In the meantime, though, I thought I mention that I’m over at PYP blogging about digital scrapbooking on the cheap. Seriously, if anyone ever tells you that it costs a ton of money to DSP, laugh at them. Okay, don’t, but know that they’re deeply wrong. With a little creativity, you can do it for absolutely nothing. With a little creatitivity and twenty bucks, you can do pretty much anything scrappy you could possibly want to do.

I love DSP–have I mentioned that? This series is an effort to make sure that anyone else who wants to try DSP but feels daunted by not knowing how to start or how much it will cost can realize that it’s more accessible than they think it is.

And then my hard drive crashed and the computer technicians have declared the data permanently gone and I lost thirty scrapbook pages and all the materials I used to make them, which means that I can’t go back and remake them. They’re just . . . gone. And of course I didn’t print them because prints cost 2.99 each and, well, you get the idea.

I’m acting casual about it now, but only because I just spent half an hour crying and wondering if I was going to throw up.

I’m so mad at myself for not backing up those gorgeous, sacred pages. So mad at myself. So so so so so so mad! And some of them were really, really cute, too.

I can’t think about it anymore. I just can’t. I’m going to have to “clean slate” it, which is where I make a mental cut that separates the past and all its related baggage completely and just focuses on where I am in the present. When I think about everything I lost–the hundreds of hours, the money, the beautiful pages– it makes me never want to scrap again. I’m going to pretend that I just woke up this morning and said, “You know, I’ve never made any digital scrapbook pages before, but I have all this mysterious, spontaneous knowledge about where to download free materials and how to do lots of cool techniques, so I think I’ll give it a shot.”

Wow. Just typing that made me feel better. Now if I can just get my appetite back before dinner.

Fortunately, I don’t think it will be too hard to match the other walls since they seem to be fairly neutral. Here’s a picture of the deadly triad.

I obviously don’t know what I’m doing, as evidenced by the fact that I even put the furniture in the room in the first place, so I would love any input on what color to paint that accent wall.

My house is slowly being redone per your suggestion. You are my muse! No, seriously. I love you guys! *Welling up.*

Okay. I clearly need to go eat something.

ETA: Someone asked for some closeups of the couch pattern, so here are a couple. I’m already loving some of the suggestions. Thanks!

Our front lawn was a disaster when we bought this house. I’m not sure what the previous owner thought he was doing, but apparently it involved gutting a lovely old apple tree from the front lawn, digging up the front edge of the lawn and filling it with river rock, and cultivating numerous and varied weeds in the grass.

Yeah.

We tried to redeem the lawn, but ultimately decided that it needed to be rototilled. (Apparently you can pay someone else to rototil your lawn for about as much money as it would cost to rent the rototiller itself.) Once that was done, we tried to rake the soil to smooth the lawn before seeding it but realized that the baseball, golf ball, and bowling ball-sized clumps of sod were foiling us at every turn. Accordingly, I spent last night and this morning raking them up and carrying them into the compost pile in the backyard one dollar-store kid’s bucket at a time. (Because in addition to having no skills or experience, we also have no wheelbarrow and no truck in which to bring one home even if we could afford to buy one. See how I laugh and joke through the crippling agony?)

At this point I really should get up and take pictures, but I feel like someone has run a slipknot through each of my deltoids with fishing line and slowly begun to tighten the string, and I lack the will to lift a camera and press a button. I’ll get back to you later.

Point is, however, that we shall prevail! I feel all pioneerish and manly, conquering the unforgiving earth with nothing but a meager tool and my unyielding will to have a pretty lawn. And believe me, despite rocks and sod and mud and blisters and kids who say, “I’ll dig this up, Mommy!” it will be a pretty lawn, because I am just that stubborn.

The gummy worms in the mud (brownie and pudding mix) were a hit, as was the graham cracker road. I did learn several things for future cake-making escapades.

1. Because I had difficulty making the frosting grass green, I learned to prepare in advance by looking up the right color combinations for the color effect I want.

2. Whipped frosting does not hold decorative shapes well (fortunately, the gangly, dangly look works for grass).

3. If you put wax paper on warm cake crust, the crust will peel off when you remove the paper.

4. One (not two) 9*13 cakes is more than enough to feed 20 party guests.