Rocking Your World 2015; Week 34

Another week has whizzed by and I blinked and nearly missed it. Did you? But I still  have some things to be grateful for, but first here is something that really made me smile! A while ago we moved our rather large dining table into the main room, because in the dining room it was always covered with my knitting for Africa etc, and it was never used as a table. It is much better in its new home, but now we very rarely even go in the little dining room, so when I did go in for something this week and I found this, it really made me smile!

Many times during this long, hot summer, I have said "I think I am melting", but my candles have taken that to whole new level. I shall be linking that up with Annie´s Friday Smiles when I finish this post, but first let´s go over to Virginia´s blog and share what else has lifted my spirits this week, and see who else has shared their happy thoughts too.

I was determined to achieve something this week, so I set myself the task of tidying my craft room. It had reached the point where I couldn´t find anything, and I had no space left to work in, so I spent a couple of days putting things away, and cleaning all the surfaces. I am actually fairly organised in here, and there is a labelled drawer for most things, so IF I tidy away after a project is finished, I should be able to find things again, but it doesn´t always work that way. However I now have a cleared and cleaned computer table...

space to work at my desk .....

(even the box of ´sticky stuff´has been cleared out, and tidied), and there is also space under the window, between my desks, for boxes of pens, files of dies, or whatever it is am using at the time. I don´t usually sit at that bit because there are sets of drawers underneath so there is no leg space, but it is still a useful area for putting materials, or my silhouette machine on. (For most of the year, Arwen makes her bed on there, but she is still camping in the cooler bathroom at the minute).

It is strange how things work out sometimes, At church on Sunday there was request from the vicar for someone who could print out our newsletter each week, 30-50 copies depending on the time of year. I knew this was something that I could do so I said I would give it a go. The man who puts it together, and does the printing for our sister church, agreed to e-mail it to me towards the end of the week. Well on Monday, my husband helped me set up a template for it (booklet style), and I did a trial run with the copy from last week, which was successful, so I was all ready to go, but later that day, when I tried to print a scrapbook page, my printer refused to work. It came up with all sorts of error messages, but none of their suggestions worked. I bought a new cartridge as I knew the black was very low on ink, and they said that might be the problem, but it wasn´t. The next day we dug out a previous printer that is almost new, but has never been very good, but that one also refused to work. Chris spent a whole morning working on it, cleaning it and even trying out a new printhead, but to no avail. 

He is a very patient man, much more patient than me, when it comes to anything to do with computers anyway, and he kept trying even though I knew he would rather have been doing whatever it is he does, on his own computer.

Unfortunately, we know from past experience, that these things are not built to last, nor designed to be repaired, so in the end he gave up, and being the lovely man that he is, he straight away ordered a new one for me. It is identical to my previous one which I really liked because it is a wide-format printer so I can print out 12"x 12" scrapbook pages, and also has a photocopier and scanner (+a fax which I don´t use). Because it is the same one again, I can use the new cartridges I had just bought for the old one too.

The new one was ordered Tuesday afternoon, and last night, at around 9.00 (our delivery men stop for a siesta and start again at tea-time), this was delivered.

Within half an hour, it was unpacked, connected up, and I was printing out my scrapbook. Hooray!

I have made good progress with my scrapbook about our holiday in Ireland, adding about seven new pages this week. But, before I put a page together, I always spend quite a lot of time editing the photos. Although I do the actual pages in Adobe photo shop, I much prefer Corel for editing, but I was getting increasingly frustrated with it, as lately it has been running very slowly, and just not working very efficiently. I bought this program around ten years ago, although it was another three years before I got to grips with using it. But it is, of course, very out of date now, and I am unable to find any updates for it. So I went online to look at the recent version and found it is now Corel PSP x8. Mine is x1! So I downloaded a free trial of the current version and spent an afternoon working through some tutorials. I was delighted to find it does everything I want and more, and the system has not changed too much. I also understand the terminology much better now, mainly because I have done a lot of tutorials with Adobe, so I can use it better too. So when my free trial comes to an end, I shall be buying the full version. I am very grateful that I made myself try it out.

With my photos edited, I started designing some layouts. Here are five of the new ones. First there is one designed using a blending mask,

and than I made three pages about Kilarney using photo tray templates.

And finally this one, which I made just using papers and elements from several digital scrapbook kits.

I am pleased with the way they are turning out, but I am only about four days into our two-week holiday, so there are a lot more pages to do yet!

We had some sad news this week, that Chris´s best friend in UK has died, so he will be going back for the funeral. It is not entirely sad, except for those left behind, as it was a blessed release for him, so I feel it is right to include it in this ´positive´post.  The flights were a real problem as it is just after the bank Holiday weekend, and every option he looked at was fully booked, except for one, which cost an arm and a leg for the fare one way! But eventually he found that he could fly out to Dublin one evening, and get an early morning flight on to Manchester, where one of our sons will meet him and drive him down to Shrewsbury. How mad is that? But we are glad that he can manage it, as it is important for him to be there.

Today we have heard from another son to say that he has been able to arrange some days off work and is coming over to stay with us for almost two weeks. He arrives next Thursday. That also means he will be here while Chris is away which is nice for me. This is Tom who we visited at his home in Denmark in July. It will be nice to see him again, and he is looking forward to dipping in the pool and catching some sun. They have not had a very good summer this year in Denmark.

At this time of year we have a sudden and rapid night-fall, with little or no dusk time, so you have to be very quick to catch the sun setting, but tonight I was in the kitchen at just the right moment to see this sky, so I dropped everything and grabbed my camera. Within ten minutes it was gone.

Lovely while it lasted!

Now I will go and link up with A Stitch in Time and Celtic House, and I´ll see you all next week.