Happy 50th Birthday Pam!

My very dear friend Pam turns 50 today...Happy Birthday girl friend! Pam and her husband Tim and their three sons live in Discovery Bay, California so we don't get to see each other nearly enough....but Pam and Tim surprised me on my 50th birthday two years ago by showing up in Las Vegas where my "husband of the century" took me to celebrate! So I promised Pam to celebrate her 50th with her wherever she wanted and she chose Los Cabos Mexico....but alas, it didn't work out on Pam's end so here we are thousands of miles apart....in body, but not in spirit. :-( I love you my friend and hope you have a fabulous year of good health and happiness! Hopefully we'll find another excuse to celebrate something soon in Mexico! Cheers!

Another Christmas Season is Wrapped Up!

Good news and not so good news (isn't that always the way?) We FINALLY took the Christmas Tree and decorations down today. I just haven't been in the mood to do it before now. I really hate the way the house looks right after the decorations are put away; very blah blah blah. So now I'm focusing on decorating our third floor "loft", ...hey, we've only lived in this house for six years, why rush things? The original owners of this house had it built and even though they lived here for five years, they left the 3rd floor virtually unfinished. So now that I've converted Meghan's bedroom into my scraproom/computer room (photos to follow soon) we've taken on finishing the 3rd floor which consists of two spaces; the "loft" (which is essentially Dan's ironing/TV room) and the other room which we're converting from the old scrap space/spare bedroom into Meghan's new bedroom. She's already decided on the color scheme; cream, black and red. She is determined not to have a "little girl's room" anymore. She picked out a really cute and fairly sophisticated comforter set from Walmart which was a very pleasant surprise; and chose the color Muslin from Sherwin Williams for 3 of the walls(which gives us a VERY neutral palette to work from)and she's wants one wall to be a dark red. Then the accessories will all be black, dark red and cream. I love it! I opened the paper today and the same color scheme is featured in the Target ad as well as another one of the local furniture store's ad....hopefully when Meghan comes home again in a few weeks Dan will have the painting done and we can get started with accessorizing. The only controversy is the floor. It's currently very rough wide planked wooden floor painted a very pale yellow, because the original owners of the house used this space as her art studio...now Dan wants to put in wall to wall carpeting, but Meghan just wants to keep the wooden floor but have it painted a cream color, and use a dark red and black area rug. Dan surrendered....God love him! The "not so good" news is that Meghan leaves tomorrow to return to college for her second semester. We will definitely miss her. She's been home since December 13th so we've have 5 weeks together, but she's spent most of it working, or with her boyfriend Steve, so a lot of the time we've been like ships passing in the night. But she's a great kid who still adds a lot of fun and humor to our household, so she will definitely be missed. She's taking five classes this semester so she will be busy; one math class, her last writing class, one drawing class and two fashion classes. She's very excited to start taking classes in her Fashion Design major....keep your fingers crossed that she likes them or she says she's going to transfer schools. We'll cross that bridge.....Her freshman year ends May 8th so we'll look forward to having her home for the summer again!

Any Marketing Ideas?

When Meghan and I were walking up Lexington Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan a few weeks ago we were window shopping and people watching. Two women in their late twenties or early thirties walked by each pushing a stroller. We turned to check out the babies, of course, seeing as Aidan had just been born a few days earlier. Now you know how our brains work, with a ton of things going on at the same time, so I observed outloud about how we were walking in a residential area with a lot of VERY TALL high rise buildings on both sides of Lexington....and thought out loud about how people must be pretty wealthy to live in these buildings and one thing led to another and I came up with this brainstorm......if people living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan are wealthy and working full time, they probably don't have time to make their own scrapbooks, right? I wonder if they'd pay to have someone make scrapbooks for them? I wonder how I could possibly market a scrapbooking business to that segment of the population. I have a lot of smart friends so if any of you have any suggestions for how I might check out this potential business I'm all ears! Thanks in advance for your time!

The BIG Blue Hat

The day before Aidan was born Colleen and I "walked the mall" to try and help her body go into labor. I had been looking for a certain type of hat for Aidan, and couldn't seem to find it, so that day we went into Babys R Us and the sales person told us to try The Children's Place. Lo and behold they had the hat, and it was in light blue, which matches his snow suit so I bought it. Yesterday I went to see Colleen and Aidan and she gave me some pics, the one with Aidan in the hat was on top! She says that when they go somewhere with Aidan and put the hat on that by the time they get where they're going it has slipped down over his entire face.....(of course now I'm worried he's going to suffocate) but I had to share this on my blog because he's so darn cute! And the second photo is of Uncle Dan holding Aidan for the first time on Christmas Day. Doesn't he look taken with his nephew? HE IS!!!!!

Enabling my Scrapbooking Friends

I don't know about you but I LOVE the Target Dollar Spot -- when you hit it at the right time there are tons of fun things; but sometimes it's hit or miss. I happened in to the Target in Henrietta last week and low and behold there was TONS of ribbon for scrapbooking, embellishments, mini albums and 12x12 paper for Valentines Day. I didn't need any of it of course, but it was so cute I just couldn't pass it by. I also found some very cute clear stamps for $1 at Joann's in the front by the dollar bins, including some lined journalling blocks. Then yesterday I went into Michaels in Henrietta and they have a lot of their clear stamp sets on clearance for $3!! I picked up the last alphabet set, but there were some cute ones left. So if any of you have gift cards from Christmas to JoAnns or Mikes you might want to check them out! Enjoy!

Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down

I'm sure you've seen these kinds of things in the newspaper where people either compliment or complain about people, places or things....and I've decided to do the same thing in my blog. Thumbs DOWN -- To 1 800 flowers Boy oh boy do I have a bone to pick with this company.....My scrapbooking friends know that I ordered flowers for Sha-na-na (don't ask) back on DECEMBER 5th!!!!!!!!! and when we didn't hear anything from Colleen about the flowers I emailed 1800flowers to get delivery confirmation. Well to make a long story short it took ONE MONTH to finally get them to contact me and tell me that they couldn't get an answer out of the local florist they used for this order so they were going to credit my account and tell the local florist they weren't getting paid. Nice huh? So now we're one month later, and I simply picked up the phone and called Arena's florist on East Avenue and they were extremely customer friendly and focused and had the flowers in Colleen's hands the next day. I also found out that my sister-in-law Mary ordered flowers on the internet for our daughter Colleen after Aidan was born, and the flowers were never delivered either. I don't know which company Mary used (???) but it's just another example of the potential problems of shopping on-line. Thumbs UP - obviously for the reasons above to Arena's florist. They may be more expensive but our friend Colleen says the flowers are beautiful! Hooray!

New Years In New York versus Cabo in January??

Well what can I say? Our plans to go to Mexico to celebrate my girlie friend Pam's 50th bday fell through (big bummer) so Dan and I talked it over and decided that we'd ask our daughter Sarah if we could stay in her apt in NYC while she and Harish went to India to celebrate his grandmother's 80th birthday. She graciously agreed so then we had to make some pretty expensive decisions about what we were going to try to accomplish while we were in NY. Fortunately we have very generous relatives so our sister-in-law Debbie Gleason let us borrow her Honda Pilot for the drive and we headed off on Friday, December 28th to the Big Apple. Saturday morning Meghan and I headed off on the subway from the apt. on the upper East Side down to Greenwich Village where we shopped at Filene's basement and a few other stores. We had matinée tickets to see the Broadway show called Spring Awakening which Meghan was dying to see. If you haven't heard anything about it check it out on the internet. Quite provocative and very different from any Broadway show I've ever seen....she LOVED it of course, and I'd say I liked it, but can see that it's meant for a much younger audience....of course I have no idea how a younger audience can afford the tickets...our two cost....are you ready????? with the extra handling charges and tax they came to $380!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I almost died! And not for nothin' but my knees were practically digging into the back of the neck of the poor guy sitting in front of me. Not to add insult to injury, the woman sitting next to me got her tickets from the TKTS 1/2 price tickets the day of the show for something ridiculous like $65 each. GULP! Immediately after the show we met Dan and Danny in Time Square at Ellen's Stardust Diner. It was jam packed with tourists, and we almost didn't get to stay because Danny got quite overwhelmed. But Meghan really wanted to eat there and we were able to get a table upstairs as far away from the singing waiters and waitresses as possible so we were able to stay. By the end of the evening Danny was even joining in with the singing staff so it turned out to be quite the enjoyable dinner....expensive of course, but it's New York! On Sunday we surprised the kids and took them to see the Cirque de Soleil show called Wintuk at Madison Square Gardens. What a disappointment. $75 a ticket and we could hardly see the stage because we were so far in the back and the way the theater was set up we couldn't see past the people sitting in front of us. Of course who gets to sit directly behind the woman holding a toddler in her lap? Moi!!!!! I ended up telling her that I couldn't see with her weaving her head back and forth so she could see past the toddler who was weaving his back and forth. After seeing the C.d.S. show Ka in Las Vegas I can tell you not to go out of your way to see this show. There was NO comparison between the two. This show was really a lot of tumbling and juggling and acrobats. Talented people no doubt, but not a show that you'll talk about for ages like we did after seeing Ka. Then on Monday we all decided that it was absolutely crazy to try to go to Times Square to see the ball drop at midnight. We had already been in Times Square a few times during this trip for the Broadway show and when the boys went to the movies, plus when we ate at Ellen's, so we opted to skip the crowd of a million plus people and ended up eating dinner at a place called Mad River Grille. We had to eat early (I'm a blue hair underneath the blonde I fear) because they were having a big New Years Eve bunch coming in at 9 but that was fine with us. So we ate dinner then walked over to Second Avenue and ordered four ice cream concoctions at Stone Cold Creamery for $25 and took them back to the apartment to enjoy while watching TV and falling asleep WAY before midnight. Oh, by the way, I also ended up getting my three stone diamond ring in the Diamond District on Sunday.....it's very lovely and I promised Dan I'd NEVER ask for another ring in our lifetimes. If you look closely at the photo above you'll see me holding out my hand to show off my ring but you can't really see it. The part of this story that I'll remember forever is that after we picked the ring up on Monday I gave him a little signal that he immediately knew how to interpret....you see he actually never ASKED me to marry him 21+ years ago. And neither of us know how we started planning on a wedding but it just happened....Thank God. A little strange huh? So I have been teasing him for the past twenty one years that he's never asked me to marry him! He's been a good sport but I think he could have lived a full life without ever hearing about it again. So, in the middle of the Diamond District my husband of the century asked me to marry him...in front of strangers and everything! That was pretty cute I have to say. So it's official and now I can never tease him about it again. By Tuesday morning we were all ready to head home but we wanted Meghan to see the restaurant called "The Barking Dog" on Third and 91st street. Sex and the City featured this restaurant a few times when Aidan was a waiter there. Dan and Danny had already eaten there by themselves on Saturday morning, but we knew Meghan would want to see it too so we headed up there on New Years Eve Day at around ten am. We were seated and ordered and noticed a couple of women with their children sitting at the table behind us. A few minutes later a third woman walked in with her two children and they were seated with the "partners" and their daughter. And finally this guy walks in alone and joins this group.....moments later Danny leans over to me and says something like "mom I think that guy is FAMOUS!!!!!" And sure enough, I looked at this guy and immediately recognized him as a movie star but it took a few minutes for me to place him. It was Dan Futterman....WHO you say? Well he really has been on TV and in a few movies that you'd probably recognize. I first remembered him in the movie called "Enough" with Jennifer Lopez. But he also played in the movie "The Bird Cage" with Robin Williams as his son Val, and he played the part of Daniel Pearl (costarring Angelina Jolie) in the 2007 movie "A Mighty Heart". On TV he played as the brother of Amy on "Judging Amy" as well as a few episodes of Will and Grace. He's also credited with being a screenwriter and Oscan nominee on the film "Capote". He's a cutie that's for sure. If you google him you'll see his other works. His wife's name is Anya Epstein, and she is a writer for TV, and they have two very cute little girls too...of course I'm very star struck and was dying to ask for Dan's (we're on a first name basis of course) autograph but my family BEGGED me to let him eat his brunch peacefully with his family and friends so I had not choice....that would've made a great addition to a scrapbook page wouldn't it Sweatshoppe girls?

"Grandma" Lynn

I love BEING a grandma; I just don't love the WORD grandma....there's something sooooooooo OLD about that word. When Colleen asked me what I'd like to be called; you know, grandma, nana, gram, etc. etc. I said I didn't care....but I'm not so sure now. I'll answer to almost anything but can anyone come up with a younger sounding word than the word than conjures up a grey haired wrinkly old person sitting alone on a porch swing somewhere hoping their children will call them sometime? Oh well, if anyone can think of anything PLEASE let me know and save me from feeling like I'm 100!

Deer Me!

I've had better days that's for sure! But I'm here to talk about it....so all is not lost. I had to drive Danny to school this morning and on my way home a HUGE deer came running out from the side of the road and hit my '06 Malibu in the front right side like a ton of bricks. I'm not hurt at all BUT I looked down and what do I see? Stupid me; I'm still in my pj's!!!!! Grrrrrr; I NEVER go out of the house in my pj's. But this morning I was exhausted and trying to fight a cold, so I hoped to go back to bed for a while when I got home... so I just threw a jacket on over my pjs and ran out of the house. Obviously NOT a good choice! I think I was more upset that the deer didn't die immediately than I was about the car. What really shook me up was that the Sheriff ended up having to shoot the deer to put it out of its misery. I shed a few tears over that but got over it rather quickly. On the positive side though, I met one of my neighbors who came out and talked to me for quite a while waiting for the Sheriff to arrive....what a nice guy; he even called me this afternoon to check up on me. There are a few nice people left in this world after all. But now we're dealing with the insurance, towing, rental car, repairs at NU look collision etc. Fortunately we only have $100 deductible on our insurance policy, and we have a rider on our policy that allows $30 a day for a rental car....so I will be driving around in a PT Cruiser for a while. I just worry about the repair work and hope we don't end up having to keep returning it to get it done properly...that's my past experience so I'm always a little apprehensive about any car repairs.

The Next Generation! Wow!

This grandparent thing is really something I'll tell ya! Everyone tells you how wonderful they are but it's another one of those things that you don't really comprehend until you go through it yourself! The whole Gleason/Brockmann/Beagley clan was thrilled to learn that Colleen and Travis were expecting when we found out back in April that Colleen was pregnant. And throughout the pregnancy we enjoyed watching Colleen and Travis grow in their anticipation and excitement when they found out that they were having a boy and then watching the baby grow, and grow and grow....Colleen's original due date was December 17th, then it was changed to the 16th and when the 16th came and went our little Colleeney got a little discouraged and worried that her son might just decide to be a real Christmas baby. Her doctor's were very good about working with her and trying to get Aidan to show his beautiful face before December 25th and with the grace of God and lots of prayers he did arrive 3 days before Christmas on the 22nd...of course with everything going on at the hospital the C section kept getting pushed back and the doctor was finally ready to delivery our first gorgeous grandson at 2:34 am. From a grandparent's standpoint I can tell you that it was a very surreal experience. I wish I could've been with Colleen when she actually gave birth because I find that whole thing quite interesting; but we also didn't want to intrude so we stayed home until around 2am and arrived at the hospital a few minutes before Aidan was born. Yesterday was Aidan's 2 week birthday so Grandpa Dan was on the phone calling to wish his grandson "happy 2 week birthday" if that gives you any idea of how excited he is! And to tell you how truly special Colleen is she told her father that she was so happy to bring such joy to our families....isn't she a good kid? So I'll try not to bore you with too many photos of my grandson.....(once I can actually figure out how to include photos) but he will definitely be one of "Lynn's lovelies"!!!!!

Jessica kick started me in this new year!

Happy 2008 everyone! I have to thank my scrapping friend Jessica for kick starting me in this process of starting a blog. I was very inspired by her blog and decided to follow in her footsteps....so hats off to you Miss Jessica! Thanks for your inspiration and good luck on your new blog. Perhaps we can help each other out as we learn about improving blogs along the way?