Don't you wish you were here?

Lovely weather we are having today. Looks like it's going to be a white Christmas much to my dismay. This morning we started with thunderstorms, pouring rain, sleet and maybe some hail. Now we have snow coming down and really strong winds. The local news website says 74,000 are without power right now with an estimated restoration time of midnight Christmas Eve night. My parents lost their power for about an hour but have since gotten it back. We are just praying we don't loose ours. Thankfully most of our power lines are underground so unless they loose a transformer (which is entirely possible) we should be okay. Winds are between 20-30 mph with frequent gusts up to 40 mph. Trees are down all over the place. Snow is suppose to start coming down harder at any time now and continue until morning with up to 5 inches by us, more in some areas. Here's a few pictures from our back deck.

This one was taken earlier and shows our neighbors trampoline standing straight up thanks to a gust of wind. Amazingly it hasn't flipped over yet. Wind must have planted it pretty good into the ground when it set it upright.

And then about an hour later I took these. Visiabilities way down already and you can see the wind gusting. Notice in the first one ou can't even see the trampoline through the blowing snow.

Don't you wish you were here??

Thanksgiving

Just a few photos to share from Thanksgiving.

This was the view from my grandparents house...very appropriate for Thanksgiving.

Then a few from dinner at Steve and Lisa's.

Me and John:

Julie and Gabriele

Looking for toothpicks lost in the Heath dessert...again.

Randy cleaning off the turkey

and his new best friend..Karen and Joe's dog Beasley

I know it's been forever...

It has been a long time since I've blogged but I'm going to make a renewed effort again as not to get in trouble with certain CA cousins. :-) So without further ado I bring you...Turkey Cookies!

Right before Thanksgiving I had Gabriele over to help me create these. The recipe is on the Pillsbury website and was really pretty easy. A little difficult to squeeze the orange frosting for small hands but Gabriele did a great job and we both had a lot of fun.

Up next is Christmas cookies and Gabriele has asked for Elvf cookies. I'm still looking to find such a cookie cutter.

THANK YOU AUNT GENNY!!!

I came home from work today to find a package containing this:





It's a cricut!!! My own personal die cutter. So exciting. I had been debating about getting one but had held off and my aunt just sent me own. I was shocked!! Haven't been able to play with it yet but I'm definitely going to need some cartridges now. It comes with the George one which looks like a great font and has some shapes like flowers as well that you can cut out. Can't wait to start creating LO's with it!! Thank you so much Aunt Genny! It was a great surprise.

LO's from the Shack

Had a wonderful time at my annual scrapbook weekend at the shack. It was wonderful as always, much need and tons of food and fun.

Here are some of the 17 pages (a new record for me) that I created.

This was John's favorite from the weekend:

My favorite:

A few more LO's

Most are from my class. A few are some that I just finally got finished.

New Layouts

I've been busy this month taking an online class at www.nyscraps.com where I do one scrapbook layout (LO) every 48 hours. I've amazed myself that I've stayed caught up so far and have met every deadline and there is only two more LO's to go!! Here are a few I've done so far: If you click on the image, you should be able to see a bigger image of each LO.