Dissertation and Digi-Scrapping

The last few weeks have been a blur...

I've heard horror stories about trying to finish a PhD, but never understood them fully until now. A graduation date {August 5th!} is exciting, but so stressful. Jonathon works 10 hour days in the lab, comes home for dinner, then works for 2+ more hours writing his paper. It is hard on him and hard on us. To be perfectly fair though, Jonathon is quite amazing about the whole thing. He has a total of an hour of "spare" time in his day, and he spends it helping me make dinner and telling the boys bedtime stories. I really couldn't ask for more, except maybe more hours in a day. We will get through this, and luckily, he is making great progress.

In the meantime, I have plenty of time in the evenings to do whatever I choose. Digital scrap-booking has been a prominent pastime recently. Last week, I had 54 pages printed that I made since January. I was nervous to print them because it is a bit pricey, and I wasn't sure how they would turn out. Luckily, I LOVE them! They cost $1.99 per page at scrappingsimply.com (which is probably a little more than I would normally spend paper-scrapping), but for me, the benefits FAR outweigh the slight cost difference. If anyone is interested, here is my analysis:

Digital Scrap-booking Pros:

1. Speed (after you learn the basics, you can really crank the pages out)

2. No Clean Up-- start and stop whenever you want or need to

3. Less storage space needed for supplies (always a plus in a small apartment)

4. So many FREE options-- I haven't paid for a single thing (besides printing). My favorite sites are CBH, craftcrave.com, and scrappingsisters.blogspot.com

5. The printed pages lay so nicely in the albums and take up way less space because they are thinner.

6. You can print multiple pages for multiple kids or reprint a page if needed

Digital Scrap-booking Cons:

1. Lack of texture-- There are some tricks to make digital pages appear textured and layered, but it's not quite the same.

2. Learning curve-- It takes a little bit of time to learn how to do things, especially if you have to learn a new software too. (I use Adobe Photoshop Elements) Sometimes it is frustrating spending an hour trying to learn a technique that would take you 5 minutes to do by hand.

3. Color Adjustments-- Computer screens always make things look slightly brighter than prints do, so I am going to have to compensate a bit on the next printing batch.

So, there you have our life in a nutshell. It looks like the next four months are going to be more of the same.... lots of dissertation and digi-scrapping.