Still catching up: #30lists 12 -15

• Decorating my parents' tree
• Driving around to look at Christmas lights a couple of nights before Christmas with my parents
• The Carols services at Chiltern and Yackandandah (so pleased that these will continue next year after our current conductor retires.)
• Our traditional family Thanksgiving dinner

• Podcasts, lots of podcasts.  
• Verity, 
• Rachel and Miles X-plain the X-Men, 
• Galactic Suburbia
• Splendid Chaps
• OMG the god-awful Bing Crosby CD on constant repeat at work.

• The DVD of "Once"
• Earrings
• Coffee cups
• My fitbit with a dead battery
• Journals and notebooks

Out the living room window:

• Christmas lights - white ones on the eves, the net of lights behind the zuchinni, stars beneath the verandah and then a fence of lights behind the corn.
• Our vegetable garden
• Next door's bush with purple flowers
• Our awesome outdoor setting

30 lists catch up - days 8 to 11

I got behind again - but not as far behind as I am on #adventword... (oops)!  So here's a few back numbers.

• "Top Gear" used to be my go-to cheering-up show, but it doesn't work so well anymore.  I think Clarkson hit the offensiveness saturation level in the last two years.  But old challenge DVDs still work.
• Watching the kitty-boys being cute
• Singing "Let it Go", and/or Adele songs, preferably at the top of my lungs
• Our garden

• My mother - for good or bad
• My partner
• Theologians and thinkers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Joan Chittester, and Robert Gribben
• Feminists like Dorothy Macrae-McMahon

• Sopa Seca (Moosewood Classics cookbook)
• Trenette al Pesto (also Moosewood Classics cookbook)
• Rice croquettes
• Sandbaklse (Swedish Christmas cookies)
• Pastry

• Cleaning house
• Washing the dishes
• Dealing with my manager at work
• At least half my desk-work
• Taking care of finances.

December 6-7 #30lists

Back from the weekend with a load of awesome photos to put into December Daily.

This is a tough one - and a strange one.  I like writing all words, as long as I can spell them...

Thinking about context, though...

• Grace
• Love
• Happy Birthday
• Merry Christmas, and all the best for the year to come.
• Congratulations
• Thank you

• I pray.  A friend suggested this many years ago and it works well.  Sometimes extemporaneous, sometimes liturgical.
• What I need to get done before I leave for work
• What I need to get done at work
• What I will do in the evening when I am blessedly free from work.

December 3-5 #30 lists

A nasty attack of gastro (OMG so nasty) knocked me out for two full days, so here's a bit of a catch up.  I'm off to Melbourne for the weekend, so whether I'll manage to post again before Sunday will depend on whether or not we get the free WiFi in our hotel room that we're supposed to get.

(Also, I apologise if this is "releasing" the prompt for December 5 early, but seriously: it's 9am on the 5th here.)

On with the lists!

• Good photos at the Carols services and the after party
• Christmas lights
• Get some good "Australian Christmas" -type photos
• Photos at Jade's wedding
• A few nice family and me&Shell photos.  We don't get enough of those.

• My cousin and her husband, who I unusually haven't seen in almost six months (they live an hour away)
• A close family friend who will be here for Christmas with my parents for the first time, because her family decided to go to a theme park for Christmas and she said "enough"!
• They left for home on November 30, but they saw the tree and decorations, so I'm including my un-laws in this list.
• Jade and the boys, and Sarah and Tony at Jade's wedding on New Year's Eve

• We moved house!  That's a massive change.
• We got our kittyboys!  (I love our boys so much)
• I changed meds
• I started listening to podcasts (boy, did I!)

December 2

So I'm already three days behind in posting #adventword photos: but I have a couple of options for December 1 photos for DD, so that's something.

On to Day 2 of #30lists December:

• Some of our presents to already have been wrapped and delivered
• Actually thinking about Christmas cards
• The MTC Christmas party to have already happened (I missed it because I was off work at the time)
• Being behind on the #adventword challenge 

December 1

So - December 1 is here... how did that happen?

Because I'm a glutton for punishment - and because I'm not doing enough already this December - I thought I'd try to blog my #30lists along with linking to my #adventword posts over on the Discernment blog.

December Daily posts will, of course, be weekly, as I get photos printed and the layouts completed, but I might share my photos if it seems appropriate.  We'll see as I go on.

On to today's #30 lists prompt:

• It's singing season (late rehearsal tonight, Carols concerts the next two Mondays, and a multitude of other concerts to go to.)
• It's Advent season (the wreath is on the table, and #adventword has begun.)
• It's silly season (I don't watch regular TV much anymore, but US TV will start going into the Christmas hiatus soon.) 
• It's busy season (OMG you should see my calendar...)
• It's December Daily season (well, that one was obvious!)

December Daily - The Materials

Last year I used a Becky Higgins mini album and a mixed bag of cards and embellishments picked up here, there and everywhere (some from CraftHouse, some from Spotlight, some from my stash).  I decided that for this year I wanted more flexibility to add pages and so wanted to use a ring binder album.  

At some point in September I found the Heidi Swapp 6x8 chipboard landscape album.  Working (slowly) on my foundation pages I kept realising I needed more pocket pages - a total of either three or four refill packets in the end. 

I'm American-Australian, and a lot of my childhood Christmases were spent in Minnesota, where you almost always have a white Christmas.  So I don't so much mind snowmen and snowflakes and such appearing in my Chritsmas kits.  I may be in my mid-30s, but summertime Christmases still seem a little strange to me - even though the last Christmas I had in the US was in 1999.  

I also don't really mind if my album isn't all nicely coordinated.  I'm still in the process of putting my title cards and foundation pages together (there's still ten days until December) - there's that pesky problem of the cards not actually fitting easily in the pockets.  But I'm using cards from:

• Becky Higgins Hollyday mini kit
• Becky Higgins Christmas Theme pack
• Kaisercraft Captured Memories: Basecoat Christmas 
• Kaisercraft Captured Memories: Peppermint Swirl
• Becky Higgins/Stampin' Up Seasonal Snapshot, printed via the Project Life App.

Embellishments are from the Kaisercraft "Christmas Carol" line, plus some from the "St Nick" paper packs, which coordinate nicely with Christmas Carol.  I've still got some left from last year's "December 25th" line which work well with the colours in Peppermint Swirl.

Numbers for days 1-24 from a set of balsa wood numbered Christmas trees found at Bed Bath and Table, while numbers 26 to 31 will be chipboard numbers from the Kaisercraft Advent Calender that I'm working on that I bought the balsa wood numbers for originally (I hope to finish the Advent Calender this week and post about it.  I'm really please with how it's turning out.

I also got a 2013 December Mini kit from Polka Dot Creative, including shaker pockets and wood and cork veneers.

I have stamps from KellieStamps (the Joy set), Typo, the American Crafts Hollyday stamp set, among others.

Finally, I'm making my own prompt cards for each day's #30lists based on these by Paislee Press, which I love, but which are in the wrong orientation.  And I put in an order today for the #30lists stamp from RUKristen.

#30lists December 2014

So, #30lists December is a go.

I'd already decided to incorporate a #30 lists into my December Daily, and spent some time via Pinterest chasing down last year's prompts (and somewhere/somehow came up with a prompt for Dec 31, because for reasons, there's not actually a prompt per day in this project except for when it's run in September.)

I did #30lists September this year, and really enjoyed it.  But I didn't manage to blog any of it instead of my bases: see here.  I shared a bunch on my instagram (@chez_stutters), but in general the time difference to the USA was somewhat painful in terms of blogging: plus I got behind and did a bunch on the weekends.

But I loved having something right there every day - even though I changed a few of the prompts as I went.  If you read my post about my bases, I mentioned that I was pleased that I didn't pre-title the prompts for each day.  This is why - because I would get to the prompt and realise that it just didn't work for me.

For December, though, I'm still tempted to put in the prompts ahead of time: I want it to be as easy as possible to complete DD.  Well, that's the plan at least. But you'll see in the next couple days that I'm really not succeeding in that... But the other thing with putting in the prompts ahead of time is that if I'm going to share my foundation pages/bases - which I want to do - I'll need to do that before I put the prompts in; or else only share my title cards.