I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph...so mama

Wow. Look at that. A brand new Nikon D40 and it's all mine. I was almost afraid to take it out of the box. I never had a camera with removable lenses before, they scared me. I remember always watching people with those types of cameras, how careful they treated them, how they barely breathed when they changed lenses....it was like the most fragile thing in the world, and it cost a lot of money. I remember my brother-in-law losing his lens cap at Disneyland and how upset he was. We went to the lost and found and they brought out a HUGE box of lost lens caps for him to choose a replacement from. I just know I'm going to lose a lens cap.

So why this camera? Because it's small and comfortable (according to the reviews I read, and they turned out to be true), because the price was right - I got a great deal at Ritz Camera.com, and because it's a Nikon. I've had a Nikon camera before and I really liked it, so when all of my comparison shopping led me to the Canon Rebel or the Nikon, I chose the Nikon. I swear to you, I was NOT influenced in any way by Paul Simon.

Disclaimer: I did not take the picture above. I stole it. I don't have a clue how to use this thing.

Look what I found...

Who cares that it cost $17.95 for this itty bitty book from Scrapbook Trends? (My stomach... when it realizes I blew my lunch fund for the rest of the week.) But it's SO darn cute! And it's filled with pictures of my favorite things....mini albums! Lots and lots of mini albums!

I know I would have bought this book anyway, but knowing ahead of time that Dedra Long had one of her albums published in it was my biggest motivator. No, that's not true... it was THE motivator. I saw the book. I picked it up. I bought it. And here it is...another fab little 'out of the box' album by Dedra Long. I adore her albums. One of these days.....

Yeah, one of these days I'm going to throw caution to the wind. I'm going to break out of my conservative little shell and go wild. I'm going to decorate my blog with color....hmmm, color. I could do that. You watch. One of these days.

Oh, Scrap!

Isn't that a great name for a scrapbook blog? Oh, Scrap! I love it. Wish I'd thought of it but it wasn't meant to be. Instead, it was meant for me to languish here in the dry, dusty desert, while the author/owner/photographer of Oh, Scrap! does her scrappin' and bloggin' from beautiful Hawaii. I know what you're thinking...you're thinking I'm jealous. I don't know why anyone would think that. We both have sun, sand, blue skies, palm trees, tropical breezes...what? Oh, okay, I don't have tropical breezes, I have sand storms. And I don't have ocean....I have desert sand. Now why would those two little things matter to anyone? If you took Joscie's ocean and tropical breezes away, she'd be living in the desert too, so you see, it's really not that different...(so there).

On the other hand, what she has.....(here comes the jealous part) is TALENT! Ohhhh, does she have talent. Her photography is fabulous, she can make a pile of shoes look good (and she did!), her pictures and her layouts are so brilliant and alive with color that I'm often transfixed. And then there's the music. Wait until you hear the music! This blog has the best music. It's upbeat and happy and fits right in with the color and beauty of Joscie's pictures. It kinda makes you want to kick off your shoes and stay a while....you know what I mean? If not, get over there and find out for yourself. It's a great place to be.

Mini Albums and... Iggydodie!

I love mini albums, so when I found Iggydodie at the Two Peas gallery I was immediately blown away. Her fondness for mini albums is obvious, and she's made a ton of them, all with that wonderful European flair that I find so charming and romantic. She's also on the Design Team at One Page At A Time and they have a lot of her layouts displayed there. Awesome! A big WOW factor here.

Take a look for yourself!

Big Picture Scrapbooking

I've gone over the top crazy about Stacy Julian's books. I think she's absolutely brilliant.

I enjoyed Photo Freedom so much that I bought Big Picture Scrapbooking, and if I see her first book, Simple Scrapbooking, I'm going to buy that one too. I can't imagine why anyone out there with a family wouldn't want these books. You're taking gads of pictures of your kids and storing them away and feeling guilty about not scrapping in chronological order. Your pictures are in stacks of boxes that are overflowing, and you're so overwhelmed that you can't scrap a thing.

I seriously recommend that you Run, don't walk, to your nearest scrapbook store and buy Photo Freedom, and if you can afford to buy Big Picture Scrapbooking, get that one too. You'll fall in love with Stacy's method for organizing and scrapping. Yes, her technique actually allows you to be a better scrapper!! Trust me, you won't be disappointed!

I'm just about at the point where I'll be slipping my pictures from the 80's, 90's and 2000+ into storage binders. This is an exciting step because I'm going to weed out the good from the bad as I do so, and only store pictures I want to scrap someday. The others will go into storage drawers, which I haven't bought yet....but I'll get there.

Stacy would have me start from the beginning of time, but I think dealing with the last 3 decades is good for now. The 60's and 70's have waited this long, they can wait a bit longer. Besides, most of those pictures will have to be cut out of the albums because they're permanently adhered there. So much for preserving history...you should see how faded they are...I'll be unable to save a lot of them. On the other hand, the pics that I never did anything with but leave in boxes....they're just fine. So I'd like to personally thank the person that invented those crappy sticky albums that sucked the life out of my pictures!

Erica's Scrapbook Obsession

Her screen name at CK is "Journeyfan". Geez, how could I possibly miss that? Journey was my favorite band (if not for The Eagles). I dated a musician in the late 70's whose band did Journey tunes so well, it was almost as good as the real thing. Honest. I'll never forget them...or him either....but I digress.

Okay, moving on here....I'm adding links to my favorite blogs and writing a few words about them as I do. Most of them have great pictures of scrapbook layouts, projects and fun things to do....Erika's site is just a bit different....what she has is great words. Judging by the thousands of hits her site has, it's not much of a secret. AND she has a blogroll of HER favorite blogs, plus everyone elses at the CK and other Message Boards. Including mine! What a smart girl!

So why do I like Erika's blog? Because she's honest. She tells it like it is and doesn't apologize. She has a sense of humor. She's sometimes sarcastic (I can certainly identify with that!), but she's always informative. She has all the news in the scrapbook world, info on the latest and greatest products, what's going on where, and if it were applicable, she'd know who was dating whom!

Check her out. She's a good read!

Scrapbook Obsession

Blogspot News

Blogger has some new and exciting gadgets to play with. They're in experimental form right now, so you may notice a few changes that don't work right. I'm not too crazy with the whole cramped page that I see right now, but I'm willing to test it for a while.

One of the new toys is being able to add a blog list with feed from my favorite blogs. You'll be seeing two blog lists for a while. One with a feed that shows updates from the blogs, and one without. And for those of you that just can't wait until my next post, (oh, you're gonna love this!), you can now subscribe for updates to MY blog! Yippee! Get in line and sign up now! Quickly, the subscriptions are sure to be gone in no time!

And if you're wondering why I'm so excited about the blog feeds when I only have a few links right now.....patience my friends, patience. I'm workin' on it.

I bought Stacy Julian's latest book, Photo Freedom, and I love it. At first, I thought I'd copy the pages that interested me and then pass it on. But now I doubt that I'll be giving it up anytime soon. I absorbed what I had read, and the more I thought about it, the more excited I got to do it. I pulled out ALL of my pictures and I'm going to sit down and sort them just the way she outlines in the book. This is going to take forever. But there's a light at the end of the tunnel because now I know what to do and how to do it.

I must have a gazillion bad pictures in those boxes. I keep them because I always knew I would go to hell for thowing someone's picture away, or worse yet....I'd put a curse on them. I mean, seriously, why do we keep bad pictures? Because we paid for them, and anything we pay for must be worth keeping? Nah. It's the devil.

I may be a bit busy for a while...I'll be at least ankle, if not knee deep in pictures.

Ryan, show us your teeth!

My nephew was born on April 1st. If that wasn't good enough, he was born in the back seat of the car on the way to the hospital.

I have the best picture of him showing his teeth when he was a little tyke. That's how his mom got him to smile...."Ryan, show us your teeth"....he'd clamp his teeth together and show that big ole smile so you could see how beautiful they were. What a great picture. I wanted to post it but I can't find it right now. It's been in a frame forever until I moved....I took it out and put it safely away....so safe that I can't find it...except that I just did! Yay! I gotta scrap this picture!

Ah, that's much better...now you can see for yourself what a cute guy he is. Oh, yeah, he doesn't look like that anymore. He's all grown up.

Happy Birthday, Ryan!