Summer Reading!!! Yay!!

I am an avid reader...but only in the summer.  Thank goodness it is summer and I am finally able to indulge in this most excellent of hobbies.  Being a teacher, the school year is full of reading; reading kids' writing, reading stories with children, reading (and grading) spelling tests...not my favorite kind of reading.  But in the summer I can live in worlds beyond my own.  My favorite books are intended for older children and teens, but the stories are fabulous.  I love fantasy, historical fiction, a little bit of science fiction, and realistic fiction.  I can spend hours disappearing into these enchanting worlds.  I have read several great books and have a quite a large list waiting to be read.  So far I have only read books by Margaret Peterson Haddix including:

Palace of Mirrors

Found

Sent

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 and am currently reading Sabotaged

All were quick but good reads!

Summer is moving so quickly and I have so many more great books to read!

My first layout!

I did it!  I made my first layout using SBC Studio.  Pretty easy, but not the page I wanted to do.  I spent hours working on one of the challenge pages posted by pixels2pages but couldn't get it to work with this version, so I decided it was time to give up on that for now and begin my Paraguay travel album.  So far, so good!

Scrapbooking!

I love scrapbooking, but it is a very rare occasion when I have the time or energy to actually pull out my extensive collection of papers and embellishments.  Then when I do, I spend more time organizing myself than I do actually scrapbooking.  I end up mentally drained with out much to show for all of the effort.  That is, until I discovered digital scrapbooking.  I tried this several years ago using a copy of Photoshop Elements that came with my scanner.  I failed miserably.  It was difficult to learn and at the time I was teaching and working on my master's degree.  Needless to say, that effort was short lived.  I got back into the digital world about a year and a half ago to chronicle the lives of the two young foster children that were in our care.  This time around I chose the Creative Memories Storybook Creator Plus software.  It worked okay, especially considering it was running via Parallels on a MacBook Pro.  Not the best, but it was easy enough to use and I actually completed albums for them.  However, after I upgraded the software to version 3, I began to have more difficulties:  menus that would not disappear, super slow response.  The only solution to these problems was to shut down the program and start again.  Working on my summer trip to Paraguay was torture, so I gave up and decided to scrap these pictures traditionally.  Imagine my excitement when I found out that CM was releasing a mac version of Storybook Creator!  I downloaded it as soon as it became available and have been working tirelessly trying to figure it out, to the detriment of my classroom planning.  So far there is only basic support for SBC Studio.  I am wanting to try some things that could be done with the pc version, but have so far been unsuccessful attempting them in the new Mac version.  None of the embellishment and paper packages I have already purchased can be used for the mac version, and I had purchased a lot!  Luckily I have 30 days to try it, but I may decide that another software will suit my needs more.  If I actually complete a layout I will post it here!