So the water pressure is still not good. In fact it is so bad that I might as well not have water. I really was hoping I could cope. But, after I realized that I was calling the water department for the third time in one afternoon, I knew I wasn’t coping very well! Then, just to show it could, the electricity decided to go out. There was no warning and no fanfare, it just stopped. It took about an hour for it to decide to come back on.

To cheer myself up, I decided to clean house. You know how a clean house always makes a woman feel better. It took a little doing but I finally got into the spirit of the thing. First you see I have to take a pain pill - doc says I gotta start taking advantage of these things. One pill in 6 months is really not going to help anything. After the pill was taken I waited about an hour to be sure it was kicking in real good. Then I looked at the dining room table and decided to wait a little longer. Eventually, of course I started vacuming. Then by the time I got to the next room, the living room, I caught a crazy bug and decided it was time to rearrange the furniture. Keep in mind, the pill had to be taken for the pain in the hip and back, but I was still going to rearrange two sofas, a heavy recliner chair and all that other stuff. Oh, I did it but it took a long, long time. Things had to be moved just a little at a time. I really like how it all turned out. AND it did cheer me up to see it done.

While cleaning I discovered a big mess in the cat tree. Dayton had been shedding his manliness all over the top perch where he likes to hang out. Look at this big pile of Dayton that I pulled off that perch. He is mad at me now as I found this stash and threw it away. I have not a clue as to what he was going to do with it all. Clio has plenty of fur of her own so he was not going to be able to impress her with it. There is enough there to make a stuffed toy!

After the cleaning - or rather when I could not bring myself to clean anymore, it was time to clean myself. Of course, with no water pressure there is no such thing as a shower. Also, with the water pressure so low, hubbie had instructed me to turn off the hot water heater so as to not burn it out. He is out of town, but if that water heater gets burned up, he is the one who will have to replace it. It is bad enough that I have to manually fill the toilet tanks up. But, now I thought I had no hot water for a bath even though it would take 45 minutes to fill up a tub. So this is where PIONEER WOMAN comes into being. I reasoned that pioneer women kept clean and kept their children clean. They had to draw water from a well or spring, then haul it into the house, heat it up and pour it into a tub. All I had to do was let the water run for a bit to fill up the tub and then heat some more up to get a good bath. Well, I had a good bath! I dug out my big canning pan and used it to heat the water. It was amazing at how fast it warmed up. I used the guest bath tub as it is a whole lot smaller than the master bath and so did not need too much water. Once in the tub, I even washed my hair. It was a tight fit, but I was able to lay back in the water to get my hair wet. Thank goodness for short hair.

So now it is bed time for me - although it is almost morning I think now I will be able to sleep. I know why Pioneer woman did not need sleeping pills. The work to get clean every night must have really worn them out. Of course, the work to keep a house clean every day must have also contributed to the ability to sleep. Though, I wonder if they kept as clean as we do? If everybody had a little body odor and did not bath on a once or twice daily basis, then it probably was acceptable not to smell like roses everyday of the week. The legend of the Saturday night bath has to have some basis in facts, right?

So the other day I was discussing with hubbie the fact that we STILL have not got a back up generator for the house. Every winter since we have been up here in the country, I have to listen to him fret, cuss and carry on when the power goes out. He just knows we are going to loose all the plumbing and lots of other bad stuff happen. This man who drives me crazy in the winter with this cussin’ about this looked at me and said that is just country living and I needed to get used to it. Of course, I called him on it real fast!

For four days now the water has been trying to make up its mind if it wants to work its way all the way up here to the top of the hill. Taking showers is not an option. Washing dishes must be done when everyone else is asleep and not draining the water pressure. On Friday the water company turck and men was out at the meter looking at something, but did not bother to discuss it with me. Hubbie in Houston keeps asking me if I have called the water company and now Dayton is bugging me about it. He likes to drink the water from the tap in the bathtub. He sits by the stream of water after I turn it on just bit and laps it up - really cute to watch. Only, he likes a little water pressure too. But, hey that is country living.

Coping with the water was something I was doing just fine. Then this afternoon right after lunch, the lights just stopped. There was not a thunder roll to be heard and there had not been any flickering but it just stopped. I began to regret stopping for lunch and a little rest afterward. It was my intention to have myself a Sunday nap. But, once the power went out, all thoughts of napping devolved into gee I want to get on my computer. Funny how that happens. A nap was great until I FORCED into taking one! After about two hours it came back on, after I had read most of my book that I was saving for tonight. But, hey, that is country living.

Later on after the power came back on and it occurred to me that I needed to get the trash out, it struck me again about country living. I had two bags and the double bagged cat litter to take out and so had to take two trips. It was after dark since I was late about doing it and had to carry a flashlight to get out to the trash barrel. That was it took two trips. See, I also carried my truck keys cause the lights come one when you hit the unlock button on them. And it hit me, yep that is country living when your trash barrel is so far out you cannot see it from the porch light and you use your headlights to make it down the porch steps!

Moving on

I wanna tease you about the next thing I am making and also would like your opinions. Below is the hint/teaser. The question is about shadows. See how the laces are on top of the shoe? The really needed something to make them stand out - but I hesitated to put shadows behind them because scrappers can be so fussy about that. So what I did was put a depth shadow all around them - its non directional so no one would need to worry about lining up their own shadows with the angle of these. Would you as a scraper be upset with this or would you find that OK? (This is just the rough prototype and yes there are some ends that don’t match up, but that will be fixed on the final product.)

So what am I working on? Well, when it is done I will tell you!

Big, Big News! I bit the bullet and applied at Divine Digital and they hired me!!! I am soo excited and thrilled to be a part of such a great place. Its almost as exciting as having my own store. And you know what is even more exciting to a techie like me? They use a different program for their storefront so I get to explore some more code and stuff. LOL - I don’t know what impresses me the most their software or their sales!   about ten kits uploaded there already - rather Photoshop actions and kits and overlays. The previews there are to be larger than the ones I have already made so I am having to redo them. Since I lost most of my raw Photoshop files when the external crashed, this is going to be a little harder. But, since I was having to redo them anyway, I put a little extra Divine Digital on them. You gotta go look and see what I mean. They look OH so Divine Dahling!

I have not given up faith in my own store nor do I ie that DigiScrapStation is less of a store than Divine Digital, but hey, have you looked at their membership numbers? or how many people they have online at any one time? One day DigiScrapStation will be there, but it is not there now. We still need to pay our dues and work it, work it, work it.

My new kit is there even before I got it up in my own store. That is sad isn’t it? But as I was getting stuff ready it just cried out to me not to make it wait anymore. Maybe some of you remember me talking about a cat fairy? Well this is the kit with the cat fairy, the firefly and the green giraffe. Oh and there is a purple frog, and . . . . well just have a look at the preview:

You can click on it to go to Divine Digital to see it in a larger version. This is a huge kit, it has over 150MB of goodies - 20 papers and all those creatures you see plus of course some frames and some tags and the usual stuff you need to make layouts. I really don’t know how I will use them in a layout yet, but I am working on it. I think a cool photo of one of the cats being mystical would fit right in.

Speaking of cats, I have decided to quit teasing Dayton about his bad breath. It struck me the other day that his bad breath was really a sign of his manliness. He has that strong, awful fish breath that reaches out and chokes you from five feet away. It really is bad when he is laying on my pillow next to my head at night and decides to do a little grooming. Clio’s breath does not even compare - of course she is  female and very queenly with it.  But, since I took away Dayton’s other manliness traits, if you know what I mean, and I laugh at him when he runs to the top of the cat tree when he hears dogs, I have decided not to carry on anymore about this manly bad breath. Clio must like it so maybe it is a thing that attracts female cats and shows those females that here is a man that will hunt and feed their young without any worry.

I’ve given up trying to figure out how Dayton does it. There are times when Clio gets so made at him that she will chase him from one end of the house to the other. Then all he has to do is just walk close to her, plop down, turn on his back and she comes running to give him a bath. He even pushes her away from the food dishes. There are two of them and if she is eating out of the one closest dishes to where he is at, he pushes her aside and makes her eat out of the other dish. There is something to be learned here, but I am not sure yet what it is. Maybe that men tend to take what they want and expect women to like it? Na, the real lesson is that woman get back at the men in the long run - Clio sure does . . .LOL

So let me show you the new layout I made yesterday. These are the pictures I had made last Spring when I got my long hair chopped off. I really am proud that I did this, and hubbie likes the photos and did not even bat an eye when I told him it cost $30 for them. Of course, I told him I probably should not have done it and did not know what got into me –kind of apologizing ahead of time. So what else could he say? well, enough blatherin’ and here is the layout.

 Papers, trim and stitches by Scrappy Cats Midnight Moon, the bird is by Royanna Fritschmann, the swirl on the torn papers is BannerWoman’s, I made the torn papers up for this layout as well as the alpha as I went along . Midnight Moon was one of the first kits I ever madw way back when and it is nice to know that it still holds up to scrutiny over a year later. Boy, there has been a lot of growth and learning since then for sure.

No Freebie today, I just have been real busy getting the forum for ADSDesigners set up and working out the bugs and putting the modifications in. Just tonight I spent hours looking for something to allow users to get email notifications when new topics were posted. But, there just is not one. I did rebuild the smiley population there and will do the same for the other forums I manage. That took some time to figure out too. There was a mod for sending digests to readers, but it required a lot of hand coding  some stuff to do in Linux - I did not even know there was such a language. They got my hopes all up and then when I read the installation guide it says just don’t try this if you don’t understand what I am talking about. Oh well.

Anyway, no freebie, but will work on that for you all. Maybe before the weekend is over, but no promises!

I’ve been growing increasingly concerned lately at the restirctions that have been placed on the use of kits. Of special note was the idea that if you purchased a personal use kit, some designers don’t want you even making gifts for family and friends with it. They are supposed to purchase their own kits. Now, I don’t know about you, but my family and friends do not know the first thing about making digital layouts and would never purchase a kit from any designer. (Not even me!) Another restriction that I was concerned about was the Commercial Use items being restricted in many ways. Some designers do not want their CU stuff being used to make freebies, they don’t want it being used for Web pages, they don’t want it being used for blogs, they don’t want it being used for making more CU items and the list goes on. Gee, when you pay the bucks you should be able to use it how you like. IN my opinion, a CU item is something that as a deisgner I have made, considered the possibilities and then turned it loose without looking back.

Terms of Use have become very tricky. It used to be, you just figured the designer did not want you making money off personal use items and but that it was OK to use CU items for things that you were going to make money from. From that viewpoint, one had to skim the TOU just enough to determine that yes this is good for this or that. The writing was technical but hey, there was not much to worry about as there were only two option. NOW - I had to read and read again to see if I can understand what is permitted and chances are I still am guessing.

For example, this is a quote directly out of a CU item’s TOU: “You cannot, to create any thing using any of my digital products for resale as a commercial digital file”. Just what does that mean? It seems to mean not to make money from anything made with her digital products, but hey, it is titled Commercial Use! Or what about this: “Do not add them to any collections for sale or downloading.” Well, when I take a bow and recolor it, then put it into a kit, that is exactly what I am doing. So does that mean this CU item of not really CU?

Of course, designers say to just contact them if you have questions. Well, I really don’t have the urge to have tou discussions over everything I buy  - I would much rather spend my time doing other stuff. Looking through my CU folder, I realize that I have used some items in ways that I should not have used them. My biggest sin is making freebies for you all with CU items that designers don’t want used for freebies. So, I guess I am going to be busy the next couple of days reading TOU’s and sorting them into folders to keep me from being naughty.

All of this angst has led me to revamp my TOU. It is now a real easy, one size fits all. I am going to post it here on my blog for all to see. I draw the line though, at going back and redoing all my zips to put the updated TOU in them. I might do a few at my store and at ScrappersZone where I would be the only one doing all the work. But, at MooTwo Designs where someone else does all the uploading and stuff, I am going to settle for an announcement in the forum.

 Moving ON

Let me tell you about my new actions that I have in the stores now. One makes the cutest firebugs - the other two makes metal rimmed tags and have a chain in them to hang them on. Each action, the bugs and the tags has two actions. The tags will make a plain tag and a tag with your background papers in it. The bugs come in the two versions you see below. All three actions are on sale at DigiScrapStation for 20% off through the weekend. But, no 

Your freebie is a new kit I made the other day - and yes it has the new TOU in it. Its a kind of big kit and I broke it into two parts so be sure to download both parts.

 Potpourri first Download (247) Potpourri second Download (233)

As I mentioned in my July 4th post, the hubbie and younger daughter went on a motorcycle day trip to Lukenbach, Texas to a motorcycle rally. The Last Chance Forever group was there and my daughter got lots and lots of photos. Hubbie was so upset with himself that he did not use the camcorder to take movies of them. He said he stood like fool with the camera in his hands so engrossed in what they were saying and doing that he did not remember the camera. My daughter made an awesome slide show of the photos and it is on her blog at: http://hawgsnpaws.com/?page_id=30 Please go see and leave her some loving for this great work she did. She makes great slide shows and does the music thing just right. Here is a great photo of an eagle she took.

All Scrappy Cats Products at ScrappersZone are 65% off included the Commercial Use Products. Sale lasts through Sunday.

http://www.scrapperszone.com/store/

The freebie is late, July 4th is almost half over. But it is my hope that you all are having family time and getting lots of photos. Then you can come back here to get this mini kit to help you scrap them.

Hubbie and youngest daughter have gone on a motorcycle trip to Lukenbach, Texas for the day. There is a rally of some sort going on there and they are going to have a bald eagle on exhibit. The Last Chance Forever/The Bird of Prey Conservancy will be there for it. Do you just love the idea of helping people help our awesome birds and eagles? They have a place on their site where you can donate -its at: http://www.lastchanceforever.org/helping/giving.asp If you make a donation to them and send me some kind of proof that you did so - I will send you a $15 gift certificate to my store. A good way to send me proof would be to forward your PayPal reciept - xxx out or delete any information you do not wish to share. The first paragraph would be fine - the part that says “Dear so and so —This email confirms that you have paid Last Chance Forever the Bird of Prey Conservancy (rschmid-lcf@raptor.net) $xxxxx USD using PayPal.” Send me that and I will send you the gift certificate. I think this would be a great way to celebrate July 4th, by giving something to help provide care for the living American symbol of freedom. Oh, my email addy -is scrappycats at catstation.net

Anyway, about the motorcycle trip, my daughter wanted to go so her daddy and her are making a fun day out of it. I could have gone, and almost did. But, first of all it is a 300 mile round trip and since there is no way I could not have rode the motorcycle that long, I would have had to follow them in the car. Then, they left so early - around seven, which meant getting out of bed around 5:00. Now to me that is just barbarian - getting up that early cannot be good for you!

I hope they have a good time. Hubbie has rigged up a cam corder holder to go around his neck so he can take movies while riding the motorcycle. We’ll see how that works. He had the camera mounted on their bikes for a trip or two, but the daughter’s Harley vibrates so it made a jiggly movie and on his bike it just was not working either. When the camera was mounted on the bike all one could see was the view ahead which was generally just road. All the interesting stuff is usually along side the road.

With them gone, my July 4th celebration will be with a sister in law. I have been invited over for a huge meal tonight and I am hoping for some fireworks once it gets dark. I am looking forward to getting out. Then, tommorrow, there is going to be a fish fry up here on the hill. That is going to be a great feast. I am making pies and a green jello salad thing for it. YUMMY - the nephew-in-law (is there such a thing?) fries up the best fish.

So, here is my July 4th freebie for you all. It has seven papers, two ribbons, two bows, a tag, a frame and two chipboard pieces. For two of the papers I took public domain pictures and adjusted them to make papers, adding textures and making them a little less realistic and more for background papers.

Downloaded a total of 350 times

WHOPPPEEEE IT IS HERE!

The Yahoo Group called Aspiring Digital Designers has put together a great collab for you all to download for FREEEE! Each of us has our part on our blog. Here is the preview of my part, you can download it by clicking on the download image below the preview. My portion consists of two clusters, six papers, six stamp motifs, and a few odds and ends I made for the clusters. Not all the pieces of the clusters are included individually - the terms of use that came with them would not allow that.  OH - yes that is a shadow on the clusters, the one with the jar really needed it and I know it is almost impossible to put those in on a flat file. The crochet flower has one of those shadow things too. 

Downloaded a total of 1442 times

To pick up the other parts of this awesome collab, visit these blogs below.The collab links are supposed to be up for a month, but the longer you wait to get them, the harder it will be to find them among the blog posts of the various designers. So - you have some time, but don’t take forever - lol

Aeryn-Munchins Scraps
Becky-beckytx
Beth-Lighthouse Designs
Brookeat Ahh Scraps
Crystal-Digiscrapalicious)
Crystal(Scrap Amazed)
Dawn-Bearlyscrapping Designs
DebbieBeckmoore’s Designs
Debi-Sweet Adaline Designs
Denise-Crazy Diamond
Donna-MamaDukez Creations
Erika-PinkuPixie
Heather-HSDesigns
Jaydensmama
Joni at Ahh Scraps
Joy-Share Joy
Karen-Lighthouse Scrapping
Kathy-Carolinagirl
Kathy-Scraploft
Kay-Grandma’s Pixels
Kelly KSH Scrapping
Kim-Kim’s Scrappin
Krisi’s Kreations
Lara- Lara’s Digi World
Leaonna-Busy Scrappin
Lori Scripity Scrap
Melanie-ByGodsDesign
Melanie-ScrappinAsitHappens
Melanie-SweetAsMel
Michaele-BurkhartScrapZone
Mollie SwordaScrappin
Monica - Random Inspirations
Nadine Scrappinmama’s Digitals
Nancy Scrappy Cats
Nikki JustPassinThrough
Patty-Secondhand Angel
Penny-Allicat Kreations
Rachael-Creations by Rachel
Shannon-One Scrap at a Time
Sheila-Abyscraps
Stella-Stellarific Creations
Sue-Scrap Stew Sue
Utski Scraps

So, June is almost over - its one of my favorite months and I have a coupon for you all hoping you will cheer me up by purchasing some of my product. Its good for 50% off all my products until midnight tommorrow night - So you will have to be real quick to use it. The coupon code is: sc75bigones
at DigiScrapStation.com

While you are there checkout the other designers. There is some great talent there

Moving on

I want to give you a hint of something exciting that is going to happen July 1 - look for a huge collab kit coming out in a bunch of blogs - I am really excited about the pieces of this I have seen. Last I saw, there were over 40 designers participating this collab. It is very exciting to be a part of something like this.

Moving on

 I completed another layout - this is my precious Clio as she explores one of the drawers of my desk. She loves getting in there but does not seem to stay there long. Its a huge drawer where I file some bills and other stuff and heavy. I have one of those huge CEO type desks. Hubbie rescued ithe desk from the front yard of my aunts a long time ago. He put so much work into restoring it that doubt I will ever get rid of it.

For this layout I used a kit called Summer in the Country - its my gift for participants in the ScrappersZone Ad Challenge in July.  You might want to check it out - a great kit. The kit has twenty papers and oodles of elements to help you create your layouts. Here is a preview of the kit:

I get so much done, when you go away
The days seem so much longer the nights so profitable
There is no guilt for hours alone or being busy
When you go away

I don’t sleep so much when you go away
The bed is so pointless and stupid
Because there is no one there to keep me company
When you go away

My soul seems missing vital parts and the world is not all there
When you go away - It’s as if I am half alive or not all aware
Could you be taking part of me with you?
Or is it that I don’t care

The food is tasteless, the television a bore
The nights so quiet since I can’t hear you snore
The sun is dim and the trees so gray
I shut myself up in my room and hope it will all go away

I work and work the whole night long
My heart knows the notes that are missing from this song
When you go away

Working is my antidote and my salvation
It helps the hours pass and keeps the minutes from dragging
But it can only hold me for so long and doesn’t seem to care
That I am not whole or happy when you go away