Hey Andrew!

No more long-distance hikes. It seems that when you go hiking, I end up staying at home unemployed. Chris' theory on this is that you want me at home to be taking better care of Milo. Thoughts? Oh, and why am I really dreading telling Dad?

The much awaited early layouts of Chris Breecher

These first pages are from my sophomore year of college- March 1997. It is from an album that I put together for a class of mine. So there’s a bit of a story to the album. Darlene and John Flint were at a Weird Al concert. As part of the show he played “Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota,” and as legend would have it, as he was playing that song, Darlene and John looked at one another and said, “Spring Break.” Naturally, I wanted to join in this expedition. However, Cornell’s spring break (where Darlene and John went to school) was the week after Valpo’s. So how was I going to be able to miss a week of classes after just having two weeks off? Many of my classes graded attendance. So I decided to see if I could do a photography independent study on cheesy road trips. Luckily the photography professor was just odd enough to think that this was a good idea.


In the end John wasn’t able to go so it was Darlene, Steve and Darlene’s friend Mike that went to the trip. Anyway, here’s a spread from that album. As part of the trip I kept a journal. That’s my journaling on the left page. Steve had sent out an email during the trip and I included it on the left. I’ve also included a sugar packet and a match book that Steve decorated since the Happy Chef matchbooks were blank. And we started to call it “Happy Chey” since that’s what it looks like Steve wrote. (Please try to keep in mind that it was probably 4am and we had had very little sleep over the last three days.)

After the Road Trip album I made a similar styled one of my semester in England. I sent weekly emails to friends and family summing up my adventures from the past week and I printed these out and included them in the album amongst pictures, postcards, ticket stubs, brochures, etc.

And now we come to the layouts of 2000 and 2001. By this point I had decided that I disliked traditional photo albums with the pockets and the limitations of direction that photos could go, etc. I liked the 12x12 size because I could fit multiple pictures on a page. I saw the various scrapping stuff at AC Moore but I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with it. All of the pages I did were done on the insert papers inside the page protectors. And my adhesive of choice was a glue stick. I never really considered myselft to be "scrapbooking". This was just my form of a photo album.


First up is a layout from a trip to France. There are 5 pages in the album from the trip. To keep a theme throughout the France pictures I have a bit of that patterned paper on each page. My PP bits get smaller and smaller as the pages go on and I start running out of the sheet of paper.



Next is Plimoth Plantation. No patterned paper on this one, but a bit of cardstock. I’m not entirely certain what I was trying to do. However, I do explain my pictures a bit.



Apparently I then branched out into stickers. They seem to have thrown up on this page a bit.


And finally, the sin of decorative scissors. Not entirely certain what I was thinking here.

I'm a blacker baby, so why don't you kill me?

Yup. That’s right. I’m a blacker. I just wasn’t inspired to write about anything. So here’s my utterly boring story about the weekend.

In an effort to save some money we cut our cable from Standard to Basic. This should save us $35 a month. However, it means that we are now limited to about 20 channels- the basic networks, about 3 different PBS channels, the Waltham channel, Waltham High channel, etc.

This weekend I realized that I am now doomed on weekends. All that was on was sports! I hate sports! I tried watching candlepin bowling, the least sporty of the options, but it was pretty bad. Finally I found Real Simple on PBS.

I suppose I could have gone and spent my time doing something more productive, but I was really just wanting to watch something while I ate my lunch. I have a feeling we’ll be going through Netflix a little bit more now!

Oh, another story that I thought of as I just titled this entry. (Yes, I titled it after typing the entry. Stop looking at me like I’m weird.)

Think back to about 1994 or 95. It was my senior year of high school. Brett Warwick and his friend Dan (last name eluding me) would always make random videos. So one day during some theatre event, maybe a cast party, they played their video for “Loser 3-Legged Jeans.” It was the two of them dancing around the Super Park to the tune of Loser by Beck. Anyway, since my title was a take on this song, I thought of the video. In fact, pretty much any time I hear that song I think of that video.

Opinions Wanted...

So Andrew is redoing my website for me. Making it look more professional, getting it off of Geocities, etc. Every so often he asks me questions about content, target audience, what I want to use it for, etc. Today he sent me this image and this comment/question.

"So after working for two months on a layout for your web page, I've FINALLY come up with something I don't hate. Honestly, I've been shuffling things and changing them and scrapping them completely about 25 times. I have a folder of bad ideas. So anyway, do you think I should keep going with this one, or keep working?"

At first when I saw it I thought it looked a little too simplistic. (And I have no idea what he wants to put on the inside. I'm guessing that when clicking on links that's where stuff shows up, but here it looks a little plain.) However, then after looking at it longer I think it's grown on me. I really like the font, and I love the little sketch of the toolbelt. He did a good job with that! Anyway, I am opening this up to any suggestions. Also, if you have any positive comments to say about your Toolbelt I'd love to include your comments on the site.

Happy Anniversary Andrew!

First off, very surprised to see that Andrew was reading my blog. I had sent him links in the past to entries that I thought might be of interest to him, but then I saw that he checked it out and responded with no prompting by me. Yippee!

Anyway, on March 1, 2004 Andrew was in Georgia starting his hike of the Appalachian Trail. I'm very proud of him for having walked over 2,000 miles. I also enjoyed being able to visit him along the trail as he hiked through New England. At the end of April he heads off to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, (through CA, OR, and WA) from Mexico to Canada. I wish we could go visit him along the way, but finances just won't allow it. However, once again I'll be his computer support, uploading pictures and journal entries for him. Looking forward to hearing all of the stories.