hooked on american boy

HALP!!! I can't get this song out of my head.

Estelle and Kanye West:

cool for cats

My son changed the home page on my new computer to "icanhascheezburger.com" --captioned pics of cats and other animals. It usually manages to put a smile on my face. Love this one:



more cat pictures

howzabout a nice hawaiian punch?

Sure could have used one this past weekend. It was outrageously hot here in SoCal. High 90's (or maybe more?) What a weekend to have a yard sale, but that's what we did. It was the usual trio - my mom, my sister and I- braving the unusual May heat to unload our discards.

We like to start our sales on Friday when there isn't so much competition - and it was a good decision again. We had lots of shoppers even without putting any signs up. That's thanks to the power of the Pennysaver, Recycler and Craig's List ads. In fact, we had some mob action at one point. Cath had arrived a little late due to some car trouble and as she pulled up to unload her vehicle, the people all swarmed to her truck, trying to make sure they had first dibs on any new 'good stuff'. Mom said it looked like she was selling tamales out of the back of her truck -lol!

Saturday was possibly hotter than Friday and I found myself leaving my post at the sale early so I could go to Scrappin' Good Times and teach a class. It was the last installment of the "Where's the Party" class designed by Kristin Hayne and me. What a great day to be in the air conditioned store. :-) It was also nice to give my wrist a rest. I had pulled something in the inside of my wrist on Thursday night while I was moving things around for the yard sale. Ouch!

Anyways, after all the hubbub and heat of the weekend, I'm ready for a nice Hawaiian punch. Doesn't this recipe sound good:

Bacardi Hawaiian Punch

1/2 oz Bacardi Limon rum
1/2 oz Bacardi Razz rum
1/2 oz Bacardi Orange rum
1/2 oz Bacardi Vanil rum
3 oz cranberry juice
3 oz pineapple juice

Pour the Bacardi flavored rums into a cocktail shaker half filled with ice cubes. Add the cranberry juice and pinceapple juice and shake well. Strain into a hurricance glass filled with ice cubes and serve.

That recipe was one of the Mixed Drink recipes in one of our "Where's the Party" class add-ons. Here's a look at the add on, "Happy Hour Starts Now". You can pick up your own copy of this book in my Etsy Shop:







And while I'm on the theme, here's a layout I did last month of my brother John doing bartender duty during one of our family dinners last November. Oh my goodness, he made us the most delicious icy, foamy raspberry drinks made with fresh berries. Yum! I need to get that recipe.

bundle of joy

Little pillow favors I made for a baby shower last weekend. They were filled with pink & lavendar M&Ms. The oversize scallop tag was cut on the Cricut (Mini Monograms cartridge). The embossed title was a Quickutz 2x2 folder from a boxed baby set. I lightly inked over the embossed letters with white ink so they'd stand out a bit better. The patterned paper with birdies is from a DCWV stack, and the satin chickies were from a dollar store. Lastly, I tied some pink tulle around the pillow box and used a pink safety pin to attach the tag.

Here they are en masse

tango

Any Dancing With the Stars fans out there? This week Len complained that Jason & Edyta's tango was too "Argentine". I'm not sure how that is actually possible when the tango originates in Argentina. Ah well, I guess he means because it wasn't the traditional stiff ballroom sort of tango.

But there is nothing I love more than a moving, tortured, beautiful Argentine tango. The 1998 movie "Tango" is tango eye candy if you are a fan of this dance. Cecilia Narova, who stars as the ex-wife of the lead character is incredible.

Here's a clip (Cecilia is the one dressed all in gray with the short hair). Gosh I just love to watch this woman move.


And another clip from the movie. This one is not a traditional tango, but still love watching her dance:


And lastly, a genuine authentic style tango with a seasoned old gentleman "at the helm":

the tag's the thing

So, I am just now *getting* how tags work on blog posts. I feel kinda silly for not recognizing what their purpose is - to index blog posts by topic. I guess thought the tags were connected to the internet search engines like Google. I only recently discovered that I can actually include a list of tags I've used on my blog to make it easier to find related posts.

I've gone ahead and added my tag list (aka "labels") at the far right under all the other blog doo-dads. I'm also trying to clean the tags up so they'll be more useful.

Just for fun, I thought I'd post some pics of some tags I've made. Most of these are pretty old --done in my swap craze days. I guess if you're a scrapbooker you might be able to guess at the dates of these projects by looking at the paper used. ;-)

this *should* embarrass me

Seeing as Winter CHA was THREE months ago, I guess I should be totally embarrassed to post these photos. But I'm not. :-D

From Fancy Pants booth, in case you hadn't figured that out yet (this stuff is already in stores - woo hoo!)

plumb tired

New Quickutz "Fiesta" set. I love the packaging --it totally coordinates with our "Party" class!

Today was the first of two "Where's the Party?" classes. It went great! I have to say that we have some truly wonderful ladies that come to classes at Scrappin' Good Times. They make it a pleasure and a joy to teach there. A big thanks to everyone who came today!

There is still room in the May 17th class session

This class was also the first time I've partnered with my good friend Kristin Hayne to teach a class. She was AWESOME! Not only is she a wonderful designer, but an excellent teacher and great motivator too. She's so organized and efficient --she made sure we got our class sample done in plenty of time for last month's kick-off and also was super about keeping us on our toes about getting the class kits ready. Love that girl!

Did you notice my subject line? Well, somehow I scheduled my April and May classes closer together than I usually do, and it's been quite a challenging few weeks. Last week was "Intro to Scrapbooking" (another great class --lots of *new* faces whenever I do the Intro sessions), and in about two weeks is the second "Party" class. Whew --that's a whole lotta class kits! I've been driving my poor little "Cricut" so hard that I think I may have done him in. The poor little machine was starting to smell a bit while it was cutting and then it got so tired that it would only cut through the first image on a page. For the rest of the images, it would act like it was cutting, but it was only pretending.

Fortunately, when the machine started acting up I had finished most of my cutting. Somehow I managed to get enough of that last piece cut for today's class (talk a sigh of relief).

So, the point of all this... me and my baby bug are tired!