New Releases {1.22.10}

I’m very productive when I’m lonely. Despite our day jobs, our personal lives, her booming social life and my RealityTV addiction – Christine and I are usually in some sort of contact with each other throughout the day. At one point last year I took a spin through my Instant Message logs and figured out that we had spoken to one another in some capacity for 333 of 365 days. Granted some of those days were just a quick couple of lines – but other times it was a non-stop typing extravaganza over the course of the day.  Early on in our online love affair (yes, Tom knows about it, and fully endorses it because he’s got a geek crush on Todd) I apologized to her once while I went outside to do something insane: spray polyurethane on a hybrid tag book I was making. I don’t do hybrid anymore, because I didn’t want to utter the words “Hold on, I have to go outside on my patio and spray three coats of polyurethane on a bunch of cardboard shapes” on a regular basis. Hybrid is not for me.

True story, one night I had a nightmare that I glued myself to my table doing a hybrid project.

Anyway, my whole point is that I apologized to her for disappearing for a few minutes and she said to me “Let’s just agree right now that we will never apologize for stepping away from the computer with each other, okay?”  Right then and there I knew she was not half bad. She was recognizing that hey, we obviously are adults with lives and responsibilities, so if an IM just sits there let’s have faith that it’ll receive an answer as soon as the other person has the time.

When Christine goes on vacation, however, I only hear from her sporadically. Whereas when I go on vacation I still maintain contact with her. I give more than she does to this relationship, quite frankly. There – I SAID IT. I give .. and I give … and she just jets off to Hawaii and is all “I only have a few days to enjoy THIS paradise before I go back to my EVERYDAY paradise in sunny San Diego, California.”

But I digress, the whole point of this is that when Christine is on vacation I wind up being super-productive. Which some might argue means that I should want Christine to be on vacation more often, but unfortunately I’d rather she were around and just randomly sending me an IM at 5pm on a Tuesday to say something like “the todd wants to know if you’re excited about free wifi at Mcdonalds starting in Jan”.  That’s an actual IM.

While she was in Hawaii in December I worked on a kit called Paradise Found, and you can pick it up for 20% off from today until Sunday @ midnight in my CatScrap store:

I had a lot of fun making something like this in the dead of winter here in Wisconsin. Let’s just say it gave me hope! It’s not just for vacation photos, of course, it’s great for anyone who has the luxury of enjoying a warm climate year-round, or for scrapping your summer photos. A nice little break from reality for those of us who won’t see sunshine or flowers for another 5 months.  This time around I made a little pack of quick pages, too (also 20% off):

And some word arts to coordinate (they’re just $1):

Also this week I had a request from Julie/mrs2a50 to make a pack of papers in warm olive/rust/brown tones for the pages she does of her dog, Roxy. And since I adore Roxy (and Julie is … okay .. I guess… Haha) I whipped these up for her. A pack of solid papers in warm, cozy earthtones (on sale too!):

I won’t prolong this post even further (I can really go on, can’t I?) by adding example layouts to it. You can view them all in the detailed images on the store pages, anyway, and they’re bigger and better!

Oh, and Christine is giving away a coupon to my store on her blog today, so if you get a chance you should pop in there and enter her giveaway and win!