Finally Back At It!

 Big HELLO to all y'all. So sorry to leave y'all hanging, but I've been round and round, details at the end.

But first, just getting back into the old habit here because I'm hosting SPA next week (this coming Sunday, July 13).

This week at SPA, Marion is hosting with the theme of Keep The Balance.

She used the highwire acrobat stamp from Tim's Stampers Anonymous set Theories.

Now, that had also been my first thought.

But I used this stamp from Theories so as not to compete with her fab artwork.

I also had this CHF Einstein quote stamp which I thought went well with this stamp and the theme.

I stamped the cyclists and quote with Nocturne V-F Clair ink and clear heat-embossed it.

Then got out Distress Inks (Twisted Citron, Carved Pumpkin, Crackling Campfire, Tumbled Glass and Salty Ocean) and my blending brushes for the background.

Three star stickers and a length of checked ribbon for the finish.

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Here is a card made for my oldest grand nephew who turned 4.

I used a red card base I already had plus Avery Elle Everyday designer papers with yellow and blue cardstock scraps.

The only stamping I did was the Happy Birthday with Versamark and white heat-embossed on a red scrap. Cut that with an Avery Elle seal die and layered on a yellow punched circle, then I ran an orange Promarkers around the zigzag border.

I created the 4-alarm strip in PSE (leaving enough room for the circle) and printed out.

The stoplight was cut from Tim's Cityscape Commute Thinlit dies and the building scape was cut from an old Savvy Stamps die. The adorable little fireman is a Free Dearie Dolls digital image I printed out and fussy cut.

And here is the sketch I used.

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I also made a card for my youngest grand niece who turned 1.

I began by cutting the SU card base, then using some Echo Park designer paper for the front panels with the corners notched with a Tonic punch (to mimic the notching on the Spellbinder dies I cut the image layer and pink mat with).

The printed digital image is also by Free Dearie Dolls.

The CAS-ual Fridays Hooray die was cut twice from scraps and placed slightly askew to see both layers.

And the sketch I used.

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I got the jarring blue screen of death on my old desktop on June 21st.

I managed to get on Amazon on my phone and order a new Dell desktop and monitor that night.

The next day I surfed over to Carbonite's website, expecting to be able to order an overnight DVD of my 318 gigs of data, but come to find out, I had to be on a desktop to do that.

So annoying!

 So, I had to wait until Thursday, June 26 to receive my new desktop and get it all set up, then begin downloading my data to there from the Carbonite cloud.

It originally told me it would take 3 days, which beat the DVD delivery by a day. But then it changed the ETA to 6 days! And it took every bit of those 6 days to finish downloading.

By then, my brain was fried from worry and disruption.

I just unplugged and read some books.

(For any of you who were/are into Van Halen, I highly recommend Alex's book Brothers!)

That calmed me down some, but then a longtime neighbor suddenly passed. Not just any neighbor, either. She was a high school classmate and we'd been in drill team together. She lived in her childhood home and her family bought the first house on the street.

So then in my grief, I began feeling off, like my inflammation levels were high, and sure enough they were.

All the stress.

I'm now on meds to bring them down but loopy as a fruit loop.

My data finished restoring on Wednesday July 2nd, but my health probs and the neighbor dying was going on, so while I did continue to make stuff when I felt like it, I just basically ignored the blog.

Then the 4th of July on Friday. Honey likes me to hang with him and we watch stuff together and then light a few sparklers in the back yard.

Then the weekend came with all of the horrible flash flooding in the Texas Hill Country west of Austin.

It triggered me a little, because I was caught in the 1981 Memorial Day Austin Flash Flood on the Colorado River. So many memories came flooding (Ha!) back.

Our campsite was washed away like 5 minutes after we evacuated in a 1970's Chevy pickup driving up through brush to a small ledge in the dark. Thank God for that big truck! We got up there just in time to see the river take our camp through a flash of lightning. We spent 7 hours until daylight not being able to see a thing except pouring rain, praying we'd made it up high enough to avoid getting washed away ourselves. I was never able to enjoy camping after that.

Then these past few days of this week were spent at the doctor and reinstalling programs on the new desktop. I did buy a new version of Photoshop Elements, so I am in the middle of a learning curve on that, but while I waited for the new desktop, I learned how to edit photos on my iphone (but not how to add my watermark). I also figured out how to access my gmail from my phone.

I had to File 13 my HP Laserjet and my CanoScan flatbed scanner as neither would work with Windows 11. My HP inkjet has a flatbed scanner on top, but I have yet to replace the Laserjet. I'm taking a wait and see. I'm gonna see if I can use the inkjet for everything because I have a monthly ink subscription and never even get close to my maximum printed page allowance.

I will have to say: this whole drama was completely my fault not replacing my desktop sooner, and for not doing my own secondary backups to a thumb drive.

I am also amazed at how cheap desktops and monitors have become!

Literally, I'd always spent $2K per computer system to get the largest and most powerful.

This new one cost less than $1K all together, and it has Windows 11 Pro, a Terrabyte of hard disk and a 64-bit fast as heck processor. Plus I got a HUGE 32-inch monitor with built-in sound.

Moore's Law INDEED.

I am enjoying the last days of desktops.

I know they'll have to pry my dying fingers off of mine!

😎

Hope everyone has a great rest of the week and I'll be back on Sunday to host SPA.

Thanks for visiting!

XOX