Absinthe makes the heart...

We went to Weber's for dinner last night...E is a "frequent feeder" so we have mad coupons...one for $75, even, but we'll hang on to that one...our little family could never spend that much there. Last one we had we used for Mother's Day with the whole famn damily.

I mentioned it on facebook a while back...absinthe is "legal" again (but I'm guessing no where near as potent as it was before it was banned a century ago), and Weber's offers it. If you like ouzo (and oh yes I do), it is the same taste, strong licorice you have to cut with ice water and a sugar cube (to release the "green fairy"...didn't you see Moulin Rouge?).

It is a weird buzz...I find myself strangely alert when I drink it, and very talkative (like that never happens, LOL). But this morning I woke up very fuzzy-headed, and I even got to bed earlier than usual last night. We did NOTHING all day today, except get out to grocery shop very late in the afternoon. Later I made borscht with the GIANT head of cabbage we got in our half-CSA share late last week. I had just made stuffed cabbage so I couldn't use it for that (still have stuffed cabbage in the fridge!), but borscht only takes a half a head...so, yay me, I FINALLY got out our new vacumm sealer and shredded & froze the other half.

Right now it's the only thing in our new ($50 Craiglisted) upright freezer downstairs...pretty silly-looking all alone in there, but we hope to hook up with a quarter side of grass-fed beef some time before winter.

That's what I get for listening to this book with E on the way home from Florida earlier this year...it's what prompted him to start a(n overcrowded!) garden, buy the freezer, and get us into a CSA this summer.

Worth the price of admission...

...oh wait, this is a FREE class over at Jessica Sprague! I don't know if you can still sign up for it, but I'm learning some useful things, like creating this vintage-style, hand-tinted photograph:

From this:

Of course, Tess liked the bright greens of the original, but when I saw this photo in the LCD screen on my camera, the image I had for an eventual LO was more toward the vintage image I finally created. Hey, it's my hobby, after all ;)

Looks like Friday night cropping will continue, thanks to my cropping buddies. Tonight we're all crowded into Kelly's, last week it was Shandra's. Tomorrow I actually crop ALL DAY, the final crop at Scrapbook Memories, a goodbye crop for Patti, the owner. I need to organize some page kits, because it's going to be too crowded for me to bring ALL my crap.

Finished this LO yesterday, after running to the Big M chain with my 50% off coupon so I could nab the last MS butterfly punch. I saw it being used all over the place at SISiversary and just fell in love with little patterned butterflies everywhere. And I'm not a butterfly person, in general (as I'm not a bird-on-a-branch scrapper, or the flourish type, either...)

This is my next-to-the-last birthday LO from 2008-2009. I have been DREADING getting these done, as I do every year, but my goal is to have a decent birthday memory book for each of my kids, as I have NO memories of my own birthday celebrations (such as they were with 4 kids and a working mom in the house). I just need to change up my approach from year to year to keep it fresh.

I am just about done with 2008 overall; the next pages I'm dreading are holiday (Oct-Dec) pages. I've done a couple pages for 2009 already, mostly everyday happenings, which are more interesting for me. Doing Project 365 last year gave me waaaay too many photos to scrap, which is why I am so "far behind" (I'm a bit anal, and *like* to scrap chronologically, so bite me Stacy Julian, LOL). Hopefully my Friday night crops continue, so I can keep up. I'm a happy scrapper when I'm all caught up (and it HAS happened before)!

Worth a listen...

NPR's reading of the Declaration of Independence.

History. It's a good thing to remember now and then.

Sad.

A little sad that this silliness is over:

SISiversary 09 rocked. I'm finally caught up on sleep and can write a little about it. The drive was exhausting, but I was also able to do the first real thinking in about 7 years (yeah, that's right...Tess is 7...you don't even have to do the math)!

The ride home was more tiring than the ride down. Took me 9 hours to get there, and 11 to get home, because I kept stopping at all the little places I saw on the way there...a quilt shop that turned out to be out of business, Elizabethtown (too bad everything in Glendale was closed on Mondays), another store called House of Quilts that was, sadly, all made-up quilts (Made in China), although I did find a cool new houndstooth backpack pretty cheap (my purple one is just sad). Oddly enough, I didn't really stop to eat (aside from a half a chicken wrap in Elizabethtown); I think not sitting down to a hot meal all day made the drive home even harder.

It's not like I didn't get enough shopping done in the SIS onsite boutique. I actually was able to behave better than at Creative Escape (most likely because things in the SIS boutique were not at CE prices...ooo, snap). There were only about 77 women at SISiversary, compared to 700 at CE, so overall the atmosphere was more friendly and laidback, although I have FINALLY learned (I hope) not to jam back-to-back classes on my schedule, and forget about things like oh, say, lunch (the slight time change messed with me all weekend).

Okay, more photos to make me happy again:

Angela Spangela (aka Professor H.L. and roomie extraordinaire), and Jamie BoBamie, who had the cutest little New Joisey accent...you only heard it on certain words and then BAM it was straight on into a brief Sopranos or RHNJ episode...hee...just for a flash...

Aimee was my late lunch buddy on Friday (and NOT a roomie, which I finally remembered by oh, say...Sunday) and Saturday dinner buddy (fried pickles? really?!) and all around good for a gut-busting giggle at any given moment.

Wendy (spelled it wrong for a reason!), another great, totally laidback & relaxed roomie, she even got up as a karoke virgin and sang Friday night. That's when I knew she'd be game for anything. Sorry I made you mess up a page with my concoction Saturday night. You got me back on video, so we're even...

Oh, just go to my Flickr site and you will see so many happy moments. I'm definitely signing up for next year!

Finally, I am most sad that my Friday night crops seem to be over. Scrapbook Memories is closing for good on July 11th at 5p and will be closed for most of the holiday weekend (including tomorrow). There is a final goodbye crop for Patti (owner) on the 11th, but that's a Saturday, so I think I'll have to skip Friday the 10th. Basically, that means...no more scrappin with my peeps on Friday nights. Sniff.