wouldn't love an adorable pink sock monkey purse?!?!? :)

happy birthday, d!

Darren's birthday is at exactly the wrong point in the school year- he's always studying for tests and writing papers, and this year he's teaching on top of all that (one year he literally had time for nothing more than Chick Fil A sandwiches and a quick round of gift opening at home). Luckily both last year and this year he's had time to at least go out for dinner, and, like last year, he opted for Greek cuisine this time around.

We didn't go to a typical Greek restaurant, though, because just a week or so earlier we heard about a diner of all places that serves fabulous Greek food along with the typical diner fare. I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical of how good the food would be, but when the staff at the City Cafe Diner in Huntsville plopped this hummus platter down on our table shortly after we arrived, I knew we were in for a treat!

And when this bread showed up just a few minutes later? Well, let's just say that the next words out of my mouth were, "I'm so not eating Paleo tonight." And, yes, the bread was really, really good!

We put our orders in, and then Darren tore into his gifts...which I had lazily wrapped all in one box. :)

These Onion Goggles from ThinkGeek are going to get a lot of use around here- we're constantly chopping veggies for some dish or other, and as chief chopper Darren usually gets the worst of the onion vapor. I also gave him a couple of t-shirts (Black Mesa and BaCoN) along with a bottle of Zombie hot sauce just for fun.

Oh, so stylin', right?

When our food came out, we both just stopped for a minute and stared at the enormity of the portions. We seriously were not expecting this much food!

Darren got a Greek sampler platter...

...and I opted for sauteed shrimp, chicken, and mushroom pasta. Soooo good! And we had tons of leftovers to take home, too.

Speaking of home, that's where D's birthday cake was served. Per his request, this year's model was a pound cake (unfortunately store-bought since my kitchen was still ripped apart for the new tile installation) frosted with Nutella.

And of course he had to take a minute to play with this food...because getting older so doesn't mean that he's getting any more mature. :)

Dinner + cake + three episodes of Last Resort made for a perfect birthday evening for D- so glad that he's easy to please!

happy birthday, dad!

Okay, so, yes, Dad's birthday was actually three weeks ago, but it's taken me this long to get the photos edited to post! Part of the problem was I just didn't think that I did a very good job of shooting that night. Have you ever had one of those days when you're just not getting along with your camera? That was me for most of this particular weekend. I don't know if I was just out of practice or just off my game, but I had a lot of blurry shots on my card after the night was over. Luckily I took enough pictures that a few of them turned out- definitely enough to share the highlights of the weekend!

I actually spent Thursday night at my parents' house on my way back from working in Ohio for the weekend, and then helped get ready for the birthday party all day Friday.

Mom had already done a bit of decorating before I got there, including this cute little cart filled with pumpkins...which one of the cats promptly turned into a bed.

I helped clean the house and baked a pecan pie (Dad's request...though the pie failed to set up and was more like a pecan soup...), and we also made sure to get the gifts wrapped before Dad got home from work. I even had time to stop and get a couple of balloons (the pink one was for my Grandmom, who has the same birthday as Dad).

Speaking of Grandmom, here she is learning a little about how to use an iPad. And the scary thing? Sophie was helping to teach her! At not-quite-two-and-a -half she's scary good at it!

And of course anywhere that Sophie bug is, she's the center of attention, right? She had great fun "helping" Dad and Grandmom open their birthday gifts. Come to think of it, maybe that's why so many of my photos are blurry- the girl never stops moving!

halloween pumpkin carving 2012

We don't do a lot for Halloween around here, but keeping it simple seems to be the key to keeping it fun for us so we go with it. We carve pumpkins, we pass out candy to trick or treaters, we sit in the living room with laptops and read/work between rounds of kids ringing the doorbell (we don't get a ton of them), and that's about it.

The pumpkin carving is definitely a favorite of mine- from picking one to choosing (or making!) patterns to setting them out on the front porch and lighting candles inside, I just love doing it. And this year, as we have for the past several years, we waited until the day before Halloween to secure our pumpkins, which turned out to be great (again!) since the farmer's market we usually get them at had marked them down quite a bit. In fact, we got two giant, heavy white pumpkins for a mere $5 each!

Darren always starts off by cutting out the tops...

...while I get "pumpkin gut" duty. And, yeah, I wear geeky t-shirts constantly when not at work. :) I also made sure to scrape down the inside of the face that I'd be carving to thin it out a bit- I learned my lesson after last year's near-debacle with the really thick white pumpkins!!

This year I knew that October would be nuts, so I made the decision early on to go with pre-printed patterns instead of trying to design my own. Luckily Target had Star Wars carving kits this year that included a few great patterns like this Clone Trooper helmet.

Darren chose a decidedly more intricate Darth Maul design (overachiever!!), and then we both got to work punching holes around the pattern outlines.

Carving happens after the pattern is punched and removed, and about halfway through Darren commented that he almost went with a Dremel carving kit this year. Well, duh!! Of course that would make life easier, and I very nearly dropped everything right then and there to head to Home Depot to pick up a new tool set. The only thing that stopped me was the impending arrival of the first wave of trick-or-treaters in approximately an hour...no way I woud have have time to get to the store, get back, and finish my pumpkin. But next year? Oh, yeah!

Looking at Darren's pattern, it's no wonder he wanted the Dremel kit. He's definitely the master carver of the two- I always pick the super easy patterns.

We finished up the pumpkins and got them to the front porch just as the first wave of trick-or-treaters arrived. There was still quite a bit of daylight around, but later that night...

I slipped back out to take some proper photos.

Darren had to leave to teach lab at the university not long after that, so I spent the majority of Halloween alone, working on the Christmas Scrapbook Paper Roundup when I wasn't handing out candy.

All in all, it was another lovely, calm Halloween!