Listgirl Elsewhere

The coolest thing came in the mail last week.  The special DIY Issue of the Dutch magazine Flow Magazine!  Back in December, I was contacted by Otje van der Lelij, one of the freelance editors at Flow Magazine.  She had stumbled upon my blog and seen my Project Life pages and became intrigued.  She was writing an article about Project Life for the DIY Issue of Flow Magazine and wanted to ask me a few questions and use some of my photos.  I agreed and we had email correspondence back and forth.  They said they would send me a copy of the magazine when it came out.  I received it in the mail last Thursday!  I was super-excited and shared on Facebook and Instagram right away.  If only I could read & understand Dutch!

 

Another cool thing I stumbled upon this past week was an article at Craft Storage Ideas, about the way I organize my journal cards for Project Life!  Hazel Hamman (one of my blog readers) wrote the post over there.  I was so excited to see it, lol.  Thanks for the shoutout, Hazel!

 

And… the end of an era has come.  The Digi Show has recorded their final podcast and ended its wonderful run.  I will miss having new episodes to listen to, but am also glad that I’m friends with Katie and Peppermint and will continue to keep in touch.  Well, of course Peppermint, ha!  We talk on most days.  But the good news is, they’ve moved all the old episodes from their Paperclipping days over to The Digi Show, so now all the episodes are at one place, available for listening!  I’ve been honored to have been a guest on four of the episodes over the years. I won’t lie. It’s awesome to see that “Christine Newman” link on their sidebar and have a URL link to all four of the episodes. 

If you’ve never listened to The Digi Show podcast, you can start with the latest and go back.  Or start from the beginning.  If you’re interested in the episodes where I was a guest, then they’re here!  Funny fact about this.  On two of the episodes that I was on, I happened to have a cold so my voice was funny and nasally.  They had a knack for asking me to be the guest when I was sick, lol!  :p

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Land of Sunshine

About the only thing weather-related we can complain about in San Diego is the lack of rain and a 3-year draught. 

I can’t complain at all about wearing short sleeves and shorts in January.  Or that the sun shines 300 days per year and I can run outside year-round. 

I suppose I can complain about the amount of money spent on sunscreen every year, but that’s just getting nitpicky.  It’s even beautiful when it’s overcast.

The weekend before this weekend, Todd & I went running at the coast.  We are both signed up to run the Hot Chocolate 15K at the end of March, so training has officially begun.  Last weekend the coast run was 3.6 miles for me.  Today we ran at the lake and I ran 4 miles.  After the run last weekend, we went to lunch at Lourdes Mexican and I had their chicken soup.  It’s my favorite, it’s so good!

On Friday 1/17, Todd’s work had an afternoon celebration in their amphitheater.  It was catered by Stone Brewery, and there was lots of good food and free craft beer.  Todd and his work friends hanging out.

Free food.

Last Saturday 1/18 we had to take Todd’s car in for new brakes.  Ouch!  But we also got to have lunch with our friends AJ & Meera and their kids at Chipotle.  We hadn’t seen them in a while, so it was a treat.

Group photo outside.

Afterwards Todd had to go check out the popcorn flavored ice cream at Baskin Robbins.  I guess he felt obligated because he loves popcorn so much.

Yesterday I had lunch with my friend Julio, whom I haven’t seen in like… three years!  Julio used to work where I work, but he’s since moved on to work on the City of SD’s budget.  We met up at Ortega’s.  They have breakfast food on the weekends until 2pm, which was perfect for me since I’m still having a hard time eating with my braces, so I need to eat soft things.  I ordered the chorizo con huevos and it was perfect!

Julio got a shrimp enchilada.  It looked really good, I might try that next time.

Me and Julio down by the schoolyard!  Er, I mean down by Ortegas for lunch.

Then last night we went to Saturday night church.  We sang a couple of my favorite songs so I was excited.  The message was really good too, about how God’s timing is different than ours, and sometimes it seems like God’s delayed in his response to us, but he knows infinitely more than we do. 

What’s that you say?  You want some Noodle photos?  Okay.

We bought him a new white mouse to play with.  It makes a sound when you shake it.  He loves little boys like this.

He also loves snuggling on Todd’s lap while we watch TV, or when Todd plays video games.

On his perch one morning last week.

Noodle found out about the “cat selfies” that have appeared on the human internetz.  He wanted to contribute a photo.

Today we went running, ate lunch at Kebab Shop, cleaned the house, and paid bills.  So fun!  I sort of hate how the mundane tasks of life takes up so much of our time.  I should think about outsourcing the stupid stuff I hate spending time on but needs to get done!  Ha!

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Concert | Philip Phillips & John Mayer

Besides eating, working out, and college football, one of our other favorite hobbies is music.  Todd is a musician (piano, keys, trumpet) and used to play in many bands.  His first music love is jazz (the real kind, not the smooth kind), but he won’t totally reject other music that’s well-written and interesting.  And he won’t outright reject music that I really like.  And for the last 10 years, I’ve really liked John Mayer.  I do like his earlier CDs better than his last two CDs though.  So, over the last 10 years, we’ve gone to see John Mayer in concert three times.  I don’t think we’ve seen him as much as we’ve seen the Barenaked Ladies or Earth, Wind & Fire, but it might be close. 

On Friday night (10/4), we went to see John Mayer for the fourth time, at Sleep Train Amphitheater in Chula Vista.  (I liked it much better when it was called Coors Amphitheater.  Heck, I’ll even settle for Cricket Wireless Amphitheater.)

No, we weren’t this close.  Photo courtesy of our friend Maria, who was in the good seats!

We got home from work and had some takeout sandwich and salad for dinner.  Then we left for Chula Vista at 6pm.  With the Friday after-work traffic AND concert traffic, we didn’t arrive at the parking lot until about 7:10pm.  We were able to get lawn tickets to the concert for $20 each on Groupon!  That was such an awesome deal, because there was no Ticketmaster fees or anything.  Just $20 straight up.  Print the Groupon out and that was our ticket to the show. 

When we got in, there were plenty of lawn space available, even with center stage view.  So we put our blanket down. 

As soon as we sat down, Philip Phillips started playing, right on time at 7:30! 

We were pretty far from the stage on the lawn, so I wasn’t able to get good photos.  Todd got some Coke and popcorn from the concession stand, which he loved.  A selfie with our Canon point & shoot. 

Philip Phillips saved his crowd favorite song, “Home”, for last.  Then there was a half-hour break to set up the stage for John Mayer.

And boy, were people there to see John Mayer! (Photo by Maria again.)

He started the concert with “Queen of California” from his “Born And Raised” CD.  (Quite appropriate for where he was, I suppose!) 

I really liked the moving backgrounds that they used for the show.  Lots of cool graphics.

Including this one with moving stars on strings.

And I liked how this photo turned out.  Kind of cool.  Kind of eerie.

We left a little bit early to beat the traffic out of the amphitheater and Chula Vista.  Yes, we were those “old” people who didn’t want to get stuck in traffic for two hours getting out of a concert on Friday night!  And yea, I’m ok with that.

I posted a photo to Instagram at the concert.  Then a couple of days later, I got tweeted at by Crowd Album, saying that I contributed to their 10/4 John Mayer concert album.  So I clicked over and was amazed at all the great photos that the crowd captured at the concert!  What an awesome idea to have a crowd-sourced album based on social media sharing!

Here’s a review of the concert by the San Diego Union Tribune:  John Mayer meets humility in San Diego

And here’s the setlist.

I just love how the internet and social media helps me capture event memory details that I may have forgotten!  We totally enjoyed the Philip Phillips & John Mayer concert.  What a great experience for $20!

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Digi Dares | Spontaneous Fun + Listgirl Around the Web

This week’s Digi Dare is about what we love the most about our summer.  There is much to love, but to me the best thing about summer is the long daylight hours, which allows for spontaneous fun after work!

Spontaneous Fun

Credits: Carson Park digital kit by One Little Bird; Pencil Brushes 1 by Paula Kesselring; fonts are Populaire, Listgirl Type.

Journaling: The best thing about summer is leaving work and having daylight to go out and have some spontaneous fun. Going to Balboa Park and seeing bike races at the Velodrome; bookstore dates, and meeting friends for wine tasting. Summer daylight rocks!

You can see other examples of this week’s Dare here, and participate by linking your digital layout in the comments section at the Digi Dares site.  There’s prizes every week!

Recently I’ve had a couple of layouts featured at other sites. 

First I was hopping along on the 2peas August Gardener’s Digest Blog Hop when I came upon Jill Sprott’s blog and saw that she had picked one of my layouts as inspiration this month!  I was floored and so honored!

This past Saturday, one of my Project Life spreads was featured on Michelle Bostinello’s Saturday Project Life Blog Hop.  So cool!

Then this morning I was just reading some blogs in Feedly when I happened upon the Creating Keepsake blog and saw one of my layouts there, about summer pages!  How fun!

Have a nice week!  :-)

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Using Feedly To Read Your Favorite Blogs

As you may have heard by now, Google has announced that it will discontinue Google Reader on July 1st.  This news has reverberated throughout the internet and people are scrambling to find another RSS reader service to replace Google Reader.  I have personally tried out three services:  Feedly, Bloglovin, and The Old Reader, and my personal favorite is Feedly by far.  So let’s take a look at using Feedly to read your favorite blogs (which I hope includes the Listgirl blog!).  ;)

Feedly has web-extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari web browsers.  It also has a free app for iOS and Android devices.  I first used the Feedly app on my iPad and LOVED the interface for reading blogs.  You can choose between many different views and the way the photos and text are presented is simple yet gorgeous. 

This is my blog on my iPad, using Feedly app to read it.


It is extremely easy to migrate over to Feedly from Google Reader.  All you need to do is sign-in to Feedly with your Google account.  Right now Feedly syncs with your Google Reader.  Feedly is working on a solution called Feedly Normandy so that your RSS subscriptions are seamlessly transitioned over to Feedly after Google closes the door on Google Reader in July. 

Let’s take a look at the Feedly interface, using my account as an example.  On the left side are the blogs I’ve subscribed to, and the categories in which I put them into.  All your folders (tags, categories) in Google Reader are imported over, so you don’t have to re-organize all the blogs you read.  If you’re like me and subscribe to a ton of blogs, this is definitely awesome.  Part of the reason I didn’t like the Bloglovin interface as much, was because when I imported my blog subscriptions over, they were just in alphabetical order and I lost all my categories!  Yikes. 

This first view is called “Magazine” view.  It shows some featured posts, plus posts by date underneath that.


There’s a “titles” view, which is more condensed.  This is the most similar to Google Reader.


There’s a “Mosaic” view, which shows more post on the page lined up, with one photo and a snippet of the post.


There’s the “Cards” view, which I think sort of looks like Pinterest pins, which I like.


Lastly, there’s the “Full Article” view, which shows the full blog post.  In all the other views, you would click on each post you want to read and it would pop up as a floating window.


I’ve set up my Feedly account so that when I first log into my account, it shows me in index of the blogs I subscribe to, organized by my categories that I had done in Google Reader.  From there, I can click on a blog to see the most recent posts.


One thing I like about my organization is that I have a category called “0_DailyReads”. Those contain the blogs I most frequently visit. I rotate blogs in and out of there periodically. Have this category helps me to hit my current favorite blogs at a glance when I’m really busy. So if I have 15 minutes of spare time, I can just hit my favorites in this category. This screenshot shows various blogs in my “0_DailyReads” category, in the “Cards” view in Feedly.


I hope you enjoyed this overview of Feedly.  You have until July 1st before Google Reader goes away to make a choice in regards to which RSS reader to migrate to.  Feedly is my personal favorite. :)

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New 52 | Week 33: First ATK Blog Appearance

Remember how on Friday I blogged about the Shrimp Stir Fry that I made from America's Test Kitchen? On Friday I tweeted them a link to my blog post, because they like to see photos of the food that their fans make from their shows/recipes.

On Monday, they mentioned me on their Twitter feed and I clicked on the link. It was a link to their community blog. My photo of the Stir-fried Shrimp with Snow Peas and Red Bell Pepper showed up on their blog! This was definitely a first and I was so excited!

Here's the screenshot.

They linked to my Twitter and my blog post as well.

So this was my exciting new thing this week. :D

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About This Project

New52 is a project started by Peppermint and I to encourage each other and others around us to try something new every week in 2011. The "new" each week doesn't have to be something big. It could be something as simple as ordering a new dish instead of old standbys at your favorite restaurant. It's simply opening your heart up to NEW possibilities.

Don't worry if you're late getting started on joining in. It's totally OK if you miss a week here or there. We encourage everyone to keep an open mind about trying something new. This is a life project, and a photography/blog and even scrap challenge if you wish. If you participate this week, please leave a link to your blog post in the link list below.  

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