Scrapbooking: Finished 2009!

Ok, let me start off by saying I plan on finding a way to take better pictures of my layouts (other than using my camera phone).  You can not see the details of any of the pages when I do that.  I might try scanning the next ones (if my scanner is big enough). 

With that being said here are just a few of the pages:

Everyone remember the zhu zhu pet craze in 2009.

I hope this is 2009.. it could be 2008. My kid never changes

LOL that Easter was a messy one, but some of the best memories are messy

Brayden to this day remembers Barney being at his birthday party. 

I try to save everyone's birth announcements and picture Christmas cards so send them our way :)

The Columbus Zoo

Family from WV

We miss our boat, I can't believe it has been 3 years since we had it. 

Chris just said it's time to buy another one!

Family fun

I love the picture of him after his haircut... he was not happy

4th of July

The kids got their picture in the paper, just for being so darn cute

New Hobby: Couponing

My New Years resolution was to not spend any money til March (besides the necessities).  So to help out with the money saving I also started couponing.  I know I made fun of all my friends that do it, asking them when they would ever need 500 rolls of TP or if they had an odor problem when they stocked up on 50 things of deodorant.  But I joined the bandwagon. 

Here are my deals:

1st week

1 pack paper towels, 1 pack tp, 6 boxes of cereal, 2 packs pens, 4 body wash, 2 cleaning sprays, 2 KY jelly, 2 baby shampoos, 1 box tampons, 1 light bulb, 1 snickers and 2 packs of razors.  OOP $39.63 and $16 CVS cash for next time

2nd week:

7 shampoos or conditioners, 4 hair dyes, 3 deodorant, 1 body wash, 3 tooth paste, 2 dish soap, 2 packs of paper towels, 2 packs tp, 2 wipes, and 3 cards. Total $133.89, $35.67 OOP and earned $10 for next time

I am still learning but am hoping I start getting things for even cheaper once my coupon pile stacks up a little bit.

Book Review: Hunger Games

This is not the type of book I would think I would like, it is about a future time period after the destruction of North America, in a nation known as Panem which consists of 12 districts and The Capital.  All of the the districts are responsible for maintaining some part of the Capital's lavish lifestyle (food, coal, textiles, etc) and they are all in the Capitals complete control. In some of the districts the residents are literally starving to death.  About 75 years ago the districts tried rebel against the capital and it resulted in the 13th district being destroyed and the 'Hunger Games" were created as a reminder to the districts not to get out of line ever again.   During this event the Capitol chooses one boy and one girl aged 12 to 18 from each of 12 districts for a massive televised battle in which only one person can survive. 

The story follows 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, a girl from District 12, who volunteers for the 74th Games in place of her younger sister, Primrose. Also participating from District 12 is Peeta Mellark, a baker's son whom Katniss knows from school.

This is all I am going to say about the books because I don't want to to give anything away... but take my advise and read them! They are some of the easiest reads and had me glued to the book.  The most time it took me to get through a book was 2 days. 
I give the books:

Stepdaugher's Scrapbook

Every year I try to make my stepdaughter a scrapbook for either Christmas or Easter, here are some of the pages of the one I just finished for her.



My 'to read' list

I found these 100 online and plan to read most of them... I have read some before but it has been such a long time I plan on reading them again.  I will take a book off the list when I am done and then maybe replace it with another or just let the number get lower.  Feel free to comment with other "must reads"

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

 2 The Uglies series

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 The Hunger Game series

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 "The Bible"

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations -Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 "Complete Works of Shakespeare"

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot 

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 "Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazu Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

101 The Best of Me

102 The girl with the dragon tatoo series

Book Review: Smokin Seventeen

This is the 17th book in the series, although it it the first I have read and it will probably be my last unless for some reason my 'to read' list gets really low.  The main character in the series is Stephanie Plum.  The plot is that dead bodies start showing up at her work (she is a bounty hunter) and then the killer starts addressing them to her.  She is also caught up between two love affairs and keeps going back and forth between both of them because she can't make up her mind.  The book was just a little too dramatic where I kept thinking yeah right and I could guess the killer right off the bat.  At the end of the book STOP READING RIGHT NOW IF YOU DON"T WANT TO KNOW THE ENDING!!!  there are three people who were all trying to kill her.  One of them kidnaps her from her apartment and then the other meets them in her parking lot and then the third comes out of no where and tries to run her over. So one gets shot by the other, that one gets run down and dies, and the driver goes to prison.  Like I said... a little too much.

Book Review: The girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The girl with the Dragon Tattoo

This was a LONG book to say the least,  If I love what I am reading I can't put it down and am usually done reading the book in a couple of hours... I started reading this book about 2 weeks ago.  The basic story line of the book was a good one: Reporter gets into trouble which almost ends his career, he gets offered a job to write a book on a rich family and to look into a 40 year old murder that happened during a family gathering.  I just think the book had A LOT of information that could have been left out.  I would sometimes skip through multiple pages at a time without reading them because they were talking about finances and businesses and other stuff I found really boring.  That being said I am excited to see the movie because all that boring stuff will (hopefully) be left out. 

Maybe it was just me though because I know a lot of people gave this book great reviews.  But I am only going to give it