I’ve been working all day (in moments between Ali and Work and Chris) on picking out the prints and “papers” for my new blog design!! I’m so excited – it should be up by the end of next week. I have been wanting to do this for a while – it kills me to have a Blogger standard background. Geesh. How will anyone accept me as a serious blogger with a STANDARD background? Ridiculous. So I’m getting one made by Doodlebug Designs. I have felt silly wanting to get that done, but Chris sealed the deal on Saturday when I was telling him about what I had been thinking about, and he said “all hobbies have expenses associated with them. This is your favorite hobby, so it makes sense to spend a little money on it.” I sure love my husband!
And it IS true – I don’t really have any other “active” hobbies right now, but I sure am head over heels in love with blogging!! It is such a perfect form of communication and journalling for me. ANYWAY, that’s my justification for paying for a custom designed blog (again, coming out of the previously mentioned “Rachel’s spending money” budget, so no guilt about taking food out of Chris’ mouth or diapers off of Ali’s butt or even litter out of Oreo’s box just to have a pretty background on my blog).
Another exciting blog thing that I’ve been working on for quite a while but just haven’t told you about yet – my first blog book shipped today!! There’s this great website called Blurb where you can download their software and “slurp” your blog into book form, and get it professionally printed in a nice glossy book. So I did my first 100 posts, and plan on doing that for each set of 100 posts. It includes all of the pictures, comments (yes, if you comment on my blog, you’re going to be published now!! Congrats!!), everything.
It took some work because I had to go through and format it (it imports the pictures and text separately, so you have to set up the formats the way you want them), and also reload all of the pictures to get the best quality pictures (Blogger reduces the image size when you upload them, so when it slurped them back into the book, they weren’t as good as they needed to be).
It is QUITE amazingly affordable (my 145 page book, including the nicest cover (hardback customized) was under $65 including shipping), and by far the best baby book that I could ever do for Ali!! I have this dream of a whole shelf full of blog books for Ali to read and enjoy. It’ll be like an encyclopedia set of her life!! Not that she’ll know what an encyclopedia is. I’ll have to tell her, “an encyclopedia was a set of big, brown books that we used to look things up before there was an internet”. She will gasp in horror – “how DID you survive?!”
As soon as my book comes in, I’ll take pictures to show you the amazing, exciting invention of a blog book!!!
Now people, no poking fun at me for how obsessed I am with blogging. After all, you’re reading it, so it must have SOME redeeming qualities, even for you!
wow. I never dreamed you’d be the one to be so obsessed with Blogging. :)
I’m glad you like it though. :)