Holy smokes! I knew I hadn't blogged in awhile, but now I see my last post was on February 5th! Wow! And now it's the END of February!! Hard to believe so much time has passed!

This week I have been off from school (we get a week off in February by combining the Presidents' birthday holidays with some district recess days), so I've been trying a new way to organize my (thousands of) photos. It is based on the book Photo Freedom by Stacy Julian:

I signed up for an on-line course based on this book. It actually runs through the end of May! We 'meet' online once a week. So far, we have been asked to organize our photos into chronological order, and put them into a certain type of binder for temporary storage. My dining room table was covered with pictures all week! I'll have to post some pictures of how it looked! Stacy calls her system the Library of Memories system:

Look at how neatly she has all of her albums lined up!! Hopefully, this big mess on my dining room table will turn into a better way to keep my pictures and my creativity flowing.

"Trust me," Stacy says. Okay, for now, I will. I'll trust that her system will give me "freedom" from trying to scrap every single photo I have, from being overwhelmed by the number of photos I have, and from getting too bogged down by all the photos to enjoy the process of scrapbooking. Photo Freedom --- sounds good to me!

My Civic Duty

This week I've been doing my civic duty. On Monday, I reported for Jury Duty. By Tuesday, I was listening to a criminal case.

I can't wait for it to be over, so I can talk about the case. It's quite interesting. We've been there all week, but have yet to start deliberating.

I found this article on Sign On San Diego about Jury Duty in San Diego . . . so funny and so TRUE!!! Here's a portion:

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. . . I learned a whole bunch of other things too. So please continue.

Deductive reasoning made me realize that although the summons says you have to be there by 7:45 a.m., it's okay if you show up by 8:45. No one seems to care. In fact, if you show up 5 days earlier or 5 days later than your summons date, the jury office apparently doesn't care about that either.

I now know that jurors are special people, although they can get sore sitting around all day doing very little. I figured out the soreness can be abated if one walks around imagining what each person would be doing if they weren't doing this.

It is against the laws of nature to fall asleep in the small seats, yet miraculously, some people figure out a way.

I also learned that you mustn't put coffee on the metal detection ramp in the lobby.

Because I am a hiker, I was happy to hear from a brief film about jury service that somehow the great peaks of Yosemite have something in common with the process of coming to a verdict.

In a particularly interesting discovery, I learned that the large jury room "cattle call" seats perhaps 500 people, who spend their time knitting, embroidering, talking on the phone, working on their laptops, reading books and newspapers or getting dates. Because there are many television sets, one can watch Wolf Blitzer talk about something while simultaneously watching Paris Hilton get out of jail and hug somebody.

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(Read complete article Jury duty - the inside story by clicking on this link).

Small world . . .

In a "it's a small world" moment, I met this woman at a recent class I took at Stamping Details. (More about the class I took in another post). We were talking about TV shows, and I mentioned how excited I was that LOST was back on, and I was told that I just had to talk to a fellow scrapper who would be coming to take a later class ~~~and I found out that she is Hurley's sister! (For you non-LOST fans, Hurley is a key character!) As Donna Downey said on her blog. . . it was a one degree of separation celebrity encounter! It was so fun to meet her . . . she looks exactly like her brother!