Anita Kalro Patel

I’m back today with a layout I completed last year but never shared here on the blog (I’ve got quite a few of them so you’ll probably see some more soon).  This is a lift from one of Kelly Purkey’s Sketchbook classes and as soon as I saw her layout, I fell in love!  The colors were beautiful and I loved the design.  Even better, it got me to stamp (several times) which was so much fun.

The photo is from my 30th birthday over 10 years ago.  It was a rough couple of years before this milestone birthday and my Dad was so sweet and wanted to make this birthday special for me.  He threw a small party on a boat with my close friends and family and it was the perfect day.  We had lunch on the boat, did a little dancing and enjoyed the beautiful weather outside with loved ones.  Such a special memory!

I’m getting organized for 2015 this week.  I got a fun new pink A5 Filofax at WhimSoDoodle and printable planner pages from Marcy Penner and I’m ready to put it all together.  I plan to organize both my everyday life and creative endeavors in my planner and have a big list of goals I’d like to achieve this year.  At first glance, my list looks a little crazy but when I break it down into weekly goals, it’s really not too bad.  I intentionally created tangible, actionable goals so I can easily quantify my progress throughout the year and check things off my list.  Who knows if I’ll complete everything but my hope for this year is to make progress and get things done rather than just think about getting things done (which I do quite often!)

In case you can’t read them in the image above, here are my goals for 2015:

• Walk 250,000 steps
• Try 50 new recipes
• Read 25 books
• Write 150 blog posts
• Create 100 layouts
• Complete 2015 Project Life
• Complete AE Hello Story class
• Complete unfinished projects (2014 Project Life, 2014 Week in the Life, 2012 & 2014 December Daily)

I’m super excited to start working on these goals and check them off my list.  Hopefully by the end of the year, I will have stayed active throughout the year, made lots of great food, read some good books, used up my huge stash of scrapbook supplies and shared a lot of it with all of you right here on this blog.  It’s going to be a fun, creative year and I’m looking forward to the adventure.  Wish me luck!

What are your goals and what are you looking forward to this year?  I’d love to know if you’re willing to share!  🙂

Happy New Year!  I apparently took an unintentional break from my blog in December but we had a pretty busy month.  A visit from an old friend, a weekend in New York City, 16 houseguests for Christmas and all the regular stuff that goes along with the holiday season.  It was a wonderful month and we enjoyed every bit of it!  After all of that excitement throughout December, we decided to welcome the new year with a quiet night at my Dad’s. The three of us went out to dinner, watched several episodes of Homeland, saw midnight fireworks from my Dad’s balcony and took silly photos.  The perfect night!

Now that things are settling down, I’m ready to get back to my sweet little blog.  I’ll continue with my 4 series of 40, scrapbooking projects and add other bits of content too.  I hope you’ll stick around for what I hope will be more regular posting and a fantastic year!  I’m excited for a blank slate and all of the possibilities that a new year brings.  Here’s to a happy, healthy and memorable 2015!

This week, Dhimant and I will celebrate our 9 year anniversary.  9 years.  In my mind, 9 years seems like such a long time yet our time together has flown by so quickly.  In 9 years we’ve experienced so much together and we’ve grown closer and closer each year.  I feel so lucky that he is my husband, my partner and my best friend.  I know I can always count on him and he will always be there for me no matter what.  We’ve had many great times and have faced our share of challenges too.  But through each experience, we become stronger and our bond becomes stronger too.

Over the last 9 years, we’ve had many adventures and have documented lots of them along the way.  We like to say we’ve perfected the art of the selfie and have thousands of photos we’ve taken of ourselves.  We have selfies that were taken at home, in the car, in restaurants, in parks, on boats, on airplanes, in the mountains, in various cities across the US and several countries throughout the world.  We’ve documented it all through selfies.

When I signed up for Marcy Penner’s Mini Album Workshop at Studio Calico earlier this year, I knew exactly what I wanted the theme of my mini album to be:  SELFIES!  So here it is – my finished Instagram mini album that includes a collection of random selfies we’ve taken over the last 9 years.  This album is mostly photos with just a few words in the form of quotes.  The quotes were printables from Elise Blaha Cripe and seem to go perfectly with the theme of this book.

It was so much fun for Dhimant and I to look through this album when I finished it last week and reminisce about all the memories we created in each photo.  I love having all of these snapshots mixed up together in one place.  None of the photos are in chronological order.  They’re all placed randomly and I love that it’s just a fun collection of “us”.  It makes me so happy to look through this book and see the wonderful life we’ve created.  Happy 9th Anniversary, Dhimant!  I love you more today than yesterday but not as much as tomorrow!  xoxo

I can’t believe it!  I made it through an entire week of taking photos for Ali Edwards’ Week in the Life project AND I have officially blogged my photos from every single day of last week!  All this documenting has been pretty intense and I’m definitely taking a little break from my camera for the next few days.  While it’s been a ton of work to capture all of these photos over the last week, I’m so happy that I now have a snapshot of our lives right now.  There are so many photos of ordinary, mundane things and experiences but life might look very different years from now and it’ll be fun to look back on these photos.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been using this Week in the Life project to contribute material for my series of “40 PEEKS” since the content goes together perfectly.  I promised to share “peeks” into my heart and home as part of this series and this project does just that.  For the final day of Week in the Life, I’m sharing photos and images that represent what Sunday looked like for us.  You’ll notice that some of the items I’ve included are screenshots I found on the internet of of our favorite TV shows.  Right now, Sundays are my favorite TV nights and I look forward to them each week.  Therefore, I thought it was only fitting to include our Sunday night TV lineup in the images for today.

Stories from Sunday include:

• Golf for Dhimant.  Definitely a typical Sunday around here.  I’m so happy he has a hobby that he loves and that he’s so supportive of my hobbies too.  I’m also so thankful that he has friends who happily go along with my crazy photo-taking antics and take photos for me while they’re on the golf course.  I was especially grateful this week since I really wanted to include Dhimant golfing in my Week in the Life album and the photos I got from his friend on Sunday were perfect!
• Scrapbooking for me.  When Dhimant golfs, I usually spend the day at home doing stuff around the house and messing around in my scrapbook room.  I’ve been taking a ton of online classes lately and have been trying to keep up with all of them as best I can.  Yesterday afternoon I spent some time working on a layout from one of the classes I’m taking and am happy I was able to capture myself “in action”.
• The Sunday paper.  I’ll confess – I don’t actually read the newspaper.  I just like looking through the ads on Sundays to see what’s on sale.  Crazy – I know!
• Watching TV.  As I mentioned above, my favorite TV shows right now are on Sunday nights and I look forward to this night each week.  We record them on our DVR and then watch them back-to-back (with some breaks to catch up on football games that Dhimant watches).  If the Pittsburgh Steelers are playing (Dhimant’s favorite team), then those “breaks” in between shows are definitely longer!  😉

And that was Sunday.  Thank you for following my Week in the Life journey.  It’s been fun documenting this past week through my camera lens and I’m excited to take all of the images and put them in an album using the Week in the Life kit I purchased from Ali Edwards.  I’ll share the final album here when it’s complete.

If you missed my other Week in the Life posts from the past week, you can view them by clicking on the following links:  Monday photos, Tuesday photos, Wednesday photos, Thursday photos, Friday photos, Saturday photos.

As part of my series of “40 PEEKS”, I’m sharing the photos I’ve been taking for Ali Edwards’ Week in the Life project.  Today you’ll get a view of what it’s like to spend a Saturday in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida.  My dad lives there and we spend many, many weekends there.  It’s such a nice getaway that’s just 40 minutes away from where we live and it’s always a welcome change of scenery.  While we were there this past weekend, I took some time to photograph what it’s like to spend time there which will be perfect to include in my Week in the Life album.

Stories from Saturday include:

• Waking up to a beautiful view
• Spending time with Dhimant and my Dad enjoying downtown and the beautiful weather
• Walking everywhere.  I love that we can enjoy so much without even getting into our car
• A trip to the Saturday market where we bought some fresh produce and Dhimant got lunch at one of the food stands
• A stop at my favorite scrapbook shop downtown – Whim So Doodle
• Dinner at 400 Seafood and Tap House

Such a fun and relaxing day!  Hope you enjoyed this “peek” of our Saturdays in St. Pete.  If you missed my previous Week in the Life posts, you can check out the photos using the following links:  Monday photos, Tuesday photos, Wednesday photos, Thursday photos and Friday photos.

Hope you all had a great weekend!  I’m back today with my Week in the Life photos from Friday.  As part of my series of “40 PEEKS”, I’m sharing a few peeks of our home  (both inside and out):

Stories from Friday include:

• Halloween breakfast – pumpkin pancakes!
• Lots of home organization that’s taken place over the past few weeks.  I took some photos of our refrigerator, pantry and closet to illustrate “life right now”.  It might be fun to look back on these years from now.
• Our outdoor fall decor.  Last year was the first year I had more than one pumpkin on our front porch.  (The one pumpkin looked so sad and lonely that I finally decided to get a whole family of pumpkins!)  I love all the different colored ones and love seeing them on our porch again this year.
• In the afternoon, we headed down to my dad’s place in downtown St. Pete to spend part of the weekend there.  I didn’t have any good photos from the evening but wanted to include this tidbit as part of our story for the day. 🙂

If you missed my other Week in the Life posts from last week you can find them using the following links:  Monday photos, Tuesday photos, Wednesday photos and Thursday photos.  I’ll be back tomorrow with photos from the weekend!  🙂

I’ll be honest.  I was running out of photo ideas when Thursday came along.  I’m really loving this Week in the Life project but Thursday was rough in the photo department.  There wasn’t really anything going on and I was kind of losing steam.  However, I pushed through, sat in front of my iMac at night and used the Photo Booth app to get a selfie so that I could include myself in the day’s photos.  Ali Edwards recommends getting yourself in at least one photo each day and this seemed like the only way it was going to happen on Thursday.  And then Dhimant walked in the room and got in on the Photo Booth fun so it ended up being quite entertaining.  I don’t have a lot of “peeks” to share today but here are a few from Thursday:

Stories from Thursday include:

• Depositing checks at the bank drive-thru
• Editing lots of photos for my Week in the Life album and the blog
• Dhimant working and eating in his office (which happens almost every day)
• My favorite flavor of Vitamin Water and the only other thing I drink once in a while besides water
• Silly selfies using the Photo Booth app on my iMac
• Happy mail for Dhimant.  I’m usually the one getting fun packages in the mail but today a Steelers sweatshirt arrived just for him!
• Writing blog posts in my office
• Favorite Thursday night TV show – Scandal

If you missed my other Week in the Life posts this week, you can see my daily photos using the following links:  Monday photos, Tuesday photos, Wednesday photos.

I’m still going strong with my Week in the Life project.  I’ve been taking lots of photos and using my DSLR more too.  Today is actually the first time I set up my tripod and used the self timer on the DSLR.  I’ve had this camera for YEARS and have never used the timer on it.  Can you believe it?  I use the TimerCam app on my iPhone all the time but somehow everything is a little scarier on the “big camera”.  Well, today I figured it out and used it and can’t believe I’ve never tried it before.  I love it and am so excited to use it more going forward.

As I mentioned previously, I’m sharing small glimpses of my life here on the blog as part of my series of “40 PEEKS”.  Week in the Life fits in this category perfectly and I’m enjoying sharing my daily photos in this space this week.  Here are my photos from Wednesday:

Stories from Wednesday include:

• His and hers bagels for breakfast
• Lots of ordinary household chores – emptying the dishwasher, filling the dishwasher, laundry, vacuuming, etc.  I’ve never really captured these activities on my camera before so it was kind of neat.  And, these are my first timer pics from my DSLR
• Date night dinner followed by a trip to Golfsmith, Target and Costco (isn’t that where everyone goes on date night?!)
• The price of gas has dropped dramatically recently and thought I’d capture that here.  Of course, Costco is usually a little cheaper than other gas stations and that’s where I like to fill my tank when possible
• Favorite Wednesday night TV show – Survivor (not pictured but I got a screenshot to include in my album)

If you missed my previous Week in the Life photo posts, you can see Monday here and Tuesday here.  Thanks for stopping by!