Stefanie Ackerson, July, Move to St. George!

My project for July changed dramatically when we discovered we suddenly needed to move from my beloved hometown of Logan to the farthest point on the Utah map, St. George!  The first week of July, my husband, Paul, received a completely unexpected job offer from a company he hadn't even applied for, and after a couple weeks of debating pros and cons, we decided to take it.  He'd been looking for a real full-time civil engineering job for over a year and this would be his big break.  The catch:  They wanted him to start on July 28th...which gave us only two weeks to pack up and move!  

During those two weeks, Paul quit his current job and I quit my job as a school-based speech-language pathologist, we made a weekend trip to St. George to go apartment hunting, then spent three days with my mom's help packing up our entire apartment and my classroom.  

Here is our cute little Logan apartment, the upstairs of an old house, before we started dismantling it:

I loved our little apartment, a great first home for a newlywed couple.  It was small and cute and cozy, but there were a few things I'd been doing without that I decided I had earned a right to if I was going to go along with this crazy adventure:  central air conditioning (our first apartment was miserable in the summer, and I knew St. George would be twice as bad), a laundry room with my own washer and dryer (we'd been sharing a small set in the dirty basement with the downstairs bachelors...icky), a garage (cars left out in the St. George sun get HOT), and lots of storage space (I'm a bit of a pack rat).  

We found the perfect place that met all of my requests and even had a few extra perks, like location right next to the beautiful St. George temple and a little back patio!  It's a cute two bedroom, two bathroom townhouse in a quite little community.  Here are some pictures of our new townhouse before we brought anything in:

Outside view

Front room, with huge beautiful
windows

Front door and dining room area,
open to front room

Kitchen

Living room, with a fireplace and
sliding door out to a back patio!

Master bedroom, with another door
leading out to the patio

Walk-in closet!!

Master bathroom

Main bathroom

On Friday, July 25th, we loaded up the truck with the help of my family and the elders quorum, and on Saturday we made the long 7-hour drive with both sets of parents and my aunt, who volunteered to come help me unpack and show us around St. George.  A couple members of our new St. George elders quorum showed up to help, thank goodness for strong young guys!  But best of all, one of them happened to have an extra like-new washer and dryer just sitting in his garage that he sold to us for only $200!  By Monday, our new townhouse was looking pretty decent.  I don't know what I would have done without my mom and aunt!

Here are pictures of some of the rooms that are coming together:

We still have a ways to go, a few more boxes to unpack, furniture to buy and/or assemble, pictures to hang...but it's coming along and starting to feel more like home.  Oh, and we're finally getting internet hooked up this week so I can start Skyping with my mom back home. :)

Stefanie Ackerson, June, Wedding Scrapbook

Hello everyone!  My project for June was to update my scrapbooks.  I've never been a very cutesy scrapbooker, but I do love collecting things – special notes and cards, awards, theater ticket stubs, postcards, all kinds of things that document some of my most treasured memories.  When I opened up my cupboard and started sorting through my stacks of stuff, I realized it’s been over two years since I last pulled them out and I had a huge mountain of things to add!  

There was no way I could get through everything in one month with everything else going on in my life, so I decided to just focus on finally making my wedding scrapbook.  I'll try to tackle the rest another month...

Like I mentioned earlier, I'm not usually very cutesy in my scrapbooks.  I typically just stick things onto the plain white pages that come in the scrapbook with little to no fuss or bother. But for my wedding I wanted to do something extra special.  I had a ton of cutesy stuff I'd been collecting from Michael's and Hobby Lobby and dollar stores and leftovers from bridal showers I'd thrown in the past.  None of it was organized at all, just thrown into nooks and crannies and boxes in my cupboards.  In the picture below, you can see the mess I was in one day trying to sort everything and create page layouts... My husband came in the room and I was just sitting there staring forlornly at the mess before me!  So I decided the first thing to do was go out and buy a cart with a bunch of drawers to start organizing everything.  The cart was a lifesaver!

It took me literally WEEKS to arrange all of the pages to my satisfaction.  I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so this was really a very painful process.  And an expensive one!  It took several more trips to the local scrapbooking stores to find just the right paper and finishing touches. But it was fun to look back and reminisce in all the memories from our wedding day and the months leading up to it.  And I have to admit that, compared to what I usually do, the scrapbook turned out really cute!  I'm so excited to start showing it off to all my family and friends.  Here's a sneak peek of some of the pages:

Stefanie Ackerson, May, Affirmations Journal

My goal for May was to develop a more meaningful routine of daily scripture study with an affirmations journal.  One of my good friends from my college days (who also happened to be my visiting teacher and Relief Society president for a time) once challenged me to do this and it was the most meaningful year of scripture study I've ever had.  I wanted to do it again this year.  I started on it a little bit earlier in the year, but May was going to be the month I really dedicated myself to it and reported on how I’m doing.

The first thing I had to do was buy a fresh new copy of the Book of Mormon, a cute notebook for my journal, and a multi-colored marking pencil.  I like to color-coordinate my entries based on which of my roles I am writing about as I try to apply the scriptures to my own life.  I have many different roles, including wife, daughter, sister, friend, as well as roles related to my job and church callings.  I also decided to include my role as simply a daughter of God to include characteristics and traits that I am striving to develop to bring me closer to my Savior.

The thing that makes an affirmations journal different from a regular scripture journal is that you write about the principles you read about in statements of faith about yourself.  As my college friend put it, "We can bring about great things in our lives by using statements of faith."  In Preach My Gospel (pg. 117) it reads, "Hope is trust in God's promises, faith that if we act now [express faith now], the desired blessings [and outcomes] will be fulfilled in the future."  Kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy!

So when I read my scriptures, as I come across principles or characteristics I am striving to develop, I write a statement about myself as if I already demonstrate that principle or characteristic in my own life.  For example, one scripture I came across was in 1 Nephi 19:3.  Here is the scripture as I marked it and my accompanying entry in my affirmations journal:

Here are some more pictures of other pages in my scriptures and journal to give you an idea of how it works for me:

One of my favorite inspirational quotes is pasted into the front cover of my scripture journal (see picture above).  I still miss a day of studying now and again when life gets crazy, but I'm studying more and more and that's progress for me!  

Stefanie Ackerson, April, Wedding DVD Part 2

Oops, a day late again....but better late than never, right?

My original goal for April was to update my memory book with a section on my year as a newlywed for my one-year anniversary on the 13th.  But then April turned out super busy between an impromptu vacation during spring break, craziness at work, and being sick a lot.  So I decided to put off my memory book project until another month when I will have more time to dedicate to doing it well.

I decided instead to finish my goal for February.  I had made a wedding DVD for my brother and new sister-in-law for her birthday in February, but ran into a few snags that took longer to resolve than they really should have, so I didn't have time to make a DVD of my own wedding.  Watching the movie with her and my brother and seeing their googly eyes for each other inspired a twinge of jealousy in my heart, and ever since then it's been eating at me!  So I decided (by golly!) that I would finally finish my own wedding DVD for my anniversary.  Well, that didn't really happen either, but I at least started working on it off and on during the month of April and finally finished it up this weekend.

I won't go into all the details again about how I made the DVD.  (You can go back to my entry from March if you're really interested.)  I decided to use the same computer program (Windows DVD Maker) for a number of reasons:  1-I had already figured out how to make it work, 2-I was too ignorant/lazy to figure out how/where to find a better program, and 3-I actually thought the first one turned out really cute and wanted to try some new designs with my own.  And I'm glad I did.  I still ran into a snag or two, but it was much faster going this time around.

Here are some snapshots of the opening menu and scene selection screens (sorry for the poor quality--picture of a computer screen--it looks much better in person):

I'm so excited to finally curl up on the couch with my cute hubbie and relive our wedding day together! (Missing family, messy cake fight, getaway car fiasco and all!) :)

Stefanie Ackerson, March, Date Jar

My project for March was to make a date jar.  I knew that March was going to be a crazy busy month for me at work, so I wanted to keep my project to something fairly simple that I could finish in a single day (or better yet, a single hour!).  It was getting close to my one-year wedding anniversary (April 13th) and my husband and I were already running out of ideas for creative weekly date nights.  Most often we find ourselves just going out to eat or popping in a movie or something like that, so I wanted to make a date jar for us to contribute fun date ideas to "keep the romance alive" without breaking the budget.

Last year I was reading an issue of the LDS Living magazine and saw a little blurb about a list of creative date ideas created by Six Sisters.  I had cut out the advertisement and stuck it in a mason jar I found at a dollar store and promised myself that I would someday make it into a cute date jar.  Of course, it just sat on a shelf for the rest of the year, until I pulled it out again a couple weeks ago to finish the project.

I'm almost embarrassed to admit how ridiculously quick and easy this was to do... I went to LDS Living online and found the article from Six Sisters Stuff titled 50 Cheap and Fun Date Ideas.  All I did was copy and paste the list into Microsoft Word, adjust the formatting, and print it out on colored paper.  Then I cut them into strips and stuck them in the jar.

To make it look like I'd gone to a little more work, I topped the jar with a white paper doily and a glittery pink heart from my haphazard scrapbook supplies bag.  Ta-da!  And there you have it, a very simple but functional date jar.  I figure Paul and I can add more ideas to it as they come to us.  We've already stuck in a couple of free passes we've received to some hot springs and a fun park near us.  This is going to be our first week using it, and I can't wait to see what we pull out first!

Stefanie Ackerson, February, Wedding DVD

Hello again, everyone!  I was supposed to post yesterday but forgot...oops!  So here it is, just a day late.

My February project was to create a wedding DVD for my new sister-in-law's birthday present.  My brother got married in August and I had tons of wedding footage on my brand new digital camcorder.  My mom had recorded some of the reception with her old camcorder and copied it onto VHS, and my sister-in-law has loved watching it over and over so I knew she would love a more comprehensive DVD of her own.  Hence, my project!  

Only problem was, I had no idea where to begin!  Oh yeah, and I made the mistake of procrastinating starting the project until two days before the birthday party--bad idea!  So I had to make it up as I went, hoping it would be pretty self-explanatory onceI plugged in the camera and stuck in a blank DVD. 

First step was figuring out how to upload all of the wedding footage onto my computer.  That wasn't too hard, just connecting cables and copying them over, so I was feeling pretty good about myself!  And in the process I discovered a neat feature on my camcorder that makes a short 5-minute highlight video set to a nostalgic tune, so I added that too.  Bonus!  Technology makes me look so clever!

Second, I had to figure out what kind of DVD I needed to buy.  Turns out there are several different types and it depends on the type of laptop you have--who knew?!  After a Google search, I discovered I would need a DVD+RW, so I picked one up at Walmart and stuck it into the computer, fingers crossed that something would pop up automatically to get me started.  And it did!  Yeah for Microsoft!  The program that popped up was Windows DVD Maker and it seemed very user friendly, so I thought, great!


Unfortunately, when I tried dragging in my wedding footage and songs, the formats were not compatible.  After another Google search, I figured out how to convert the songs into the right format in iTunes, and the video into the right format using a free converter I downloaded called Freemake Video Converter.  (Though I don't know if I'd recommend it or use it again myself.  It worked great, but since then our computer's been acting a bit unreliable so Paul and I think we may have gotten a virus or something else malicious in the process....)


Once I had everything in the right format, I was able to drag in all my video footage, all the pictures their photographers had taken of their engagements, bridals, and wedding day, and some of their favorite love songs as background music for the slideshow portion of the video.  It took me quite awhile to get everything in the right order, time the songs to the pictures, and get all the little details worked out. 

But in the end, the DVD turned out so cute!  (If I do say so myself!)  The best part was watching my brother's and sister-in-law's faces when we watched it after the birthday party--priceless!  They both absolutely loved it.  Here's a preview of the final product:

I had planned on making a DVD of my own wedding this month as well, but since the process took longer than I had anticipated, I just didn't have time.  I think I want to do a little more research into other movie-maker programs and video converters too, to see what other options are out there.  So if any of you more experienced, tech-savvy ladies have suggestions, I would love them!