Outside my window this morning ....

There are two things wrong with this picture; (a) it's 7:15 a.m. and it's still dark outside, and (b) it's October 31 and there is snow on the ground!!! Yup, my little piece of the world had its first snow of the season last night. We were having a cold, rainy day when Mother Nature thought to herself, hey what the heck - let's inject a bit of fun into Nathalie's driving tonight: let's throw some thick, wet snow in the sky and on the roads .... !Well, I hope that for the sake of the trick or treaters tonight, this stuff will have melted off today. It's supposed to be sunny and 4C, so I have high hopes.

In case you're wondering why I haven't posted in over a week and in case you're thinking I'm back to neglecting my blog - that actually isn't the case; my poor computer caught a virus and was out of commission for almost a week while the husband was valiantly nursing it back to health. This one was a doozy, and it also ended up infecting the husband's computer, and he has lost years of archived data ... I'm really grateful that he managed to save my picture files, since I haven't backed them up in a very long time (note to self: back up picture files regularly).

So I did go shopping last weekend with sister M, although we spent less than 5 minutes inside Michaels - we made a valiant effort, but the lines at the cashes were so very long, we knew we wouldn't have the time to make a purchase. That would be because we had just spent almost 2 hours in Winners, doing a very good job of spending each other's money ("You have GOT to buy that dress/those shoes/that coat/those gloves/that scarf/that sweater/fill in the blank, it looks ADORABLE on you...!"). Actually I am pretty pleased with my purchases, which included a new short winter coat in charcoal gray, with the most adorable ruffles ... a scarf and gloves to match of course ... and a gray knit Calvin Klein dress, which looks great with tights and my new (from the previous weekend) gray suede boots. I am having a thing with gray this season, seems that's the only colour I'm attracted to!

Speaking of gray/grey, does anyone know which spelling is correct? Is it an American/Canadian thing?

I did go back to Michaels this weekend, to, um, check it out more thoroughly. It has a fantastic scrapbooking section, actually I would say that it's probably got more scrapbooking stuff than any of the other types of crafts. I picked up a few sheets of paper (lord knows I don't have enough paper already, lol...!), and a "few" embellishments, and then I wandered over to the knitting aisle and got inspired. I picked up a pattern, some wool and a crochet hook and re-discovered the joys of crochet by making myself a scarf yesterday afternoon.

So while I haven't done any scrapbooking yet this weekend, I did something creative which is almost as good.

Other than that, life is good. The girl is rocking 2nd year, and the boy seems to be adjusting well to high school. My Sens aren't doing so good, but the boy's team is undefeated to date (3 wins, 1 tie). I made a work-related decision regarding my career path that I'd been resisting making, and actually had a better week this week than I've had in a long time.

I'll make efforts to share something scrappy soon, I promise; but first, I have to learn how to stitch scans together using Adobe Photoshop Elements, because I was using ArcSoft before and that software didn't survive the illness that plagued my computer. So if anyone has links to a tutorial or any special hints ... feel free to leave me a comment & throw me a lifeline!

Ciao for now!