I have good news, my friends! :) I had an appointment at the fracture clinic this morning, and I'm delighted to report that they are pleased with my progress, that although the fracture is still visible on the x-rays it is also clearly healing, and that they have discharged me :) I'm now under the care of my local physiotherapist, whose job it is to get me safely putting weight through the foot again so I can lose the crutches. Yay!!!
I am slightly nervous about this since discovering last week that 'physiotherapist' is another word for 'torturer' (oh boy, did I have a bad couple of days after that appointment!!) but I do trust my physio so I'm cautiously looking forward to my appointment tomorrow morning when I will, literally, be taking the next steps in my recovery :)
*big sigh of relief!*
And I now feel more able to look forward to December - in a literal way, and also in that I can start getting excited now! Just in time, of course, as we only have a couple of days to go....
I'm excited for the 1st on Saturday because it's The Doctor's birthday, and while I can't spoil him as I would usually by baking him a cake and cooking him a nice meal or taking him out to a restaurant, The Tomboy's going to bake the cake under my direction and we'll go out for a family meal with The Doctor driving :)
And I'm also excited for the 1st on Saturday because it's the start of
Journal Your Christmas, one of my favourites of Shimelle's classes! I've had my supplies ready since
last December and I had an idea of how I wanted to shape this year's project, but I've completely changed my mind at the last minute :) I had planned to use divided page protectors and take a photograph for each day's theme plus make a 4x6" 'mini page' to go with the photo, placing them side by side in the protectors and putting the whole project in with my Project Life. Well, Project Life never quite happened this year, not least because the supplies didn't arrive in the UK till February.... At first I thought I might catch up, but eventually decided that wouldn't work and I'm the kind of person who needs to start at the beginning of the year so I'll be going for it from 1st January 2013 instead.
I could still have used the divided page protector idea, but I was relying on the prompts being pretty much the same as previous years so I could make a list of the themes and take the photos as I found them, before or after the day the prompt came out. Then Shimelle announced that she'd revamped the prompts and I'm not yet clear how much the themes might have changed, but those OCD tendencies of mine mean that I can't cope with not having my advance list!! So for this reason too I've abandoned Plan A - or deferred it, at any rate, as I may do it next year instead :)
Plan B? I came across a Paperchase binder I bought some time ago. It contains 20 plastic pockets (page protectors), ie enough for 40 layouts, which is ample for this project; it also contains a generous wodge of kraft paper, which I can use for journaling and notes, with as many extra pages between layouts as seem necessary. The pockets seem to be a tiny bit less than 6" wide by a tiny bit more than 10" tall, which is an unusual size for me but I'll make it work! The cover is plain kraft too, so plenty of scope for decorating it, though I'm leaving that for now - I've got some ideas, but I want to see how the pages start coming together first :)
The supplies I carefully set aside last December include lots of lovely Echo Park
Season's Greetings papers with coordinating stickers and alphas. I've added a couple of sheets of brightly coloured cardstock that match, plus plenty of kraft cardstock, to make the base pages. I've also thrown in some additional alphas and a sheet of seasonal word stickers, and a few sheets of Echo Park from a different Christmas collection (
Times and Seasons) that I may or may not use (they do go with the original collection, but they're a bit darker in tone, and I may have more than enough paper anyway!) And then I've got some cute Elle's Studio cards and numbers, and a couple of random bits and pieces for good measure (not all pictured):
I've sorted the numbers into pockets in readiness, and as I'll be likely to go into January with this project I also found some suitable stickers and cards to give me additional numbers for those extra few days:
That's all I've done so far, though I did consider cutting some cardstock to size to create some base pages. I think I'll wait till we're a few days into the class though to see how the first few prompts go, and then I might have an idea of how many plain bases I want and how many might be from the patterned paper, etc. And while I've put all the above mentioned supplies together in one place with the basic tools, I'm not declaring any of my other supplies off limits, so I may well be working in other items such as ribbons or washi tape or twine or stamps or....! But if I can't manage to get at those things while my foot is still recovering - I don't want to run before I can walk, after all, in a quite literal sense - at least I know I have enough to hand to make a start :)
The other thing I need to decide about is photographs. I'm quite happy to scrap this project with or without pics, but if I do use them, I probably won't get them printed till January. This might leave me in the interesting position of trying to create the pages with a space allocated for the photo and then slot it in later, which is something I very rarely do! Might have to see how that goes....
Phew - mammoth post!! But that's where I'm up to right now, my friends :) How are you all? I've been neglecting your blogs again, I'm sorry - I've been so tired lately, which I think is down to the pain, the pain relief, and the extra effort I need to put into even the simplest of tasks. I've had whole days where I
haven't even switched the computer on.... *gasp!* ;) But I'm hoping to catch up with you all soon, and to see many of you in class. Bring on the JYC!! I think I am at last ready for December :)