Happy December 1st

Here in Brisbane we are celebrating the beginning of the Christmas season with rain. As much as I'm in constant jealousy of our northern hemisphere friends and their snow filled days during this time of year, for me the rain is a timely reminder that maybe living in the warmer sunnier weather is more conducive to my going outdoors and enjoying this season. This may well be the topic of my December Daily page today.

Speaking of which I still haven't put scissors to paper to create my foundation. Argh, I know! I do however have what I'm calling my December Daily Workbook ready to go.

My idea behind this is to choose and record my photos, sketch out my layout and journal daily. I will be getting my photos printed at a store so I can't finish my layout each night. This way all of the design work and journaling is done in the moment, which I think is so important, because tomorrow is a new day.

It's slowly starting to look like Christmas around here. We have the advent calendar up (had to make some sacrifices in the design department, has anyone seen my wooden pegs?).

This year I've departed from prompts that include things like "Look at Christmas lights", "Go to see the Myer Windows" and "Visit Santa" as we will be doing these activities anyway. The reality is that I just can't set these dates in concrete right now and I'd prefer to not have to play advent calendar activity switcheroo like I did last year! Instead we have things like "Eat dinner under the Christmas Tree", "Make Christmas Play-Doh cookies" and "Wrap a present".

Today has also been a happy mail day. I've recently entered the foray of online shopping and it scares the pants off me to think it's possible to pay all that money and have your item lost in the post. But I now have 2 out of 2 successes. And I must say USPS International Priority Mail, although expensive is fabulous. I've also learned that you can add "signature on delivery" with parcels shipped within Australia. That gives me peace of mind.

So my awesome mail today:

Reading blogs pays off. I discovered the whole wide world of Clip It Ups on Gail's blog and I love the idea of seeing your embellishments. At present, mine are in all kinds of different drawers and it's too easy to forget what I have. I'm hoping this will be a space saving, inspiring alternative.

Really though, this whole purchase started as a little bit of fun when I read on the Simply Renee Inc. blog that they were having a 50% off everything sale. I added a bunch of things in my cart, all the things a gal could ever need. And it came to $74.85 without shipping. I was convinced that the shipping costs would be totally outrageous so I emailed Clip It Up and inquired about the price. $62.95 for shipping, $137.80 in total. Considering that here I would be looking well over $200 (just the base unit here is about $120) for much less than what I had in my cart you couldn't blame me for thinking this was the deal of a lifetime. I was on cloud 9 reading all about the Black Friday sales in America and couldn't resist telling my parent's how insane some of the deals were at the time. Mum and Dad said that I'm pretty hard to buy for at Christmas (too fussy and specific) so if this was what I wanted then I should get it. At first I brushed it off because the price had always been so far out of my reach that this was never a possibility. I had written it off. But really my parent's put it back on the table. So I did it. Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday to me! All said and done this thing is as high as my waist and rest assured it's all boxed back up waiting for Dec 25th.

What has your day been filled with?