You know it's going to be a good weekend when it starts off with this in the mailbox...

 

And these blooming in the planter outside.

 

 

 

 

And it looks like I'll have cherry blossoms soon!

 

Friday Favorites - Fun and Funny

Eeek!! So these are going up later than I had planned, and I didn't even post yesterday- but I have such a good excuse. :) I got a new (old) toy that will make it soooooo much easier for me to photograph layouts to share on the blog and spent most of last night setting it up (which involved crashing the self-checkout system at Home Depot when I was buying new light bulbs- seriously, they had to reboot! Did you know those things run Windows XP?). I'll post all about it later (as soon as I've taken pictures of it). I had a bunch of layouts photographed (in my old style) and ready to share, but now I think I'm going to go back and re-photograph them. They'll look so much better!

Okay, so on with my faves this week...

From left to right:

• Canadian Scrapbooker Magazine. Okay, I have to confess that I've never physically held an issue of this magazine, but after looking at their web site I WANT IT!!! Anyone know if there is a store in the US that carries it? I might have to result to paying to have it shipped to me from Canada...
• A totally awesome post by May Flaum on some creative ways to use digital photo masks. She was also the guest on Paperclipping Roundtable last week and talked about hybrid scrapping.
• A cool mini album on the Hambly blog. I love mini albums. I love Hambly (and absolutely cannot wait for the cupcake overlays to come out). Any questions?
• It's not crafty, but this list of 10 words that are often misspelled is pretty funny (at least to my neurotic self, who cringes at typos even though I know I make tons of them myself).(link via Marta Writes)
• Printable doilies by Martha Stewart (link via Triple the Scraps). Free PDFs- woohoo!
• The new Flutter collection by Making Memories. I'm usually not a huge fan of their 12x12 papers, but I love their journaling books and will probably pick one of these up. 
• A couple of weeks ago I shared a site to download free scans of vintage seed packets, so this week I thought it would be neat to share this site that details the history of playing cards and has some great downloadable images. Especially with all the Alice in Wonderland hoopla these days. :) (link via Design*Sponge).
• Christine Middlecamp shares a few pages from her newest mini. I love, love, love the color scheme.
• ScrapScene's paper dress garland tutorial. This would be so cute as a party decoration!

Have a scrappy weekend, everyone!

Happy St. Patrick's Day Birthday to Me!!

Yay!! So, today was my birthday and I'm officially 30 now- how cool is that?!?!? I had a day filled with awesome eCards from my parents and friends, plus emails and Facebook messages wishing me a happy birthday. :)

I had to work today, but I made a little time at lunch to play. I went to Target just to pick up some snacks and got sucked in by all the Liberty of London stuff that I've been hearing so much about in the blogosphere lately. I managed to escape relatively unscathed and only picked up this hat and a binder that I plan on using for a project I'm starting tonight.

And then I went to my LSS in search of Little Yellow Bicycle's Lucky Me line. I have no idea how I missed this when it was first released, but it seems like every blog I've read this week is using it for some project. I've never really liked any St. Patrick's Day paper before this- it was all too cartoon-y for me- but this stuff is just gorgeous!!

My LSS only had two papers from the line, but luckily I was able to hop on 2Peas and order all but one of the patterns. Lucky Me! I can't wait for it to get here. Isn't it lovely?

Darren has been asking me for a week or so now to pick out a new light for our front porch. The one that we have now is pretty sad, so I finally settled on this one. I love the color, the lantern style, and the seeded glass. Plus it has a motion detector and timer. Sweet! We even have a gift card that should cover the cost, so hopefully he'll have time to purchase it and get it installed soon.

Whilst browsing blogs, I came across these cute free printable mini cards on Leo on the Loose.

And this cute digi kit was part of the One Buck Wednesday specials at Jessica Sprague.com. I'd already bought a set of Vintage Cabinet Card Frames (the ones I've used on the photos in this post) and love that this one came with a couple more. Plus, those camera papers are just cool! For $1.00 you can't go wrong (though I think it's only on sale for another hour or so).

Lest you think that all I did at work was surf blogs, I'll assure you that I actually did very little of that. I had a very busy morning fixing software bugs, and then I was in a review all afternoon (until 6:30 pm, in fact). Somewhere near the beginning of the review I realized that I'd been in that exact same conference room all evening on my birthday last year as well, and at least four of the people who were in the meeting today were there last year as well. Luckily, this year I was not nearly so stressed. :)

After work, Darren took me out for sushi at my favorite Japanese restaurant- Edo. They make the yummiest Ebi-Tem, and of course I also had to get smoked salmon and crab nigiri.

And then Darren gave me my gift, which he had wrapped in tactical webbing- totally fitting since he had bought me a scope for my rifle!! When I ordered it I'd opted to not get factory sites, so I've not had anything to properly aim it with until now. Maybe I can actually hit a target with this thing installed. :) And, yes, I'm very pro- second amendment.

After dinner it was back to the house to read all those wonderful eCards that the firewall at work blocks, and then we sat back and watched Lost on Hulu. And now I'm watching a rerun of Burn Notice while typing it all up. :) It was a fun day!