Is it too early to talk New Year's resolutions?

I'm eager to say sayonara to 2009, so now that it's officially the first day of the last month of the year, I'm feeling relieved.

One of my New Year's resolutions is to back up my digital photos and get them and my digital scrapbooking files organized according to some sort of usable scheme. I haven't done much digital scrapping, partially because I don't entirely know what I'm doing, and partially because when I open Photoshop Elements I inevitably spend twenty minutes looking for the file I want because the stinking files are all over the place, in different folders on different spaces on my hard drive. So I spend so much time trying to figure out whether that background image I KNOW I downloaded is in my downloads folder, or my documents, or my pictures, or in one of the various subfolders within my downloads or my documents, or my pictures...yeah, you get the idea. It's a mess.

But my inability to construct digital pages doesn't mean I don't get swayed into downloading more and more awesome digital freebies from the web, or even buying digital templates and elements from time to time. When I saw Cathy Zielske's post about her new holiday memories digital template, I could not resist. It looked SO easy. And it took her 20 MINUTES to throw together three pages. Three pages in 20 minutes! Presto! Surely I could do this.

To make a long story short, it took me more than 20 minutes. To do one page. But, eventually I emerged victorious. My page looks almost exactly like Cathy's examples because I'm not well versed enough in my Photoshop skills to do much other than drag and drop into the existing template. I used Cathy's Layered Template #15 and Mindy Terasawa's I Believe Kit and I Believe Solids. So yeah, complete copycat. Still, I'm pretty proud of this one.

2007 was Eliot's first Christmas. We were in the little house that Eli and I first bought together, the little house we brought Eliot home to when he was born in April of that same year. Ah, memories. Captured!

 Eli informs me that he wasn't working 12 hour nights yet in December of '07. He claims he didn't even transfer to CCU until January of the next year. Since it's digital, I suppose I could easily go in and change the journaling. But you know what? I'm not going to. Done, and...done. Good enough.