Wednesday, May 21, 2014

I have tried

my hand at making clusters, and I found out a couple of things....
Probably the one that was no surprise, AT ALL was that it is an amazing amount of fun to just play with the parts of a kit, without having to fit other things with it and that also leads to the second revelation...... it's a lot easier than page scrapping!
Don't worry, I'm not going to leave all the pictures that I need to put somewhere, but it IS a whole different way of scrapping and a whole new kind of fun!

These are my first attempts.....

Carena's kit AUSSIE for these 2


DigiDesignResorts collab MIDSUMMER for these 2


Color Challenge at The Studio

Played with one of Boo's kits as well........ The One Step Beyond series is going strong, and #13 released today.  




Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Hi there :-)

Everytime I say that, I have to think about the puppy in UP....  Maybe because I have the same attentionspan? LOL


Found this on facebook this morning.......... seemed kinda appropriate ... don't you think?



Nothing shocking has happened in a week, and I'm starting to breath easy......
Haven't done much in way of scrapping, because I'm sorting thru things to make legroom in the house. It's very slow going, and the hardest part seems to be to get to the dump to actually get rid of things. I may ask my brother in law to come up one of these days for a dump run. He has what the family dubbed "the ugly car" which doesn't look huge, but you'd be surprised what fits in it!  I personally don't see the ugly part on the car. I rather like it actually. The common name of the thing is Toyota Yaris, the 5 door version..... Our neon is great, but like the Ka, is not really known for the capacity of crap you can haul in it. LOL.

So the boxes, papers, things we don't need/want need to be recycled. We take them to the dump and put them in the designated containers, so they don't fill up the landfill....... you just have to get them there, I s'pose.
On the up side, the computer room is starting to look a little less of a dumping ground, and a little more  "just" like a bomb went off, so we're making progress. I spent a good day last week going thru paperwork, deciding what can go, what we need to keep, (and where) as well as how long, and than it came to me..... Keep the current year in a binder, and at the end of the year, scan it, and put it on an external drive. DUH! I already do that with the bank account, power, rent, and internet bills, because they don't send out bills or statements anymore, and they are available online for about 1 year, so I download the statements, and put them in folder by year, in January, I go in, and sort the payments by company, put that in the folder and on to the next year........... I am going to donate back some of the books I got for free at the library not a of them, some I want to read again), break down some of the boxes after I decide what needs repacked and I don't need them anymore, integrate a couple of boxes into one or 2 crates for Christmas and other decorations and see how much space I created. I'm still debating whether I want to keep the packing material for the dishes and breakables, or if I should pitch that (that would take care of a box or 2........) to give me a little legroom under the desk.

I had planned to go to Avifauna coming Sunday, while Mike is at work, but he decided he wanted to go to the zoo in Arnhem with me the weekend after, so that will have to keep. I have been wanting to go to both places for a long time, and finally decided that I was going to go on Mikes day of work, since the discount train tickets we had will expire on June 5th.  Avifauna is a bird park, and I seem to be the only one that has any interest in going there in the entire family, so that will be a "Pauli day" ;-) The zoo always seems interesting to most of the family, but Mike told me a while ago that he can only visit so many a year (unlike Nicky and me, who could go every day, and never get tired of it) so I have to pick my battles on which ones to go to together. Burgers' Dierenpark is a 100 year old zoo, but it prides itself (and has done so since I can remember) that it is more than a variety of animals, it is also very much into the understanding of species, and enrichment, so that will be interesting, and than we have a date to go to the Safari Park (not sure if it is with my sisters family or just the 2 of us, but he really wants to go there) and I think that will probably be the limit on zoo's for the year.  I will go to Avifauna as soon as I can find another set of discount tickets LOL. (The added bonus is that with my zoocard I can get in free to the bird park, and half price in Arnhem, with a discount for Mike, so on a whole, it's a doable day out..... And a GRRRRREAT opportunity to get a couple more pictures to play with LOL.  I'm also hoping to go to the open air museum this  year, but a lot of the outings depend on finances, so probably not, but it will keep, I hope.

Like I said, no scrapping pages to show you, but I wanted to at least try and get back in some kind of habit, and figure I start with the blog, work my way to the webdesign course, and eventually back to scrapping on a regular basis, before i get kicked off the team :-)

For now, if I don't talk to you before than, have a great memorial day weekend, maybe visit a cemetery and clean some family markers, be safe if your traveling, and don't forget to hug a loved one...

Hugs,
Pauli


Thursday, May 1, 2014

I don't get it.....

Just read on the Zoo site, that the baby lions are all dead!

Nobody knows what happened, nobody kept an eye on the pride, there were no camera's, and there was nowhere where the lioness could safeguard her cubs............... I don't know if it was ignorance or not-caring, but somehow, this doesn't feel right for a zoo? It stated in a Saturday post that there hadn't been any sign of life since the keepers came to work on Friday Morning.....?
I guess it should have rang alarm bells, when they didn't know that she was pregnant, even though they sent out a newsletter with a picture of the mating......... Last year, they were surprised by the birth of 2 of the 3 giraffe calves. I'm not making this up, it's in their newsletter. It gave me the creeps when it happily states in the announcement that "the mother was pacing all day Wednesday and part of Thursday, often with one of the cubs in her mouth" and it was put down as if she was proudly showing off her little ones.......?!?!
I'm thinking she was looking for a place to put them safe. No matter how "respectful" the rest of the pride is.... every nature documentary I've seen always had the new mom take distance from the pride until the cubs were atleast 2 or more weeks old. You'd think if I can figure this out, the powers that run the zoo, should have for sure?  You need a degree in Animal Care to volunteer keeping the cages clean, so you'd think somebody would have had ideas for the safety of mom and babies?
I guess accidents happen, nature takes its course, and all those other platitudes, but we're not talking baby ducks here. In my humble opnion, with it being her first litter, and the pride only being together a year, they should have had a little bit more precaustions/surveillance than locking up at night, and calling it good?  Just saying....

I read some of the comments, and I think they're going to have a heck of a time living this down. They've been awarded "best zoo" for the last 3 years, although for the amount of animals they house, they seem to have a lot of deaths. But I have to be honest, I wouldn't know how many animals the other zoo's loose in the course of a year, because I don't go to their sites as often and when I do, I just skim the highlights. It just seems a lot.  There's people that were commenting that they would never, EVER set foot in the zoo again, people that were thinking of putting the animal protection agency on them, people comparing them with the Copenhagen zoo. etc. Me? I don't know what I'm going to do. I just renewed my membership thru july 2015 in February, so..... I'm dissappointed, disgusted and incredulous, a little mad, (OK, make that a lot mad) but I also don't have all the facts. I hope that they learned, be it at the expense of helpless animals (no matter how many sharp implements they have, they can not act like they would in the wild) and it won't happen again. That next time they have little ones, no matter what species, they will have a keeper in the area at all times, or at least camera surveillance with someone keeping tabs and ready to intervene if need be, that they will be prepared to separate the mom and baby(s) from the other animals until they stand a chance of survival and they figure out that animals in a cage behave differently from their wild cousins ........... As for the Stockholm zoo thing....... If you know there are enough animals of a certain sub-species, the responsible thing to do, if you're acting on behalf of the animals, and not the shareholders, is not to breed them, so you don't GET to the point of having too many of one gene pool? One article almost made it sound like they were growing their own meat for the predators in the zoo, but I somehow have a hard time believing that one.

Ok, stepping off the soapbox now :-) and I'll be back with updates in a day or so. Mike is off tomorrow, and has called dibs on the computer, so it will probably be Saturday or tomorrow night after hubby goes to sleep. LOL. Looking forward to Digital Scrapbooking Day, and will spend tomorrow updating/checking and narrowing down things on my wishlist, checking the bank account, and probably narrowing down a little more, or maybe I'll just play/pick up freebies on Saturday :-)  We'll see, and when done with that...... there's always ZOO TYCOON! LOL Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that I would enjoy playing computergames this much. I'll have to figure out how to make screenshots, so I can show you "my" zoo, someday.....

Don't forget to hug a loved one? And if you have fuzzy roommates, hug them extra tight :-)