be AUDacious

my Daily Digi contribution

Here's the kit I created for The Digi Files this month; you can find out more details here.

The Open Book, Challenge 6: Kitchen Confidential

This week's challenge is brought to you by Barb.

My book is Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

I love this book...couldn't put it down, and it's changed how I think about eating in restaurants and the people who work behind the scenes. 

Description of the book:

After 25 years of sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine, chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain has decided to tell all. From his first oyster in the Gironde to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown (where he first experienced the real delights of being a chef); from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop the Rockefeller Center to drug dealers in the East Village; from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain's tales of the kitchen are passionate and unpredictable, shocking and very funny. This book will change the way you view restaurants — for ever.

 Challenges:

1. Use some black and white with yellow as an accent color, like the book cover (see attached)
2. Use two different fonts or alphabets
3. Have you ever worked in a restaurant? Tell us about it!
4. Have you ever worked for a difficult boss, or with unruly co-workers?  Tell us about it!
5. Do you like to cook or do you hate cooking?  Either way, tell us about it!
6. Chef Bourdain's love for food and cooking was ignighted when his family spent a summer in France when he was a teenager. That trip changed his life forever. Have you ever gone anywhere that changed your life forever?  Tell us about it!
7. Did you ever have a bad experience with food and find that you can't eat it anymore?  Tell us about it!

Here's what our team came up with:

from Barb:

from Amy:

from Dawn:

To participate, just create any paper-crafted item -- a layout (digital, hybrid, or traditional), a card, an altered item, or home decor item using the challenge above. Post a link to your project in the credits, and make sure to share any thoughts about the novel as well. We'll have a new challenge up on August 9, 2010. Thanks for playing along!

some upcoming events

I know things have been pretty scarce around here lately, but there are some upcoming events that I wanted to let you know about.

On Tuesday, I'm going to be chatting it up over at Artisan Guild in the chat room; I was one of their featured designers this month, and we're going to be playing a fun game of 20 questions. Here are the details -- I'd love it if you could help me spread the word on Twitter, Facebook, and your blogs and forums.

In addition, I've got a great kit reveal coming up this week; if you recall, I was asked to be part of this month's Digi Files over at The Daily Digi and it's finally time to show off what I created. Also, I was asked to take part in another awesome project and the big reveal for it will be happening in just a week or so.

Don't forget that we've got a new Open Book Challenge coming up on Monday, too!

I'm hoping to get Photoshop installed on my husband's computer today so that I can do a bit of catching up; I'm going to remain computerless for a couple more weeks, at least. But I've fallen in love with the quick and easy blogging that is Tumblr -- you can see a link to my Tumblelog over in the sidebar under my profile photo. Check it out and follow along -- that's where most of my updates and information will be coming from in the next few weeks.

We are home again, after a great trip to Washington DC, which combined work and play for me. There's tons to catch up; I'll be back in this space soon, with some announcements. Take care, and thanks for your patience over this extended (and unanticipated, for the most part) break.

The Open Book, Challenge 5: The book of Awesome

This week's challenge is brought to you by Laura.

The Book of Awesome by Neil Pasricha grew out of the author's blog (1000awesomethings.com), begun in June 2008, where he set out to write about one awesome thing every weekday. He began the blog as a way to see something positive and joyful in the midst of a very difficult time in his life, and over time the blog grew to attract a huge following and led to the publication of the book. His "awesome things" are the little joys: finding a pull-through parking spot, waking up and realizing it's Saturday, the smell of crayons, and a favorite old T-shirt. I love this example of thankfulness for ordinary and otherwise unremarkable events and the encouragement to take notice of the everyday bits of joy we all have. I also loved seeing how many of his awesome things made me say, Hey, I didn't know anyone else noticed that! My kids read the book, too, and for the past few months we've continued to point out awesome things to each other--and that's awesome, too.

Challenges:

Use bright colors against a black background.

Try a painted, brushed-look font. A selection of free ones can be found here: http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=604

Scrap your list of awesome things or a single awesome moment.

Scrap about a turning point in your life--perhaps a difficult time that spurred you to make a change, as the author did when he started his blog.

Scrap about enjoying a book together with other people: a book shared with loved ones, a favorite read-aloud with your children or from your own childhood, a book group experience.

 Here's what the team came up with this week:

by Laura:

Credits: Everything by Audrey Neal; fonts vtks animal 2, Steelfish, & DJB Laura.

from Jennifer:

credits: digital paper  Sweet Summertime by Crystal Wilkerson, template- ChrissyW, cardstock - Audrey Neal, font- LeviBrush dafont.com,

from Stefanie:
Credits: fonts, Walkway Bold & Ginga.

To participate, just create any paper-crafted item -- a layout (digital, hybrid, or traditional), a card, an altered item, or home decor item using the challenge above. Post a link to your project in the credits, and make sure to share any thoughts about the novel as well. We'll have a new challenge up on July 26, 2010. Thanks for playing along!

book review: Girl Trouble: Stories

taken from Goodreads:

"A high school basketball coach learns that his star player is pregnant—with his child. The nightmare of a college student's rape and murder is relived by both her mother and her killer, whose contradictory accounts call to question the very nature of victimhood. In these eight stories, the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence is walked over and over again."

Before I get started with my actual review, I want to be up front about all my "connections" with the author, because I am aware that these things might possibly have influenced my reading of this collection. (I do think my opinion would be the same without the connections but still, in the interest of full disclosure...)

Jones taught in the MFA program at Murray State University, which is where I got my undergraduate and graduate degrees (and where I'm currently employed and working on my Rank 1). At the time I got my B.A. in English with a minor in Creative Writing, she was not part of the faculty and we didn't have the MFA program that we currently have. So that's one connection.

The second is that Jones grew up in Russellville, KY, which is home to two of the schools that I currently serve with the Gear Up grant for which I work. That's another connection.

Normally, a collection of short stories like this wouldn't have kept my attention; it's not that I don't have any appreciation for work like this, because I do, but stories in this vein -- Southern, literary, realistic, dark -- are less and less my cup of tea as I get older. (An aside: This was really the only type of stories we were expected to produce in my short story workshops as an undergrad, and I fought against them -- and the professor's notion that genre fiction could not be "literary" -- tooth and nail.) But I was interested, because I knew Jones had taught at MSU and I knew where the stories took place.

The regionalism of the stories drew me in -- it's such a neat thing, in my opinion, to recognize all the places where a story takes place; it's a spark of connection that I can't deny, you know? But it was Jones' writing, her characters and the sweeping play of despair and hope and determination and love and poverty and humanity that kept me reading. I did more than recognize these places; I recognized these people. While Jones' stories take place in and around Logan County/Russellville, they just as easily could have taken place in Hickman County, where I was raised. These people are people I knew, people I went to school with, people my parents worked with, people I am related to. I mentioned before that the stories are dark, and they are; two of them ("Parts" and "Proof of God") offer two different sides of a story, one based on the murder of a young girl in a dorm on WKU's campus in 2004. 

Overall, it's an excellent collection, and Jones is a talent to watch. I'd love to see something longer from her. The current paperback version also features an interview with Jones as well as some of her favorite quotes from Kentucky authors in a P.S. section at the back of the book.

book review: The Nobodies Album

taken from Goodreads:

"Bestselling novelist Octavia Frost has just completed her latest book—a revolutionary novel in which she has rewritten the last chapters of all her previous books, removing clues about her personal life concealed within, especially a horrific tragedy that befell her family years ago.

On her way to deliver the manuscript to her editor, Octavia reads a news crawl in Times Square and learns that her rock-star son, Milo, has been arrested for murder. Though she and Milo haven’t spoken in years—an estrangement stemming from that tragic day—she drops everything to go to him.

The “last chapters” of Octavia’s novel are layered throughout The Nobodies  Album—the scattered puzzle pieces to her and Milo’s dark and troubled past. Did she drive her son to murder? Did Milo murder anyone at all? And what exactly happened all those years ago? As the novel builds to a stunning reveal, Octavia must consider how this story will come to a close.

Universally praised for her candid explorations of the human psyche, Parkhurst delivers an emotionally gripping and resonant mystery about a mother and her son, and about the possibility that one can never truly know another person."

I won an Advanced Reader's Copy of this book from the Goodreads First Reads program; I read it a couple months ago but I'm just now getting around to reviewing it. That means, of course, that it's now on the shelves, so you won't have to wait to pick up a copy for yourself if you are so inclined.

Parkhurst's first novel, The Dogs of Babel, is one of my very favorites; I love the story of Tam Lin, and despite the grief and the animal cruelty that drive the novel, I think it is a fantastic mixture of content and characterization. I was pleased to find that Parkhurst uses another interesting approach to a standard murder mystery in this novel. The main story is pretty straightforward in terms of narration and sequencing of events, told from Octavia's point of view. Interspersed with these chapters are the last chapters of all of Octavia's novels, which have been rewritten, along with a plot summary of each -- these revisions are part of a new "novel" she has pitched to her editor. The catch, of course, is that these final chapters each contain a lot of information that reveals her own thoughts about a tragedy that occurred earlier in her own life and which affects both her and her estranged son.

It's pretty evident all along as to what is happening, but I think that is intentional; it's another way for Parkhurst to reveal more information about the relationship that Octavia and Milo have (or don't have, depending on how you look at it). In terms of characterization, I think Octavia is a bit of a pushover -- she's just a very dishwater-bland type of character, but again, I think that's necessary. Writing her as a more forceful character would have changed the whole tone of the novel and it just wouldn't have worked. I found Milo much less believable as a character, because it really seemed as though he was a 30 year old man who continuously acted like a 7 year old.

Other than the ending feeling a bit rushed and wrapping up too neatly, I think this was a good book. Not a great book, but a good read nonetheless.

in limbo

One quick note of good news: I'm guest posting on the Ella blog today. Look to the left -- see that snazzy orange elephant button? Just click on it and you'll go directly to my post. Hope you'll check it out! Thanks!

In other news, my laptop (which is less than 2 years old) is dead. Looks like either the processor or the motherboard went out on it. Of course, there was a ton of stuff that I hadn't backed up recently, including the wonderful photos of the girls that I took while we were in Gulf Shores. Chris is seeing what he can do to get the files off the hard drive, but so far nothing is working, so it looks like there was some hard drive damage somehow as well. I'm just sick about it.

This is the second time I've lost information when a computer went down, and while I have more stuff backed up this time, I just hate that so much of what I consider important is now lost. I am seriously rethinking technology -- not completely -- but just how I handle it and how much I depend on it. I foresee a number of changes in the future, I think, beginning with much less reliance on a computer system.

ETA: Does anyone know of a software program that lets you take small photos (for example, photos that I saved to Facebook or my blog at 600 pixels, approximately) and restore them to a larger size more suitable for printing? I remember there being a program mentioned in an old issue of Digital Scrapbooking Magazine, but I don't have it anymore. Any help that anyone could provide would be wonderful!!!

July: Can't Miss Photos

Here are some photos you want to make sure you grab during the month of July:

• Farm fields
• family reunions
• camping activities
• fun in the sun (water fights, sunbathing, pool time, people boating, swimming lessons)
• a concert in the park
• girls playing hula hoop
• ice cream or snow cones
• watermelon ready to serve
• Fourth of July celebrations (fireworks displays large and small, parades, people wearing red white and blue, flags flying, military personnel in full regalia)
• a boy holding a worm, frog, or bug -- or a little girl doing the same ;)

Just  a quick note: These types of photos would make an excellent "monthly summary" type of layout.

The items on this list came from an article in the October 2009 issue of Creating Keepsakes; I'm posting it here in case you missed it. I'd love for you to leave additional suggestions in the comments.

some recent layouts to share

I've been able to squeeze in a little bit of scrapping recently -- here's hoping I can find time for a little more very soon.