Buying Happiness

You are no doubt familiar with the saying "Money can't buy happiness", right? Well, I beg to differ. It just depends on your definition of happiness.  Jay & I spent a portion of the weekend shopping for flowers for the front shrub bed and plants for the house, among other things, and I managed to buy a bit of happiness...

First we went to Lowes and bought plants for the shrub bed - including snapdragons, dahlias, asian lilies, and another I can't think of the name of.  And Jay planted them in the shrub bed - most of them aren't to the point of flowering yet.  But soon!

While at Lowes, we saw Lucky Bamboo and thought it would make a great planting for the sunroom. But we weren't so excited about the variety of pots available.  So we went to Walmart...

Where I found and promptly fell in love with this planter. The colors are perfect for my scrap room (which did not yet have any plants). I brought the pot home empty with not a clue what to put in it.  A little happiness for my scrap room!

Then we headed over to Target to look at pots, still not having found anything that seemed perfect for bamboo stalks. Which is where I found this...

Utensil crock for my kitchen. On clearance! I also bought the three red utensils you see in it. On sale! I was needing a new one of each of these items anyway - and this looks so great with my red canisters.   Yep, a little happiness for my kitchen counter.

So, back to Lowes we went, still searching for a plant for the Walmart pot and still thinking we wanted to do something with the bamboo.  Back at Lowes I found the Peace Lily plant pictured in the pot above. I think it is perfect for my scrap room and continues with the blue/green/tranquil oasis theme of the room.

And we settled on this pot for the bamboo:

The completed arrangement has all five elements for Feng Shui.  Fire (the red pot), Wood (the bamboo plant), Water (in the pot), Earth (the river rocks in the pot that hold the stalks in place) and Metal (I dropped some coins in with the rocks!).  The arrangement of three is supposed to signify happiness (yes, I bought happiness!).  In any event, it looks great in the sunroom and I can't wait to see how it grows. Right now the arrangement is about two feet tall. I also learned a lot about bamboo and feng shui in the process. Thank you internet!

The balance of my weekend was spent house cleaning, grocery shopping, doing 10 (count em - TEN) loads of laundry all washed, dried, folded, and put away, and some decluttering. You'll understand why I didn't have time to come play on my blog and keep up with Google Reader.

Set It Sunday

Okay, I know this is really late this week... but I have been crazy busy and feel lucky to be getting to it at all! And I KNOW you can relate...

Last Week's Goals:
1. Gym three times.  Check!
2. 1 each Gratitude and Art Journal layouts. Check on the Gratitude. Did not get to Art Journal.
3. Keep up with Picture Spring prompts and post photos on blog - DAILY. I was successful at completing this each day during the week, but barely made it to the computer over the weekend! Big why in an upcoming post.
4. Finish tagging 2008 photos. No. I changed focus and finished up the lessons from my "Get it Together" class and tagged a bunch of digi scrap elements instead.
5. Get back into normal routine.  Check! (well, pretty much anyway).

This Week's Goals:
1. Gym three times.
2. 1 each Gratitude and Art Journal layouts.
3. Keep up with Picture Spring prompts and post photos on blog.
4. Pay Taxes (ugh).
5. Spend 15 minutes/weekday tagging photos or digi elements - Wednesday is excluded.

I have a crazy busy two weeks here - will be at work Wednesday and Thursday both this week and next, so I'm having to keep my goals very reasonable and allow some flexibility on the timing.  But my intention for this week is to be able to put a happy CHECK mark next to each item at the end of the week!

More Picture Spring

I'm loving this class so much - I just had to share some more shots with you!

This first is my Spring Palette creation! I had a lot of fun slicing and dicing in PSE today! 

What follows are all the original photos that created this. All of the photos were taken in the last two days, with all but two coming from my own yard. The Bradford Pear was snapped at a local shopping center. (Our Bradford Pear split in two during a bad windstorm and was never replaced). The Forsythia is from my neighborhood - down the block.

Picture Spring - Everyday Beauty

Today's prompt asked us to look at our mundane everyday chores and try to find beauty in the laundry, dishes, and soap scum.  This is the hardest prompt we've had so far - it just wasn't working for me.  But I came up with these two contenders:

Curious?  It is rust on a hinge on the door in my bathroom. And it needs to be cleaned or replaced. In a setting OTHER than my bathroom, I might see the beauty in this.

As I plodded through my morning routine, I honestly could not find beauty in the clutter, chaos, and sticky kitchen floors that I call home. Until I spotted this. In a small box filled with the earrings that I wear on a daily basis (sorely in need of sorting and putting away) I found a Spring Palette, Spring Sparkle, and Everyday Beauty.  I think this tangle mess of costume jewelry is one of my favorite photos so far! (And if you ever had any doubts about what my "happy colors" are - just look! They are all here!).

Picture Spring - Spring Sparkle

Having already done a "dew on the grass" photo (which is really my best idea of Spring sparkle), I had to get creative. I also had very limited time as I had to be in the office.  So my quick and dirty shots for the day included these:

Inside the shower looking out - water droplets on the shower curtain.

Need I say more?

Picture Spring - Spring Palette 2

Subtle Transformations - part two

These "lovely" blue cardboard boxes actually hold 12x12 hanging file folders. I have three of them. One houses all the "School of Life" ephemera for Rachel and Becca. The second houses Sarah's "School of Life" and family vacation ephemera.  The third has miscellaneous stuff that I've kept to scrapbook. At some point I need to go through these boxes and do some major purging of saved "stuff" but for now it is contained.

Only the boxes were just too ugly to take their place in my beautiful new scraproom. That royal blue stuck out like a sore thumb.

Two cans of spray paint later (did you know that cardboard boxes really soak up spray paint?  And that if you paint outside on a windy day, half the paint blows away?) and I have green boxes that match my room and do not stand out, but rather, blend in quite nicely. I learned a lot about spray paint on this job - including that hubs gets annoyed if I get paint on the garage floor... ooops!