Keepin' On with the Keepin' On

The thought occured to me just now while I was using the restroom (who doesn't do 90% of their thinking there??), that we are the kind of family you would see on "It's Me or the Dog", and laugh at because they're so ridiculous about the things they let their dogs get away with.  Now, for those of you without children or pets, who do not spend hours of your lives watching Animal Planet:  "It's Me or the Dog" is a show whereby a dominatrix pet trainer by the name of Patricia Stillwell goes into the homes of crazy people and trains their dogs to quit humping visitors. 

Not that humping is our problem.... for the most part.

Argus is still a puppy with puppy energy, but he's now passed the 'delicate garden flower' weight class and LEAPED into the 'stocky bully' weight group.  This is mainly a problem for his favorite playmate Jazz, who weighs fifteen pounds when she's soaking wet, with a ten pound weight vest on.  So their playing in the house mostly consists of Jazz skittering through the house with Argus lumbering after her at full gallop, destroying everything in his path until Jazz hides under something... anything.

Even the Christmas tree.

I'm sure you're horrified by the thought that we still have our Christmas tree up, what with it being midway through January and all.  But please let me make my case.  First of all, our tree is fake, so it's not going to turn brown and drop needles all over the place.  Secondly, it's decorated in a Seahawks theme (same as last year), and so we decided to keep it up until the Superbowl.  And YES  I KNOW that the Seahawks were no where close to being in the Superbowl this year (or anytime soon for that fact), but when you're a diehard fan as Scootchie is, you take no notice of these mere formalities. 

So the tree was knocked down last night, and we lost even more of the expensive glass seahawks ornaments that I have worked so hard to amass at half price after Christmas sales.  Would you BELIEVE that I had to stop Argus from trying to chew on the broken ornament glass?

Creativity:

Tuesday, January 12th - I don't remember Tuesday.  At all.  I'm 35 now... be gentle. 
.... Oh wait!  That's when I declared in those last moments before bed that we should start a new blog called The People of Craigslist, and post some of the ridiculous ads we see.  Then Scootch put on his snorkel mask and we fell asleep.

Wednesday, January 13th - Not having enough commitments, I started a new blog - called... you guessed it!  The People of Craigslist!  I can justify this one because its been monetized, which means that any day now I can quit my job and dedicate myself full time to my vast internet empire. 

Also on Wednesday, I turned an ordinary cute little purse I found on clearance for $6 into an expensive combination of purses for Brittany to carry her diabetes supplies in style and comfort.  For those who don't know, Brittany is my step-daughter, and she was diagnosed with insulin-dependant type 1 diabetes this past year.  Wednesday was her birthday, and so I wanted to make her something nice.  So I made her these cute labels, with the help of one of my favorite blogs, Just Something I Made.  I don't have Photoshop, so I have to fiddle with things a bit and they look a little messy, but I think you get the gist.  This was the label I made for Brittany's bag:

I use a program called SnagIt, because it's free (version 8, which is gr8), and because I use it for a ton of stuff.  You can capture and save anything on the web with SnagIt, even pesky protected pictures and stuff that pretend they can't be captured.  Since I do everything only for my own personal use, I'm not really doing anything overly evil. 

So I use SnagIt to capture the frame I wanted from Cathe Holden's free frames (the blog link above).  Her blog is so wonderful because, not only does she always have great ideas, but she SHARES them, which makes her my hero. 

Because I'm doing all of this crafting in a rather roundabout way, here's what I do:

1. Choose the frame and cut it out using the SnagIt webcapture. 

2. Use the eraser tool in SnagIt to erase all of the exising text, and then paste my blank frame to a blank Word document (because I haven't figured out how to work on more than one thing at a time in SnagIt). 

3. Find the font you want to use for your frame.  I think I've explained before that I don't like the choices I have available to me in Word, and I have a computer I can't download anything to... so I go to Zazzle and "create" a product, then use SnagIt to capture my font straight from the design box.

4.  Paste your words into your frame.

 5.  For this particular frame, I used WordArt to create the curved letters that don't quite fit into the boxes properly.  If I was one of those people lucky enough to have Photoshop, I'm sure this would look MUCH nicer.  In case you want to know... Photoshop is on my AMAZON WISH LIST. 

Oh yeah... if you want to be hip and cool and understand the reference to the strawberry milkshake, watch Llamas with Hats2 on Youtube.  It makes me laugh hysterically...