Resuming the regular blog posting

I'm still on holidays from work and had a nasty fright this morning, my monitor wouldn't start.  Eeeeek.  The yellow light was on but it didn't fire up to a green light, and the screen was black.  So when in doubt unplug everything and then plug it back in right?  Then I couldn't remember which hole the monitor went into on the back of the hard drive.  Why are computers as frustratingly confusing as cars?  So I had to get Mike to come to the rescue.

Turned it back on and it started. Whew!  Mike said it might be a hint that my monitor (read: my big beautiful 22 inch monitor) is on its way out.  Let's just limp it along for a little while yet.

So I'm enjoying my last week off of work.  Have wrapped all my Christmas presents (bar a couple for mum).  This year I'm getting her a bag and inside it will have lots of little presents wrapped that I've collected throughout the year.  How fun.  Don't worry, I'm safe to put this on my blog, mum doesn't have the internet, she can't even text message me on her telephone, she won't be reading this!    So that's a big job out of the way having done the wrapping.

Next ... the Christmas cards.  I went down to the post office this morning to get some overseas stamps for cards, and was more than a little annoyed that they only had ONE stamp for overseas.  Are you kidding me?  Okay this is a small town, but they're servicing a population of 1000 people in town and perhaps 1000 in the general outlying vicinity.  ONE FREAKING OVERSEAS STAMP!  Gaaaaaah!  I'm sorry, but my thoughts on running a business is that you don't allow your stock to get that low, you look at the trade you had on your books last December, and order your stock accordingly.  Or am I being rather simplistic here?

So tomorrow I either head over to the post office over in the next town or, well I guess, that's what I'm going to have to do.  There is no or!

I'm a bit paralysed as to starting to put together even a plan for my holiday album, you will certainly get sick of seeing those pages once they start.  My partner in travel gets home tomorrow, she's still been holidaying with her family.  I've enjoyed looking at the pics she's had on her flickr page, but they are merely a drop in the ocean.  So I've been checking out Designer Digitals for some type of template system, then it struck me I might do my holiday album as a landscape album instead of a square this time round.

Like I said ... paralysed by a decision before I start!

I popped this page together though, just for something fun to do.  Credits Designer Digitals.

One thing I like is the versatility of templates.  I loved this template that Katie had put together and knew I wanted to use it to show the first photo I took after three weeks away and seeing Mike for the first time at the airport.  But the photo I wanted to use was not the portrait orientation.  No matter, flip the template, straighten up some of the elements, and voila, a whole new page!

Okay well as I'm typing here on the computer I have two sleeping dogs on the floor by my side.  See, I can't go anywhere!  And touch wood, the last two nights Molly has been great.  No early hour wandering.  Hopefully I haven't spoken too soon.  We have some spray to spray on her bedding before she goes to sleep, apparently it produces a calming effect, but we're not to use it every night as otherwise she'll get used to it.  

So I'm heading off to bed, Mike is still working, the perils of working from home unfortunately.  He has some big orders to get out, so he's still binding and packaging reeds.  The bagpipe business stops for no man!