Scrapbooking AND Poland;)

Hey, a combined post! Now in all fairness, I'm going to continue to blog about scrapbooking because that's where all my comments come from. Give the readers what they want right? (For those of you who want more on life overseas, leave me a comment).

I've got a few things for you today. Lain's challenge for this week was to create a home decor object from scrapbooking supplies. Now I don't know if ornaments are generally considered to be home decor, but for this purpose I am considering them to be.

I make these for the kids' godparents each year, since we're so far away, it gives them a little idea of how much they grow. I recycle a CD and cover it with paper or cardstock and then embellish it with ribbons, beads and all the rest. This one took me about 30 minutes to do, but I kind of rushed it and I didn't get the beads around the outside on quite straight. I use a glue gun to glue the beads on. The other side is also covered with paper and has another picture of Toby on it, but it's not as embellished...I really only cover the other side so that the CD doesn't show through. Because I don't have a crop a dile (but I'd really like one), I punch the holes in the CDs by using my handy hammer and nail and a block of wood underneath.

So that's my scrapbooking for today. Now onto Poland.

Today, I was stopped in bumper to bumper traffic leaving my house trying to get to Toby's school. This is never a problem. Usually I am in bumper to bumper traffic to Seth's school, but Toby's school is about 10 minutes up the road. So just outside of Powsin, which is about 5 minutes from my house, traffic STOPS. It took me about 20 minutes to get the 2 miles to Toby's school from where the traffic stopped. When we get up to what's going on (I'm thinking it's an accident) it turns out that there are about 7 police (Policja) cars sitting around, pulling people over randomly. Apparently their job is to impede the flow of traffic. Dylan said, so you take a main artery into town and completely block it during rush hour on a Monday morning, no wonder Western Europeans think Poland is backwards.

And one last bit for the day. Here's an article on gift cards. Dylan sent it to me this morning and it really hit home. My friend Sara sent me one of those "get to know you" emails where you fill in the information. I'm a sucker for those even though I don't usually send forwards, but those are just kind of fun and sometimes you learn something new about your friends. Anyway, in that one was the question "What is the worst gift you have received?" I answered "Walmart gift cards". We don't have Walmart anywhere that I live and it really shows that you didn't think about me at all. You just checked me off your list. Gift cards are not as great with online shopping and Walmart in particular is difficult (particularly when you live in Africa and Walmart, as well as quite a few other vendors, have African ISPs blocked).

Now after all that, I did cop out and send 3 gift cards this year. All to the same family. And for the same reasons she mentions in the article. I don't really know them anymore and I never see them. So maybe they should fall off my list...

So hope you all have a good day. And leave me some comments;).