Just my luck...

I have insanely bad luck. Everybody who knows me knows that about me as well. It's hard to miss, because I complain about it. A lot.

Every week it seems like something goes wrong. Back in November I think it was, the washer went haywire. The next week, the dryer went haywire. Back when we got our taxes we were getting all caught up on bills, and then our car breaks down. There went that idea. Then just a couple of weeks ago, as I was sitting down finishing up a kit, my glasses just snap right in half. I wasn't even touching them, it just seems like gravity did it or something. The funny thing is is that as we were headed to get them fixed, we got a huge bolt in our tire and went totally flat. The eye doctor that I go to was closed and we barely made it to my grandma's before we ruined the tire. That weekend we had to buy a new tire because ours was ruined and I had to end up taping my glasses until Monday.

That's just how my luck is, and that is an every day occurrence. Every day something goes wrong to totally ruin my day. Either the house is a mess, my computer is protesting me, Isaac is being a terror, or the cats are fighting and/or destroying the once-clean house.

So...I wasn't entirely surprised when one day last week I woke up and decided to start catching up on some work that should have been done weeks ago, and my EHD wouldn't read. It had been doing this for a while. You plug it in, and it just lies there but it doesn't read on your computer. Like a kid who is spacing out in class - you can yell at it all you want, but it just doesn't respond. This particular Thursday it was being an extra large pain in the butt, because I just needed something to go right - I wasn't in the greatest mood. It was literally four days after I had to have my glasses taped all weekend just so I could see what I was working on, and I was still getting used to my new glasses (that weren't taped and all uneven). It was Heath's last day of work before 3 days off and I was just ready to get that day over with. So I screamed and I yelled and I got ticked off at Heath (who didn't do anything at that point, mind you) because he wasn't helping quick enough. And long story short, we got a little too forceful with the non-responding EHD and with a couple of wiggles, the little USB port inside it completely snapped off.

It was actually probably pretty funny. That was the last thing we had expected to happen. Who expects a USB port to just pop off? It was probably extra funny when we looked inside the tiny hole and found the port literally rattling around inside the inner workings.

Just. My. Luck.

Now let me tell you, that EHD has my whole life on it and I have no backups. No, not the greatest idea since EHDs are more likely to fail than flash drives or computer hard drives. I have no idea why that is, but the digi-scrap and design community has seen more EHD failure than - well, I have no witty comment, because it's way too early in the morning. But in my defense, signing up for an online backup service was one of the things that had to go out the window back at tax time when the car went down, and we just don't have the money normally to afford it. Maybe soon, but right now, no. (I know that there's one out there that is only $5/month and I definitely make that in sales at Scrappity-Doo-Dah - I should check that out huh?)

Flash forward to a week later...(inter)National Scrapbooking Day. The single biggest sales weekend for pretty much any designer. The single most fabulous day for any digital scrapbooker. 40 and 50% sales pop up at almost every store. You can get really, really fabulous deals for not a lot of money. There are games, designers are giving away free stuff left and right, and husbands are fainting everywhere when they see the credit card bills and bank statements.

And just my luck, my EHD breaks the week before this joyous occasion. I cried.

Now really, I was upset for nothing. It's not like my money was stored on my EHD. But my new products for (i)NSD were. So one week before (i)NSD and all my products (except for one which was luckily on the SDD server already) for release that weekend are locked on that stupid drive. Not to mention, all my digital kits from other designers and every single one of my pictures. I couldn't design, I couldn't scrap, all I could do was shop.

Bad, bad thing. If I'm not designing or scrapping, I'm usually shopping. And if I don't have designing or scrapping to keep me occupied, I'm shopping all day.

I do have some good things to report however. My dad graciously gave me money to shop with and I didn't break the bank. In fact thanks to about $1 left of that money and payday yesterday at SDD, I still have money left. (However, methinks that instead of shopping this week which I did plenty of this weekend, I will sign up for a subscription to Mozy online backup.) The money allowed me to buy some CU items in order to design with, and buy some kits to scrap with. I found photos online at my old Webshots account, plus found some that were on a different drive, so I could scrap.

The best news? It looks like I'm going to get my EHD back today, thanks to Yvonne for suggesting that I just take out the regular drive inside and install it as a slave drive on my desktop computer. Also thanks to Heath's mad computer skills. See mom? All those hours Heath spent taking crap apart as a teen is making his wife one happy woman. It's a win win.

I was able to do a little scrapping while my EHD was down, but this weekend I was so busy shopping my brains out with dad's money that I didn't get much else done. I did do a little designing in between then though, so I could make some of that money back. Although I didn't even make half of it back, but oh well.

Here are the pages I did:

Template by unknown designer, it was a free download. Elements and papers by RK Designs from Zoo Baby and Zoo Baby 2 available at Designs In Digital.



Layout is all my own design. Elements and paper are from Lucky Island by Vonnie's Digiworld available this month at MissTiina.com.



Template by ChrissyW available at Elemental Scraps. Elements and Paper from Little Engineer by Spinky Dink Scraps available at Gotta Pixel.

When I saw that kit by Spinky Dink Scraps, I just knew I had to have it for those pictures. I still have a few more to do, but I'm waiting until I have my pictures back because it's a pain to have to copy and paste pictures from a Webshots screenshot into Photoshop, crop them, and end up resizing them because they're too small. Hopefully they will turn out okay when I print them.

I hope this week to get more time to scrap, maybe tomorrow or something if I get my pictures back today. I have quite a few pictures to catch up on scrapping.

I hope to be back later this week with a few more things to share. I'm taking a break from P365 because of the hard drive thing. I'm just non-motivational lately lol. Heath is off for the next three days off so it's a possibility we may go out for photos. Until next time!