No Bones About It

2 years ago when Mom and I went to the Scrapbook Expo we took a class by the AMAZING Boxer Scrapbooks! Well over the weekend I finally finished the Album we started to make in that class! Yeah I realize I said 2 YEARS AGO!!

I just was never motivated to sit there and "shave" off the excess paper that overlapped the chipboard album part but lo and behold it is now completed and I think it's FREAKIN ADORABLE!! Of course I'm biased and think my dogs are the cutest things in the world but hey doesn't everyone think that about their own?

So here's my bone album dedicated to my furbabes Buster and Roxy!

The quote on the top says "A House is not a Home without a Dog"

My Roxy when we first got here. And nope that's not a white spot on her, it's a really bad glare from the flash. It's amazing how black and little she was when we got her cause now she's salt and pepper (she's only 2 1/2).

You can kind of see her fur has changed in this one. I just love how she puts her one ear up, it's like she's trying to listen more intently when I talk to her :-)

And here's puppy Buster! He was such a fat roly poly when we got him and I miss him being so little. He'll be four this year and it's so sad! I miss my little puppy!!

Nap Time!! They love to sleep together!

My babies are so sweet when they sleep! I need to remember to look at this whenever they start getting rowdy! haha!

Like I said they LOVE to sleep with each other. This picture makes me smile cause Buster is so tolerant of Roxy. Here he is trying to cuddle her and of course she has to sleep with her paw over his face! I guess she was trying to keep out the light LOL!! 

And here's out Buster Roo as a big dog! He grew too fast for me and I miss being able to pick him up and cuddle him! He was such a Mama's boy when he was a pup, when we first got him we took him to get some stuff at Petsmart and stopped by the video store. I had to hold him the ENTIRE time, even when I gave him to Chuck to hold he whined like crazy. It was really funny!!

This one is from when he was first starting to get bigger. It's his "in between" stage!

And because I loved this entire set of pictures of them sleeping I had to end the album with this picture! They are just so darn cute!! The quote on this page says "A Dog is Man's Best Friend and Vice Versa"

I was really happy to finish this album not only cause I got to throw out the big bag holding all the class contents but I also finished another cute album that can be on display! All my big albums stay in my scrapbook room but this one will be going out :-)

Next up is to finish the album we started in my class last year at the Expo and then of course finishing my layout from this years class. Although that one will be easy peasy just need to get pics developed!!

Diary of a Mad Bride!

Another book down YAY!! Last night I finished reading Diary of a Mad Bride by Laura Wolf! It was so nice to just relax and read as I've been busy crafting lately. Last night I settled into the mancave with my honey and while he played video games I got my read on!

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This book was pretty amusing. It was also a super easy read which made it easy to get it read while on lunch and before bed most nights. It's written in complete diary format which is also a little odd to me and I'm never sure how I really feel about it. On one hand it's cute but on the other I like a little bit more scene setting rather than just this is what happened today.

But anywho, aside from the diary format the book was alright. The "author" of the diary is Amy and she gets engaged and then starts planning her wedding! Yes such a great deep and meaningful topic but hey how often will I have an excuse to submerse myself into reading wedding related books? I'm hoping just this once if all goes the way I want it to :-) So I'm taking advantage and boy oh boy am I so happy I'm not like this woman. Not only do I refuse to let my wedding take over my life I also don't ever want to be a crazy psycho! Yes in the end Amy is totally likable but throughout the book I'm just like holy crap lady what's your problem? It really is just one day out of your entire life and there is absolutely no need to freak out over almost everything.

I guess the part that really turned the book from cute and funny to meh (A.K.A Alright) was when she started complaining that her parents were not giving them that much money and that she felt her grooms family should contribute more but they only contribute the same as her parents. First of all - she's 30 (or 32 I can't quite remember) and second of all she should just be happy they are willing to contribute anything. I mean seriously this chick pissed me off! She should be grateful for what she's getting (which by the way between her parents and his was $10,000) and she's 30 shouldn't her and her older fiancee have some money saved to contribute as well. But no they don't and they aren't willing to apparently figure out any way to save. I just was annoyed by that whole thing and the book went downhill.

If you can put up with a whiny bride who thinks she's entitled to everything without having to do the work then yes you might enjoy this book, but like I said it's alright. A part of me feels I wasted a good slot on my book list for something that just got me annoyed but then they all can't be winners right? My final grade a C-!

POST PUBLISH EDIT - This damn book wasn't even on my list...how the heck did I do that?  

YUM-LICIOUS!

Last week we met for our Monthly Book Club and the book we discussed was The Help, (check out my review here). And since this was the first month that I hosted that I knew I could incorporate the book into the food I was STOKED!! I immediately started looking up recipes for Minnie's Infamous Caramel Cake.

And I found the most perfect recipe from Alpaca Farm Girl's blog. It's SO EASY too!!! Just the way I like things in my life - Amazingly Tasty and Easy!!

To make the cake part you only need: Vanilla Extract, Boxed white cake mix, whole milk, eggs, and butter.

Mix it all together really good!

Pour into your cake pans, that have of course been sprayed with Baking Spray and then lightly dusted with flour.

Then pop those babies into the oven at 350 degrees for 28 minutes!

I let the cake cool over night so that the frosting didn't melt over the top! But I was SO EXCITED to whip up the frosting the next evening, before the ladies arrived of course!

You need: whole milk, vanilla extract, light AND dark brown sugar, butter, and powdered sugar.

First melt your brown sugars and butter in a saucepan over medium heat!

Once those are melted you add in the milk. Remove from heat and then mix in your vanilla and powdered sugar!

And you end up with this drippy looking frosting. Yes it will be dripping but have no fear it dries wonderfully!!

Then just get to frosting. This had to be one of the funnest ways to frost a cake because you just put it on when the frosting is warm and drippy and let it coat your cake! I just kept adding to the top and letting the frosting ooze down the sides. In order to keep it mess free I put aluminum foil underneath all the "sides" of the cake and then when the frosting dried I removed the foil and VOILA -

Isn't she so pretty? Yet another food item I'd love to have as a wall color in my house :-) This cake was so easy to make and so easy to frost. Now I was just hoping it was delicious!

Of course it was delicious people! I mean come on I made it, how can it go wrong?? HAHA Just kidding I've had plenty of bad food experiences but O-M-G this was NOT one of them! This cake was AMAZING!! And I'm not a huge caramel lover but I could've eaten the entire thing!!

This is all we had left after each of us (total of 7 including Chuck) had a slice and then I had to send some home with everyone :-) I am dead serious that was all that was left of the cake Thursday after the book club ladies had departed.

Oh YUM!! Excuse the slice of bread but check that out! It makes my mouth water right now, in fact I wish I could go home and whip up another one but I know it's probably super unhealthy!!

Thanks to Alpaca Girl for providing me with such an AMAZING recipe for what I'm sure is what Minnie made in The Help. For those of you who've read the book YOU MUST MAKE THIS CAKE, for those of you who have not read the YOU MUST READ THE BOOK AND MAKE THIS CAKE!!

Y-U-M-M-Y!!!

2 Year Anniversay Celebrations

Over the weekend I SCRAPBOOKED A LOT!! I was able to scrapbook on Saturday and Sunday afternoons and it was SO NICE!! One of the layouts I finished was pictures from our 2009 2 Year Anniversary!

I started with an awesome Storyteller's Pack and then let the creative juices start flowing!

You'll have to excuse my appearance in the pictures. I was actually really sick for this anniversary but we still wanted to celebrate. My honey even made us a special Anniversary cake!

And of course we did gifts, Chuck a new statue and me a photo frame I'd been eyeing for weeks :-)

It was so much fun working with PINK!!

Hippity Hoppity

Another Storyteller's pack here for you! I had this adorable Easter related pack sitting around waiting patiently for me to crack it open! So I did and what better to use it for then EGG DYING!! (Crack, egg, get it?)

In 2008 we had an egg dying night at my parents and the pictures are pretty cute! Here is the two page layout of us dying the eggs! I just love Storyteller's embellishments! For someone who is against kits I love these cause I can arrange it however I want and it still looks awesome!

That picture of Chuck and I is one of my favorites so I was super happy to get it into my scrapbook!

Doesn't Chuck look hard at work? He's such a sport and gets into these things just for me! Although secretly I think he likes getting to act like a kid again! Oh yeah and check the picture of me, Chuck and Mandy. Our faces really tell it all!

Since I had leftover paper and a really cute Easter title embellishment I had to create just one more page! Having only 2 pictures from Easter 2008 I didn't want the hear to be forgotten so I cropped one and then just added in the other. It's a simple one page layout but it's so darn cute!

I am so happy to be getting back into scrapbooking! I was working diligently on my best friends album that I haven't done anything else and was feeling a little burnt out on all the wedding stuff, so to get down to business and do some random layouts has been AWESOME!! Now I really can't wait for the crops that Mom and I have planned to go to!!

The Last Song

I hope everyone had a FABULOUS weekend! Mine was actually very productive as well as fun! I was able to scrapbook a bunch, but I was also able to check another book off my list!! Sunday morning I woke up at 7:30 and immediatly dove in the book The Last Song by Nicholas Sparks because I knew I wanted to not only finish the book but also watch the movie version that morning!

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First off I am so HAPPY I did not finish this book while at the gym. For the last 20% of the book (yes the Kindle does it in percentages) I cried my eyes out. I must have had to put my Kindle down at least 5 times to get my eyes to quit dripping and start focusing! Had I been at the gym bawling my eyes out while on the treadmill I'm sure they would have asked me to leave :-)

This book was, as almost all Nicholas Sparks books are, phenomal! I wish I had been able to read it when I was 17 instead of now at 24, but nonetheless I was still touched by every moment in it.

It's the tale of a young rebellious child named Ronnie who is forced (along with her younger brother) to spend the summer with her father that she hasn't spoken to in 3 years! From the get go you can almost predict that there is going to be some sob ending that has nothing to do with the love story that begins but I won't spoil the heart wrenching storyline. Just know that along with the love you get to see develop between Ronnie and (the complete opposite of her) Will, but you also get to see a broken bond between Father and Daughter mended! This book is a light fluffy read that I'd recommend for summer. Maybe if you read it out in the sun while at the beach, the pool, or just out camping you may not cry so much! Laying in bed while the weather is clouded over didn't help me much! HAHA!

Now onto the movie. I will never understand why Nicholas Sparks lets these damn movie people change his story so much! Yes most of the big parts were the but this movie does not do the book any justice at all. It reminded me A LOT of A Walk to Remember. The book is 200% better than the movie and I would never recommend that you watch the movie first for this one. The book has to be read first and then if you really want to I'd say watch the movie, honestly I'd skip the movie altogether!

First - ALL of the acting was pretty horrible. I understand it's not meant to be as dramatic as the book and it's appeal was really to the younger crowd of teenage girls but seriously the acting was HORRIBLE! I was let down by ALL of the actors! I don't think they cast the roles very well either, Miley Cyrus definitely was not the best Ronnie I could chose, they needed someone a little les Smiley :-) and a little more sullen! The father role was totally off balance, I mean come on! If you read the book you picture him completely different than Greg Kinnear, but I will give props to Greg Kinnear, at times he was able to pull of the clueless Dad who gives you a chuckle once in awhile. The character from Will wasn't too bad, essentially throw any good-looking teenage actor in there and you've got what you're looking for, but again the acting was pretty craptastic. The only person I felt was cast correctly was the little brother Jonah. The actor they got for him (he was also the kid in Martian Child) was pretty good, not quite as the book described, but the playfulness and cleverness was there!

I understand why Nicholas Sparks let them turn his books into movies, I really do, but I will never understand why the movies can never do the book justice. I mean seriously his books are so emotional and so heartfelt that you'd think they'd be able to pull it off a little more in his books. BTW I'm excluding The Notebook from this opinion as I felt that movie was phenomal!

I'd give the book a solid A and the movie a B. Don't get me wrong I didn't care for the movie that much but I can gurantee that teenages ate it up! I know if I was 16 or 17 I wouldn't have loved it!

Next up I am going to start a book called Julia's Chocolates, a great friend recommended it! And I'm also reading Diary of a Mad Bride right now! It's a library book so I can only read it on my lunch break or at home since it's impossible to read paperback at the gym!

Anyone else read The Last Song and/or saw the movie? I'd love feedback about what YOU thought!

Birthday Bash!!

It's BIRTHDAY TIME!! No not really but I was pretty excited to finish up the layouts for my birthday BBQ at my parents last year! Remember the croquet layout? Yup these are all from the same day! But these are ALL ABOUT ME!!

Since I knew I wanted to do something with some cute BBQ stickers and I knew they wouldn't work for my gift pictures I figured what the heck, use the same background paper and solid colors and then have fun! That's exactly what I did, no matchy matchy for me this time!

I just LOVE this page! Not only did I get to use fun paper and a nice picture of my Paps but I also got use AWESOME BBQ stickers! I found these a long time ago and I've been dying to use them!

And then I wanted to do more girly for pictures of me opening gifts! I got these little embellishments from some random pack of cut outs! I love them!

The final piece to a birthday layout is of course the Cake!! I found some awesome funfetti paper awhile back and since my Mom knows how much I love funfetti we of course had a funfetti cake for my birthday! Hello perfect opportunity to use some funfetti paper!!

Beautiful cake right? I know my mouth was salivating the whole time I was working on this layout!

In case you didn't notice (I'm sure you did) this layout is not a Storyteller's pack, it's just my own creativity with my limited supply of birthday embellishments! But because I had to get creative what did I turn to? My cricut of course! I used the DoodleCharms cartridge to create the party hats and then used Star brads as the toppers!

Can you tell that I love pink, green, and yellow! I think for my next birthday layout I'll need to be brave and try new colors!! :-)

Croquet Time!

I am SO EXCITED about this layout! I used another Storyteller's Pack to start creating it and I just LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE how it turned out! I still need to finish the journaling but that will only take a few minutes!

Here's the first part! It was for my Birthday BBQ and we had to play some croquet!

Isn't that Backyard Fun embellishment so cute? I loved the colors that Storyteller's included in this pack!

Check out the cute croquet mallet stickers! Mom and I found those awhile back and I was so happy I finally got to use them!

The second part of the layout!

Of course we had to showcase the Winners! Yup Mom was #1

I love how this layout turned out!

What do you think?

Stars & Stripes!

Since I got super inspired to scrapbook again after going to the Expo I decided to spend some quality time in my room on Sunday! Needing to break away from working soley on my best friends Wedding Album I decided to break out some cute little pages that I got from the awesome Storytellers Club to see if those helped me get my scrapbook groove back!

And yes Kendall got her groove back! I was able to complete a 4 page layout of our 4th of July pictures from last year when we went out to see my parents! Excuse the mess in the pictures as I didn't feel like cleaning my scrapbooking table before taking pictures..

I just love that Storyteller's gives you some paper and the embellishments so you can either take their idea for their layout or you can create your own! I'm not usually a fan of kits but I do love how these turned out and I was able to alter them to how I want them :-)

These are pictures of Chuck and I playing Ladder Ball!

The second 2 page layout! I used just plain background paper on this one as I didn't have enough of the pattern paper from Storyteller's, these were a basic kit but the deluxe kit gives you more paper!

I really loved the embellishment down at the bottom cause I was able to add each couple's names! YAY!

 

I still think I want to add a little something to the red stripe at the top but I'm just not sure what! For now I can check this one off my list of layouts to do!!

It's obvious I slacked on my 2011 Scrapbooking goal for the past few months but I'm okay with that as I'm making up for it now, stay tuned for my Birthday BBQ layout and my Easter Layout!!

CUPCAKE TIME!!

Since these turned out so cute and so delish I just had to share a picture!! It was one of my coworkers 1st year anniversary at our company so we decided to celebrate! Me being the official office baker I was happy to whip up some of these yummy cupcakes!!

I just used a Butter Yellow Cake Recipe (out of a box) and then Milk Chocolate Frosting!! I added the little pink dots on the top to add some color!

And because I've been doing really well with my healthy lifestyle I only ate ONE of these cupcakes!! ONLY ONE!! To avoid eating more I didn't bring any home and I took the remaining four that didn't fit in my carrier down to my Mom's house for them to have as a dessert!!

I have decided though that I LOVE cupcakes so much more than cake. I know it's not a big difference but they are just the perfect size dessert and easier to pawn off on other people :-)

It's That Time of Year Again!!

So this past weekend guess where I got to go??? To the Scrapbook Expo!!! My Mom, Aunt Stacy, and Cousin Jayleen and I all went again this year!! Only this year we left even earlier because we all took classes at 9 AM!!! You'd think we'd plan it so we all took a class together but nope, we all took separate classes!!

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The class I took was called Yummy Layouts put on by Melissa Frances using the Kitschy Kitchen line!!

I am not usually a fan of classes, in fact I only took this class cause my Mom was really wanting to take a Copic class at 9 am and we like to shop the floor together so I figured why not take a class and then her and I can get our shop on!! I just loved this class. The instructor was really awesome and the layout turned out ADORABLE!! I'm actually going to use the layout we made to scrap my pictures from the class, even though it's for a recipe, I thought what a fun way to scrapbook the expo :-) Once I get it scrapped I'll post pictures!!

Even though I was dead tired from spending all those late nights finishing the Hunger Games Series I still had a blast!! Granted by 2 PM I felt dead so I grabbed a Mocha that gave me a little pep in my step but man oh man did I crash hard. I guess I had too much caffeine (a giant redbull first thing at 7 AM) and then the mocha cause I only got a little jolt of energy from my coffee and then I was pooped!! Mom was patient with me though and we both had a successful day of shopping!!

I scored A LOT of wedding related stuff which was SO EXCITING!! But I also scored some AWESOME baseball stuff, including MLB Oakland A's and Baltimore Oriole's stickers that are AMAZING!! I can't wait to scrapbook the next set of baseball picutres for my Paps Album!!

Anyone else do anything exciting over the weekend?