Laptop Crashes and Sketch Challenges

I've been away from the blog for a bit, but I've been super busy with lots
of small home projects and crafts - more to come on those very soon, I promise.

First, I have to say I've (barely) lived through 2 laptop crashes this month and finally had to rebuild my entire machine, causing me to have to re-download my entire online backup. Thank goodness I had an online backup. I used Backblaze, and it's working great. I can't imagine what I would do if I lost my 20K photos (not to mention movies and documents and music) forever.

On the other hand, let me tell you how long it takes to download your entire 20K photo library - it takes FOREVER. I have more than 200GB in my backup - and I know that's not even a huge amount compared to others. But to download that 200GB is a time-consuming and painstaking process because you have to truly verify that each file made it intact. Sometimes you download an entire 4GB zip file and find that just 2 files in the whole thing didn't make it. Other times, all of them did. And then the next time, none of them.

It's certainly faster to download than it is to upload, but it still takes a long time. I think I'll be completely done by this weekend. If that's the case, it will have taken a week and a half to get everything back in place. That's compared to the more than a month that it took to upload everything to my online backup in the first place. But again, I'm just so so thankful I had that backup.

So - on to more positive things.

I've been getting Scrapbook Circle's monthly scrapbooking kits for a few months now, and I still love them. They always have the best combinations of colors and patterns - and I love that I don't have to match anything together. The kits always have the newest stuff too, which I love.

May 2012's kit The Story is a great one - full of subtle and bright colors. It was a fun one to play with. I used the sketch for this month to create this layout.

A simple but fun layout - everything is from the kit except the large cream letters, the mists, and the little date punch strip (both from my stash).

And then, just for fun, I thought I'd share this layout I made with last month's Scrapbook Circle kit. It was a super bright and happy kit, great for these photos of a day spent at the amusement park.

I printed out the photo collages on 8x10 photo paper, and I love them! I think I'm addicted to these collages now as I've made a bunch (before my laptop died). They are a great way to get a bunch of photos on the page.

I'll be back (hopefully) soon with my latest home projects - as soon as my laptop is back in shape.