What a WEEK!!

HOLY MOLY!! Pull up a comfy chair cause this could be a L-O-N-G one!! And yes, there are cards involved!!

Last Saturday we headed to Legoland to celebrate youngest DS's b-day (both my kiddos were "blessed" with holiday b-days.....oldest is Memorial weekend (hit/miss) and youngest is Labor Day weekend (hit/miss again, and yes, I know the irony of that one!!). ANYWHOOOS! So we load up both boys, youngest's best friend and his older brother and the grandparents and head out. We were at the park shortly after opening (about 10:30ish). Did you know that it takes approximately 7 hours and 15 min for boys between the ages of 9 and 12 to decide that they've had enough of Legoland? But the close to 2 hour drive home was QUIET!! LOL

The "Birthday" boy, Chace~soon to be 9, *G, oldest DS Grant and best friend *J

Soooo, Sunday, I'm TIRED. I know that I have to think about making DS and his great grandfather b-day cards by Wed and Thurs. No big deal. I'll just take my time and kinda putz around with it. Until I get a phone call. "Oh good! You're home!! Did you know that Oak Glen is on fire?!" Uhhhhh.........Here is what I saw from my driveway:

Great!! Some mental yahoo decided to see how challenging it would be to start a fire when we are surrounded by drought conditions. Now where this is burning in on a icky steep hill called Pisgah Peak. We have a "loop" that we will ride our mountain bikes on this miserable hill when we feel we need some type of punishment. Round trip from our house is about 10 miles. This is somewhere between 3-5 miles away. Within 2 hours 300 acres had burned. Moving fast. Decide that I need to get all my pictures in one place JUST IN CASE since I have heard that there are mandatory evacuations happening less than 2 miles from our neighborhood. The state pulled in the big guns early on this fire:

Along with numerous helicopters and crop dusters, we got the DC 10. This shot does not begin to tell you how LOW this was (imagine: small p&s camera, zoomed in but not all the way!! That's how low this was!).

MONDAY: FOUR mental teenager yahoos decide that there isn't enough going on and decide to start another fire in our drought conditions. But this time....they started it basically in someone's back yard (which just happened to be a friends house....melted her windows, but the house was saved). This is what we saw from our front driveway:

As the crow flies, this is less than a mile away from our neighborhood. I had many friends who were evacuated (in addition to the ones who had been evacuated the previous day~~yep...we got two fires within mere miles of each other!). We were under voluntary evacuations. By now, my truck is loaded with all our pictures and have bags packed with some clothes. NOT FUN. But!! No mandatory evacuations ever came about.

TUESDAY: SU makes an announcement that has everyone up in arms (more about that later). So now I am spending WAAAY too much time reading all the hoopla about that.

After a couple of days of going the L-O-N-G way home due to road closures, everything was fine. Everyone was allowed back home Wed and roads were totally open by Thurs.

MEANWHILE: It is now Thurs and in addition to everything else, I've not made my birthday cards. Yeah....what a great mommy I am!!! We celebrated DS's b-day and I came home and FINALLY finished his card

I had in my head that I wanted the extreme skateboarding to look like he was grinding a rail down the stairs. Spent too much time trying to make a rail. Finally just moved on and just had him "jumping" the stairs. I used the Stair Step Fold Tutorial found on SCS and modified it by cutting off the "top" stair. I didn't realize how TINY this stamp was! This guy looked like he was in the land of giants with that top stair. I stamped the image once on chocolate chip paper with craft chocolate ink and clear embossed. I stamped him again (just regular ink) on a scrap piece of chocolate chip paper and cut both of the images out (did I mention that this image is TINY?!!!). I then took a thin strip of transparency and using glue dots sandwiched the strip between the two images. I cut off some of the extra transparency so that the strip was just noticeable along his leg.

Originally, I had wanted to do the wrinkle free distress look for my stairs. Just could NOT get the mojo to flow with that one (I think the grunge look requires you to be in a "hey dude~~whatever~~ mood". Too many bad vibes with everything else. You can't force grunge. It has to flooooow). I then pulled out some designer paper from my pack from Me and My Big Ideas. The designer paper was stamped with the Extreme Elements to add a more "grungy" look. I had thought to use the collage alphabet and make the "X"treme look more like the "X" games. Uhhhhh, yeah. The "x" in that set is TEENY TINY. So not happening. So "Extreme IX!" was stamped with chocolate craft ink and clear embossed. Supplies: Paper: Baja Breeze, DP from Me and My Big Ideas. Inks: Chocolate chip, chocolate chip craft, baja breeze. Stamps: Extreme skakeboard, extreme elements, collage alphabet (all SU). Accessories: clear ep, heat gun, Scor-Pal, glue dots, glue glider pro.

Overall rating: *** 1/2 to **** stars.

Thanks for stopping by today!! I will share the rest of my week and another card tomorrow. I need to s-p-r-e-a-d out all the fun! LOL

Be safe this weekend!!