Learn Something New Every Day

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to my new followers or, as Shaz in Oz would call them, my enablers - without you all I would be whistling into the wind so thanks for joining.

I, belatedly, decided to join in the Learn Something New Every Day (LSNED) course Shimelle runs every September. It's taken me a while to get to grips with the course but I've made a start.

The first thing I had to decide was how I was going to record the lessons I learned every day - would it be in digital form or good old cardstock and paper. Actually, that was an easy decision to make - I prefer working with paper and I really wanted to practice putting together more scrap pages. That decision made, I then had to decide on the size ... not 12"x12, that would be too big, and not 6"x6" - too small - 8"x8" seemed perfect.

In the 'use-it-up' spirit, I'm hoping to create all the layouts with leftovers and scraps of paper ... well, wherever possible. That being the case, I hope you will forgive me if I don't list the materials used ... I generally don't have a clue! Here are the first three pages.

This page was inspired by the road trip we took in June this year - we covered 1200 miles, quite an adventure. I love to travel - so much so that my family say I was born with itchy feet - and I'd always wanted to go on a road trip but somehow never did. So this year we remedied that omission and planned a two week trip - not quite of Jack Kerouac proportions but at our age adventurous enough. It proved to be a lot of fun and the adventure lived up to, and exceeded, expectations. That map on my knee was our guide to three counties and countless hours of discovery.

One of my favourite quotations, and I do have a lot of favourite quotations, is the one on this page - 'You cannot open a book without learning something'. Confucius knew a thing or two.

I don't remember learning to read, which is probably just as well because I was diagnosed as word blind, a form of dyslexia, at the age of ten. I know I could read to myself long before then but I couldn't read out loud - somehow the message did not pass between eyes and mouth ... what came out was not what I could see on the page. Instead, I developed the most embarrassing speech impediment which took years of therapy to sort out.

However, none of that stopped me from reading and from learning through reading - this ability has served me well over the years. And this love of books takes me into every book shop, especially second-hand ones, that I discover. This one, discovered in 2009, is in England's Book Town, Sedbergh - it's huge and my idea of heaven :)

For this page, I got to thinking about the choices I've made during my life. Instead of doing what many of my school friends did, that is, staying at home and marrying the boy almost next door, I amazed them all by enlisting in the army ... and so began a life of travel and interesting experiences. This photo shows me kitted out, wearing my much loved walking boots, at the start of a hill-walking trip in the Peak District. The scenery is stunning but the reason I chose the photo to scrap is because there is no traffic on the road - it's the road less travelled! I would say that I took the road less travelled, and in the words of Robert Frost, 'that has made all the difference.' I wouldn't have had it any other way :)

I'm enjoying this process of learning something new every day and hope to have a lovely scrapbook at the end of it all, so I plan to post more pages over the next few weeks - until I've completed the LSNED course.

Yesterday  was the EM's birthday - his 74th. Coincidentally it is a friend's, Margaret O's, birthday today too so, she and her husband travelled up from Galloway and we spent the day celebrating. We ate out and caught up on all the news before they carried on up north to Loch Awe where they will be staying for a week.

I've just spotted the time ... after midnight! Time I was in bed so I'll say goodnight all and ...

... happy crafting,