a cleaning whirling dervish

I haven't had much time to devote to the blog lately. Now that the weather is nice, we're busy doing outdoor stuff and spending our weekends cleaning and purging 12 years of accumulated crap. My dh is a notorious packrat, and yes, I also have my fair share of junk that I can't bear to part with, but I'm getting better at being ruthless and throwing it out. Case in point.. last weekend, we had a yard sale, and managed to make enough cash to pay our membership at the local outdoor pool, so I was pretty ecstatic about that. We cleaned out a major part of our basement a few weekends ago, and it was pretty amazing to see how many boxes of useless stuff we actually had. It was a bit of a pain in the butt getting it organized and ready, but the outcome was very rewarding. Alas, no pictures were taken that day as I was too busy trying to argue with cheapo hagglers and tend to my 2 kids and 2 of their friends who just happened to show up for the afternoon. But we had fun, saw a bunch of neighbours we hadn't seen all winter, ( as we Canucks tend to hibernate) and it was that good kind of tired at the end of the day. A job well done. :)

Scrapwise.. not much time for it lately, ( and I would dearly love a chance to sit down in an ORGANIZED space, b/c mine SO isn't.. and sit and do just that- anyone wanna come over and be my personal organizer?! I'm so bad at it.) but I did do this layout for the AC blog last week. So, being pleased with it, I sent it in, and then came across a page on 2Peas a few nights later that had the exact title, and pretty much the same product line on it. Yeah. I was horrified, although I'd never seen the page up until that moment, I knew there was no way I could let them use it on the site. So I made a quickie card, and sent that in place of this. This same thing has happened to me once before, although that time, it was one of those very subconcious things where you see a layout you adore, and file it away in that 'things I love' part of your brain. Fast forward to 2 years later, and I made a very similar page, only realizing it after the fact. Kind of embarrassing, but an honest mistake, really. I sometimes wonder how much of what we make is 100% our own creation? I think we're all so influenced and inspired by so much out there that it's really hard to come up with something that's 100% your own design and idea. I would love to experiment for 6 months by not buying a scrap mag or surfing scrap sites.I wonder if I'd scrap the same? Probably. But I'm way too weak for that kind of torture, lol!





















Time for lunch making duty. And that chore is getting very tired too- only a month to go, and I'll be lunch free, woohoo! PLEASE send me some lunch sugestions if you have any, I ( and my poor children) would be very grateful!