Back to Scrapping!!

I have finally gotten my laptop back and everything reinstalled so I can start digiscrapping again. It has been a long 6 weeks, thank goodness I was able to get it all done before Season 5 of the Amazing Digiscrapping Race (ADSR5). Alas getting my laptop repaired involved replacing the hard drive. Not thinking when it came time to swap out the hard drive I totally spaced off backing up ACDSee. Which if anyone who has used it knows that I have a ton of tagging to do. You would think that if you take into consideration I have completely retagging/reorganized my digital scrapbooking stuff twice in the past three years that I would remember to run a backup of the database. It just means that I can tweak my “organizing style” and clear out stuff that I’ve never used.

So the first layout I worked on was one using Rebecca Labbe’s Urban Chaos kit which I downloaded mid-November as part of a Creative Team Assignment over at Divine Digital. The Alpha is from her Urban Decay Alpha Set. You get three different alphas in the set.

I’ve got two more assignments in the wings that I’ll try to complete tonight or tomorrow. Of course between working on the CT assignments I’ll be tagging and sorting through over 71 Gigs of digital scrapbooking kits.

He Loves Me…..

I got a combined Valentines/Birthday present today!!! A new Dell Studio 1537 laptop with all the bells and whistles I could ever want. The best part is that it’s RED!!!! I’m having fun playing with it and tweaking it just so tonight. I haven’t even had a chance to check out all the features on it. It was a killer deal through the Dell Outlet because someone custom ordered it then cancelled the order after the laptop was made. So we got a $1200 laptop for half price! The extended battery alone is worth $200, not to mention that it has a webcam and fingerprint reader. I can have it scan my finger instead of remembering passwords to the various sites I visit daily. Although I have decided to not utilize that feature for bill paying and financial stuff…it’s cool but I just dont’ trust any program that saves passwords on the computer.

About the only “bummer” out of the deal is that PSE5 and PS7 aren’t Vista compatible so I now have three nice big PS text books that are no good. I’m thinking it’s time to bite the bullet and upgrade to PSE7 now or figure out ACDSee’s Photo Editor program. I also have to re-install Office 2009 since I use Excel and Word and they only include Works – I prefer Word over Works because I don’t have to save everything twice – by default it saves everything as a “works” file so I also have to save wordprocessing documents as a “word file” if I want most people to be able to open the document later.

Slow Computer and Home Improvement Saturday

It was “Home Improvement” day at the Burress house yesterday. We divided our time between reformatting my laptop and working on a couple “home improvement” projects. We spent most of yesterday ripping out the toilet and putting in a new one. The old one turned out to be the original toilet from when they built the house. The supply line was “copper” and we had to add a flange to anchor the new toilet to the floor with…the old one had four bolts coming out of the floor that held it in place. We also put a electronic, keyless deadbolt on the front door so we don’t have to worry about the kids losing their stormdoor key anymore. We can’t unlock our front door from the outside because it’s the original (1946) hardware and they can’t make a key for it without taking the whole thing apart and taking it to the locksmith. Luckily we have a good solid storm door that locks. It’s wasn’t infallible but was basically one more step a burglar would have to go through then get past the alarm system. Now Mike can quit worrying about us when he is at work and we both will rest easier when the kids are home alone.

In between runs to the hardware store and working on the toilet and deadbolt we reformatted my laptop. I spent the morning transferring files to the EHD and figuring out what programs I was going to need to reinstall and which I really didnt’ need. After we got it reformatted I remembered that I needed to find my PSE 5 disk so I could reinstall it. This didn’t stress me out at first because Mike figured it had to be around here somewhere, well after we got thinking about it we realized it was missing.

Normally it wouldn’t be an issue because I’d just go buy another copy off ebay (I don’t need to have the newest version and would be happy with PSE 5 again) We looked on ebay and he suggested getting PSE7 but I got looking at the requirements and it would use up all my RAM which I wasn’t willing to give up and don’t want to go buy more RAM at the moment. But this morning my hubby came through, he found the copy of Photoshop 7 for me. I have been using Photoshop Elements 5 so I figured it was close enough and I could manage to get my layout done. He got a copy of it way back I was just getting the digital bug. Back then instead of going on a digiscrap kit downloading spree I went on a bookshopping spree. We had three different Photoshop 7 books laying around. Back then I ended up using Elements instead of the Photoshop 7 program because Hummiesworld had great tutorials for PSE and I couldn’t find any that were geared towards using Photoshop for scrapbooking.

Long story short…it’s 4:41pm and after 3 1/2 hours of working in PS7 I completed challenge #11 for ADSR 4….YAHOO!!! I’ve posted it below. Thank goodness it was a fairly easy one…we were limited to one photo and the journaling was limited to one question and you couldn’t answer the question with the journaling. No other journaling or words other than the question. I decided to use a photo of my great-uncle Ed and his garden. After finishing the layout I’ve come to the conclusion that Photoshop 7.0 is a little different than PSE 6 but I can work around the quirks and will probably like it better in the end. Since I have the books for it I will probably be able to do way more (if I was so inclined) than I ever could have done with PSE.

Now that I have challenge #11 done and #12 won’t come out for a day or so(and both aren’t due until Sunday) I get to tackle some serious tagging in ACDSee. When we reformatted I completely spaced of backing up the database. This is the second time I’ve accidentally deleted the tags. The last time I did it was last summer and it wasn’t that hard of a project because I cleared out alot of freebies that I didn’t use. So it’s going to be another “clean out and tag weekend for me. Doesn’t that sound like soooo much fun. It also means I can reorganize the categories in ACDSee. This time around I’ve decided to sort papers by color only not colors and patterns.

You know what….I just realized that we didnt’ take any photos of the guys working yesterday!! What kind of scrapbooker am I?