The screen on Tracy’s iBook died and he’s been waiting to buy a new MacBook. This weekend he got a great deal with the Educators’ discount, but I’m the one who really lucked out. Since I do more photo work and now some digital scrapbooking, he thought I’d benefit from the faster processor and the extra room on the hard drive. My MacBook is not yet a year old, so I’ve been surprised by how much faster this computer is than my previous one. Resizeing the photos for the last post took no time at all. Opening Parallels so I can run Adobe Photoshop Element 5.0 on Windows takes half the time. Love the Mac, and looking forward to learning how to use Time Machine so I can stop worrying about back-ups and multiple copies of all my documents on my external hard drive.

I love family traditions. Cutting down our Christmas tree the weekend after Thanksgiving is one we’ve been doing pretty faithfully since Sarah was a toddler. The first time we went out, I was pregnant with Matt, and we pulled Sarah on a sled around the Christmas tree farm. That would be 24 years ago. There were a few years we purchased a pre-cut tree when it was raining too hard to go out. For the last 10 years or so we’ve gone to the same farm, but this is probably our last trip. Although we found a pretty tree (still in the garage, but coming in tonight), good trees were few and far between. We’ll have to find a new spot next year. Last year there were only three of us on the expedition. This year everyone was home. Here are my favorite photos from Saturday’s trip:

My handsome son-in-law, Adam.

My lovely daughter, Sarah.

My good-looking son, Matt.

And our favorite dog, Sadie, who enjoyed the trip more than anyone.

I was about to pack it in tonight when I saw this on the A Fancy Word for Simple blog:

What are you smiling about today?

Couldn’t resist responding:  Only two days of school this week and on Wednesday the whole family will be here. Sarah, Adam, and Matt should all be here by mid-afternoon and will be here until Sunday. We haven’t had this much time together in nearly a year. Can’t wait!

I was determined to finish the last lesson for my digital scrapbooking class before it ended. Today is the last day and here is Lesson 4. I love the faded photo in the bottom left corner. I recolored the flourishes (red in the original) and will probably go back to change that again. I have learned so much, but now the challenge is to practice my skills. Not so easy with the holidays approaching. I was surprised to see that I had 13 digital layouts posted on the galleries. I’d forgotten that I did several extra assignments during the first class (which was last summer so I wasn’t working.)

I keep reusing the photos from Kiawah last April because I have so many and they seem to work for these multi-photo layouts. I hope to take some photos Thanksgiving Day that will also work for layouts like these.

Two friends and I drove to Buffalo this morning to attend a bridal shower for another friend’s soon-to-be daughter-in-law. It was a brunch at The Pearl Street Grill. Great atmosphere, good food, and lots of fun. Before I left, I started the week 3 layout for Jessica Sprague‘s Now We’re Rockin with Photoshop. I’m pretty pleased with it, but especially pleased that I managed to solve all the little glitches on my own!

It’s a 2 page layout, shown here 24 X 12. My computer slowed down a bit with all the layers and details, but held up just fine. One more to go, although the class officially ends tomorrow. There are also mid-week assignments, mini-books and challenges I never got to. I need to just keep plugging away at this. Some of the PSE commands are second nature now, but I still lack confidence on designing my own layouts.

I was hoping to hold on to my October decorations until Thanksgiving, but the squirrels had different ideas. They started out with a few nibbles, but the final result is here. We’re trying to figure out if they are especially hungry or thirsty (not much precipitation here this fall) as we’ve never had this problem before.

And here’s another layout from Pencil Lines (Sketch #58). Most of the materials came from this months Studio Calico kit.

Pat and Ian are the hosts of a wonderful B&B we’ve enjoyed for many years in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Unfortunately, for us, they’ve decided to retire and have sold the B&B. This photo captures both their personalities perfectly.

This is the second layout I’ve done recently using a sketch from the Pencil Lines blog. I thought this time I’d email it to the blog but, once again, it didn’t happen. I’m really liking their simple layout designs. This is almost a complete lift of Sketch #57. These photos are from the Dansville Hot Air Balloon show we went to over Labor Day.

I’m taking Jessica Sprague’s second level course on digital scrapbooking. I’m learning a lot, but need to branch out and practice, practice, practice. For now, however, I am merely trying to catch up. Here are the first two layouts for this class.

Week 1:

And Week 2:

We’ve done a lot of traveling–away the better part of four weekends in a row–so unusual for us. I loved all the trips, but it made keeping up with schoolwork more difficult than usual. We do report cards early in my district so one of the parent conference days will fall on Election Day, and they don’t have to worry about parking. So, finally, my report cards are done and parent conferences run from 1-7:45 today and tomorrow. Yesterday I finally edited some of the photographs from the trips and hope to have them uploaded in the Photo-a-Day (October) by tonight. Here are a couple of my favorites:

A stand of birch trees at the Southern Vermont Art Center on a foggy October morning.

When we were driving from Vermont to Hyde Park we stopped at a wonderful little farm market to pick up some pumpkins, gourds, and Vermont cheese.

Grapes still on the vine in Ontario where we spent a weekend with our good friends, Karen and Mike. We saw a play at the Shaw Festival, visited our favorites wineries and found a few new ones.

And finally a layout I did for a challenge, but never uploaded: