Who else has a weakness for punches?

I ordered some new Martha Stewart punches recently and one came today. Its the newest Graveyard punch and I ordered it from Hope Stamps Eternal. Wonderful customer service!!! I made this Halloween ATC for Angie as she was missing the 9th ATC from her sleeve of ATC's so it will be in the mail tomorrow Angie :). I am expecting 2 more to come from Ellen Hutson as she was having a 15% off discount but I will wait until they come in before I tell you which ones. Stay tuned :).

86 years old never looked so great!!!

Charlie's mom and Charlie's brother both share the same birthday - July 26th!! Marie is here visiting from Virginia and we had everyone over for the day to celebrate. Katherine and her family were away on a missions trip so they weren't able to make it (we missed ya Katherine!). We had a great day and had a lot of food and fun! I took a few photos!!

Looks like I never came back to tell about the college tour

Completely forgot about it ... so here I am now, 2 days later. Ha

UNCG was very nice. It was quite large, in my opinion. Charlie thought it felt "compact" but compared to Wingate University which had only 1,700 students, it felt pretty big. Now I never went to college so I have nothing to compare this to so this felt big. Our tour lasted about an hour and I felt like we walked FOREVER!! I was surprised to see about 25 students, 24 girls and 1 boy who were there for the tour. We watched a short video and then they divided us into 2 groups so it wasn't so large with all of us walking around the campus. They showed us the one cafetaria they have which freshmen get to eat unlimited meals for one price which I thought was nice. We got to go in a freshman dorm, all freshmen dorms are air conditioned. The upper classmen dorms are NOT but are larger. They also, like Wingate, have a great teaching program and by the time the students graduate, they will have had 1,000 hours in schools in clinical settings so she will have lots of experience before she actually teaches. If this is what she decides she wants to be. Can you see little Emily teaching? :) Aw, I think she will make a cute little teacher. Emily thinks this school is too big and isn't sure she likes it. Now she is saying she prefers Wingate so we'll see. We have PLENTY of time to decide and I am glad we are doing all this research now.

In a little bit we are headed off for another college tour

We are headed to University of North Carolina Greensboro or UNCG for short. Its about an hour and 1/2 from us so its not too far from Concord. 17,000 students go there. Its on 210 acres so it sounds HUGE. I still can't quite believe we are looking at colleges already for little Ms Emily :). I will report back with our findings later.

I tried another Bella challenge

My latest and first Greeting Farm image - isn't she adorable? Here's the challenge ...


and here is the card I made. Paper is Lime Rickey from Basic Grey (love that too!)

Gorjuss Set #3 are in the house!! All the way from Scotland!

I'm trying something new

I look at other blogs and see other people who try these blog challenges. Well, I have never tried this as I think they are too challenging. Make sense? So today I tried it. And you know what? I liked it. I sometimes think my cards all look the same! I tried this card from the Bella blog and it looks like this



and I came up with this:

What do you think? Do you like it? I do :).

I changed my blog around a little bit

What do you think? Do you like it? Do you love it? Do you hate it? I noticed Angie's blog is really cute and she changed it up so I wanted to change mine up so I did. Let me know what you think if you have a few minutes :).

We are having the coolest summer that I can remember in the longest time!!

And I do not mind one bit!! This morning when the dogs woke me up, I went outside and I thought, wow is it July or is it October. There was a definite "chill" in the air and it felt great!! Refreshing comes to mind!!! I came in and turned on the light, looked at the thermometer. Was that 57 degrees I read? Yes it was. By 10:00, it had "warmed" up to only 68 degrees. WOW and it is only JULY!! WOW. It feels WONDERFUL. I think we broke a 100 year old record temp in Charlotte. How nice is that!!! For July!! This is why I love it in the Carolinas. Oh yeah!!! I don't miss Florida one bit!! Not for one second!! Ha!!

The talk about colleges has started

Emily will be a senior this coming year and its hard to believe we are starting to talk and think about colleges. She has her senior schedule already picked out. She knows what classes she is taking the whole year and her guidance counselor recommended her to start taking college tours over the summer so today we took our first one at Wingate University. Its a private college in Wingate, NC which is only 40 miles from us. Its quite expensive and only has 1,500 kids but I wanted to get a "feel" for something small and see what Emily thought of it. It was very nice and is the 3rd college in NC that specializes in education for teaching. Emily is thinking of becoming an elementay school teacher so this would be a great place to start. They offer this fantastic international program too where in their junior year each student gets to travel (at no extra cost) to a foreign country of their choice (depending on where they are going) for 10 days. They earn a credit and its a great experience. I can see Emily loving that!! They also get to do alot of hands on student interning in their freshman year so she would know from the get go if she liked teaching. Next week we will go to University of NC in Greensboro. A much larger college with about 17,000 students so we can compare the two schools. We do that on Thursday.

Amuse has their Christmas holiday stamps for 2009 out

and I went to La Carta Bella today to get mine. I made these 2 cards so far. What do you think?

Christmas in July?

I made a few Christmas cards today. I love this snowman stamp by Whipper Snapper.

A few ATC's I made Friday

While sitting at the dermatologist office with Nicholas getting his 2nd blue light treatment for his acne, I brought along some ATC's to work on in the office. Since we were there for about 2 hours, I had PLENTY of time to get these 3 completely colored then assembled them once I got home. I love how each one turned out. But I think the pumpkin and the sunflower one are my favorites. You can click any of them for a larger size. I think I am getting better at my coloring with Copic markers. What do you think? :)