This year, we were too relaxed to go out. Husband couldn’t hold out till midnight, I saw the new year in watching the fireworks on Sydney Harbour. Note the unfinished Christmas tree. Husband didn’t start putting it up until a few days before Christmas and it remained only half decorated.
And the day was spent downloading scrapping supplies. I bought Cyndi Wetmiller’s store at Divine digitals. This was an interesting experience. I never bought a whole store before and I will have to plan the downloads and timing because I have limits to how much I can download per month.
Today, my husband and I bought our joint Christmas present. We’ve been discussing it for a while. My camera needed upgrading, the old Fuji Finepix is getting on to three years old now and there is so much better out there now. After a lot of research, we decided to buy the Canon Powershot G10.
One of the main reasons for this model, aside that we’ve heard nothing but good things about it, is that we can get an underwater housing for it.
The motivation for getting an underwater housing is that my husband decided a while back that he would get scuba diving open water certification. I just looked back at that blog entry and I can’t believe that it was in May that we paid for his dive course. He finally got started with it early in November but has yet to finish it.
Anyway, we couldn’t find a store that stocked the housing. In fact, we barely found a store that stocked the camera. They were all sold out and after some yellow pages searches and phone calls, we found one in Brisbane. We drove this morning to Brisbane(parking in the Myer Center was $19!) and walked a short way to Raine’s Camera House.
Brisbane was hot. I have thin blood from the medication I take and not normally feel the heat as much as other people but today I felt it.
The drive back was hot also. The air-con couldn’t cope on the first setting, we had to cranck it up to a couple more settings to blow more air. This is a shot of the M1, the highway from Brisbane to the Gold Coast.
Oops! Someone was speeding.
The photos were taken with the Fuji Finepix Z20 camera. The battery wasn’t charged on the new camera so I had to satisfy myslef with reading the manual on the way home.
I can’t wait to take photos with the new camera.
I have made a paper pack and it’s in my store:
And these are some layouts that were made with the papers
You have to see these. It is an artist that sculpts paper cuts. I found the work fascinating. the details, even in the larger works, is exquisite.
Peter Callesen
An elderly Chinese woman had two large pots, each hung on the ends of a pole which she carried across her neck. One of the pots had a crack in it while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water. At the end of the long walks from the stream to the house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.
For a full two years this went on daily, with the woman bringing home only one and a half pots of water. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it could only do half of what it had been made to do. After two years of what it perceived to be bitter failure, it spoke to the woman one day by the stream.
‘I am ashamed of myself, because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house.’
The old woman smiled, ‘Did you notice that there are flowers on your side of the path, but not on the other pot’s side? That’s because I have always known about your flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you water them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the table. Without you being just the way you are, there would not be this beauty to grace the house.’
Each of us has our own unique flaw. But it’s the cracks and flaws we each have that make our lives together so very interesting and rewarding. You’ve just got to take each person for what they are and look for the good in them.
My friends are crack pots. 
Lunch today was partly appetising. I felt like eating some prawns so I went to the deli at Coles downstairs from the office and bought 200 gms of cooked shelled prawns (without the tails). I like prawns, they are a quick and tasty carb free lunch that doesn’t cost a lot.
The plan was to eat my lunch while catching up with the community boards and a few private emails and maybe even a round of packrat on facebook. Simple, easy and flexible. One would think…
The prawns were frozen and I had to reboot the server so the internet connection would be gone just for long enough for me to miss out with the private stuff in my lunch hour (which is a misnomer because my lunch hour is never an hour long). Since I don’t know of a safe way to defrost prawns fast, lunch went out the window.
I had a Quality Assurance review last week and I passed with no breaches. I’m set now for a while until the next one.
It’s been a horrible couple of months at work. I’m really behind with work. I’ve had illness that put me out of action for almost three months out of the last twelve months and preparing for the review took a lot of time too. I’m feeling overwhelmed and I’m very tired.
Now that I have the review over, I can concentrate fully with catching up.
zedd - contains azithromycin. Killed my cough! 
I had to go to another doctor as the other didn’t resolve it for me.
I finally slept well and right through the night and woke up refreshed.
The down side is that I didn’t get any scrapping done last night.
I’m still not over my cough. I’m exhausted. It keeps me awake at night and I’m barely getting a couple of hours of sleep each night. I’m so over it. My ribs are sore from coughing and it’s so hard to concentrate. I spent a few days in bed last week, the air conditioning makes it worse and the cooler air at night makes it worse. One good thing, I have my voice back.
I made this new alpha and it’s available at Zig Zag Scrap
I slept right through the night last night for the first time in a week. Hardly any coughing at all. I did however, loose my voice. Maybe it’s my imagination, but when you loose your voice, people no longer listen to you. They talk above you and even walk away from you. Weird.
We are having the biggest thunder storm ever at the moment. There are loud claps of thunder right above us and the pets are slinking around low to the ground.
I did this layout for Cori Gammon with her new kit Asian Fusion. I think it turned out lovely.
