busy break

Technically, I'm on spring break this week, but I'm not any less busy this week than I was last week during midterm week! So I'm not really feeling the "break" part of this week, but it's definitely spring in Chicago. This isn't to say that the weather is nice, just that we're experiencing some of that cold, damp, muddy weather that we look forward to every March here in the Windy City.

I did a phone interview last week with Tanith Belbin & Ben Agosto, Olympic silver medalists in ice dance who are currently touring with Stars on Ice. They were a great interview because they're very poised, they come off as very friendly, and they can pack a lot into a short amount of time. I was able to squeeze the 15-minute phone call into my midterm schedule a week ago, but I didn't have a chance to write the article for a few days. It went live on ice-dance.com today: read it here.

This is also deadline week for IFS, the figure skating magazine that I started writing for a couple of issues ago. I normally plan ahead better, but the timing of this deadline was tough, and I was still gathering information and frantically reading books at the beginning of the week. I'm reviewing two books in one of my columns, which are going to be my 4th and 5th reviews for the magazine, so I guess that's kind of becoming my thing. I like reviewing books and take that task very seriously, so I'm trying not to rush through them.

And of course, I'm trying to keep plodding through my thesis, but I'm having a tougher time with energy and motivation this week. I was so looking forward to working on my thesis this week, but with everything else going on, I guess it's not the relaxing break that I was looking forward to. I have stuck to all of my deadlines with my thesis adviser so far, but I'm worried that I'm not going to be able to keep this one.

When I need a break from the written word, I'm also working on my old scrapbook from 2004, which is proving to be a bit of a challenge, since I can't locate quite a few photos from spring/summer 2004. I'm hoping to find backups at my parents' house this weekend. I thought I had a stack of backup discs here, too, but I can't find them.

This is my most recent page, in progress. I finished it yesterday.

Which brings me to two other projects: 1) cleaning and 2) organizing photos. Both are ongoing and monstrous tasks. I'm not exactly the best housekeeper, especially when I'm busy, so I have all kinds of piles of things to sort through. I cleared a bunch of stuff out of my bedroom last week, but somehow new piles have already appeared. I'm enjoying the extra space right now (my roommate moved out in December and I haven't found a replacement yet), but I definitely kept at least the living room cleaner when B lived here.

The photo organization is also a huge task. It's time for a portfolio update, so I'm trying to figure out which of my skating shots from this season that I should print. I'm also well overdue in posting photos, so I'll try to get a couple more sets edited this week. It's also nearing the end of the season, so I need to make sure that I have double backups of everything. Being a part-time sports photographer is a never-ending task. I can't imagine keeping up if I did this full-time!

And spring break week culminates with seeing Stars on Ice on Saturday. I might be going alone, which will be a weird experience, but at least it's just the U.S. tour and I'll be reunited with the girls for the traditional CSOI weekend in April/May.

crafty sunday

I hardly ever see movies and I don't currently have a way of watching TV that isn't Hulu after the fact, so here's a Monday-morning blog that's not about the Oscars. Instead, I spent yesterday being fairly productive, though I suppose I should have spent a bit more time working on my thesis. I only gave that a whirl early in the day, and then abandoned it.

Lately, I've been wanting to be creative. I think this is partly inspired by my friend Lori-Anne Jackson, who is working hard to get her brand-new accessory line, Sara Laurence, ready for its launch. She's been posting sneak peeks of some of the pieces on Facebook in preparation for her pro photoshoot, which is coming up soon. I haven't made anything that I've wanted to wear since a poorly-thought-out foray into painted beads in the fourth grade, but I do get paper crafty, on occasion. Though it's been a long time since I've been inspired for those occasions.

Jules and I made an 8x8 photo scrapbook together to give to some friends of ours last fall, but besides that, I'm 7 years behind in my scrapping. And I like to scrap chronologically (I like to do most everything chronologically), so I'm determined to finish up the years I can barely remember before I can't remember them at all. Over the weekend, I started digging through all my tubs and boxes of materials and started to get organized. I currently have an empty bedroom in my apartment, so this has proven to be quite useful for the process.

In 2006-2007, I worked at a scrapbook store for 50 weeks (that's a story for another blog...), and one of the things I picked up there is that it's easy to fall into the organizational trap and never get anything done. So yesterday, I determined that I had unearthed more than enough to scrapbook my March 2004 weekend in Michigan, and I did it!

It took me a long time to pick the paper from my stash. It was for a skating show, but that was before I was a real photographer, so my pictures of the actual skating were worth forgetting and I wanted to highlight the good times of the weekend with paper that was fun, a little springy, and not too girly. This super old paper (all of my paper is super old, since I bought it in stacks in 2006-2008 and never got caught up) by Junkitz did the trick! Sidebar, but the striped paper is reminiscent of Seb's pants, right? I didn't have any specific embellishments to use, so I layered papers, used Distress Ink in a couple of places, and added some Prima flowers and a painted chipboard square with a sticker to the bottom right corner. The brads on the journal box are glittered, so I thought that was appropriate for Stars on Ice.

I actually didn't plan for the paper to coordinate with the tickets, but that was a nice perk, once I decided where to put them! They're actually stuffed into a makeshift pocket behind the patterned paper. I have this weird thing where I don't like to stick things down if I can't see them completely, but I didn't want to take up all of that space of laying out all 4 tickets, side by side. So I put them in a bunch in this pocket and if I ever need to take the tickets out to see exactly where I was sitting in each arena, I can. You know, just in case.

I hate throwing away scraps, so instead of saving all of these tiny pieces of paper, I have taken to making cards out of the leftovers. These are all small (4.25"x3.5") and very simple, but they're cute and will be useful. I'm actually planning on sending the two non-thank you cards out in a package that I'm planning on mailing today, if I can get the rest of the photos for it edited.

I thought I was done after that, but my creativity was still looking for something else to do, so I ended up making another page. I only had two photos from Easter '04 and couldn't find backups of any other photos to print. It's actually tougher for me to come up with an interesting layout with only two photos, since I'm so used to having to cram 10+ onto a two-page spread. I picked remnants of a paper pack that I bought circa 2004, used some vellum and some flower brads and some Prima flowers, and hoped for the best. I don't like this one as much as the other one that I did yesterday, but it's better than the awful layout I did the one time that I scrapped last year! I only had enough leftover paper from this page to make one card.

I should apologize for the quality of the photos, taken on my phone. I was feeling a little lazy about photography last night. I'm not sure I'm going to keep posting photos of craftiness, but if I do, I'll get motivated to post better photos.