Hobbies

I know I have always thought that it would be so nice to be on bed rest, though this thought usually comes during the most chaotic and hectic times of the year when you just want an escape. It has been 5 days since I have left our apartment and I'm discovering new things to keep me off of my feet and entertained. My first choice of entertainment has been reading. This works great until my eyes go blurry from focusing (sign #1 that you have read too much). Choice 2 was the simple mundane relief of watching television. In the beginning I was grateful that our cable box records shows so you can fast forward through commercials, but I quickly realized that 99% of the shows which were set to record are from HGTV. Now HGTV is great, but I have decided you can only watch so many shows about redesigning your house without going nuts. So I figured we have hundreds of channels to choose from so I began the joyous past time of channel surfing! I decided T.V. was out as an option when the most appealing thing on was Curious George. :) Then came along choice 3...surfing the Internet. It is amazing how many cool ideas and free patterns/classes/recipes you can find online, but there is also an immense amount of useless stuff on the other end of the spectrum. Once I got passed these choices, I decided to be more creative.

My favorite hobbies have always included reading, cooking & baking, and scrapbooking. Now I have tried reading and still enjoy it, but not for terribly prolonged time periods. Cooking and baking is out since it requires standing for the most part so my kitchen time has been limited to getting a drink or leftovers from the fridge (Brian has been an awesome sport about cooking dinners. Even though he feels out of his element in the kitchen, he has done great!). So it is time to fall back into scrapbooking which is great anyway since I want to be able to keep up on scrapbooks for Kaidrei and hopefully catch up on the past for Brian and I at some point.

I've been toying with the idea of doing my scrapbooking digitally on the computer for quite a while, thanks to the influence of my sisters. It makes a lot of since at this point because the papers and elements are reusable and so much of it is available for free online and when I scrapbook with paper I can't seem to not make a mess of little pieces of paper...just ask my mother! :) So I have had a program to use, pictures to scrapbook, digital papers and things, and a how-to book for quite a while, but was always missing one key element: TIME! Well, imagine that, I suddenly have time on my hands (at least for a little while longer). So I have delved in and spent time organizing my photos and scrapbooking things.

I came across some free classes online about photo editing so I decided to give it a try since it is more fun to scrapbook with good photos. It is amazing how simple things can be when someone will take you step by step through the process. After an hour of playing with a few photos I feel like I've made some progress learning how to make photos look better. Here is an example of a picture of my nephew Trevor from last Christmas...

Before ---------------- After

It may not be the best, but gol' darn it, I'm proud of myself. :)