March is typically a very fickle month, weather-wise, in western New York, and this year is no exception. On Tuesday it was near 60°, and we were finally able to get a nice long walk outside. Yesterday this is what happened.

Here's my Zoom In, Zoom Out for Week 11:

We had 18-20" of snow. You can see that it comes up over my knees.

Really, I've had enough! It was only 15° today, and although it's supposed to be warmer tomorrow it will be another week or more before the sidewalks are clear enough to walk outside again. The roads today were still terrible. Matt has a new job with a wonderful landscape company. They plow during the winter, and Matt was out from 11 o'clock Wednesday morning until 8 o'clock Thursday morning with just a couple of breaks. Spring officially begins on March 20th, just a week away. Let's hope it looks a lot more like spring by then!

My Project Life album was started last August, so this is the first yearly title page I’ve created. It was inspired by this page, but there was not a lot of similarity by the time I finished.

All by two of the cards for this layout were created with Bazzill Orange Peel cardstock. I started with the Live Simply quote which I downloaded from the “Sunny Vegan” blog, and that determined the color scheme. The top left card includes a Papertrey Ink Stitched Heart die, patterned paper by Basic Grey, and a flair from a Cocoa Daisy kit that Tracy gave me for Christmas. “Life is good” was created with a Kara Dudley digital brush and two wood veneer hearts, also from a Cocoa Daisy kit. The photo was taken by Tracy’s mom when we were in Florida, and the Evalicious tag seemed perfect.

 The second row includes a Midnight Edition card with a wood veneer arrow, my favorite typewriter die by Savvy, some cool Washi tape and a wood veneer camera, and the last card is a letter press card from a Cocoa Daisy kit.

 The card documenting my One Little Word for 2014 was inspired by cards I pinned here and here. The watercolor “paper” was cut down from a Cocoa Daisy 4X3 card. I’m not sure where the vellum arrow came from, and the “Happiness is Where You Find It” flair has been in my stash for a long time. I like the clean look of this page, and would like to figure out how to recreate it on a regular basis. 

This notebook turned out to be a good purchase. I’ve been writing down intentions for every month, and keeping notes on how I do. I’ve used it to take notes from my online class “A Simple Year,” and have added quotes, and pasted in some inspiration pieces. The notebook title is proving to be true: write it down, and it’s more likely to happen.

I also bought this cute planner at Target, and use it to jot down the activities of the day. Since I’m always working on my Project Life a month behind, it’s a good reference.

In February, I purged and organized our guest room. That included a three section bookcase with cupboards that yielded another three bags for the craft consignment shop, and some more books for the library book store. Another bag of clothes went off to Goodwill after cleaning the closet.

My goal was to read four books each month. I only managed three this month. Our book group book, The Monuments Men, took much longer than I anticipated. All the members of our book group (four couples) agreed the book was interesting, but would have been better as a long New Yorker profile instead of a book. Much of it seemed repetitive and there isn’t a lot of action.  The book group went to see the movie as well, and we all enjoyed it. The movie very different from the book, so much so that none of the characters even have the same names. Although the book dragged in parts, I was very glad I’d read it before seeing the movie because I knew so much of the back story that wasn’t told.

I also finished Louise Penney’s A Rule Against Murder, the fourth in a series of Armand Gamache mysteries. I absolutely love these mysteries, and am amazed that I’m not any further along in the series. Number five is on my list for March.

Humans of New York was the last book I read. It’s a book of street photography taken in New York City. It’s been on the best seller list for weeks, and I finally snagged a copy from the library. The portraits are wonderful, but it’s the captions full of humor and pathos that make the book worth perusing.

It’s been so wintery here that it’s absolutely unsafe to walk outside. The sidewalks are covered with ice and snow, and the city can barely keep up with keeping the roads clear, let alone the sidewalks. I hate the treadmill, but I wrote down a goal of walking 20 miles this month, and managed to get in 21.5. If I hadn’t written it down, I’m quite sure I would have found a variety of excuses not to go to the gym.

I hoped to finish both the December and January Project Life pages, but only December was completed. I did get 19 cards created and sent most of them to friends and family. There was lots of entertaining in February, the unexpected trip to Florida, and the usual volunteer commitments as well as the annual Church Leadership Development Day. All in all, it felt like a productive month.