Laura Vegas

now for the second 20 years of my life. to be honest, the last 20 years are a blur of working, moving from house to house, marriage (x2), and kids. i loved doing that last post, on the first 20 years. but i'm having a hard time getting motivated to do this list. lol! i decided that if i wanted to get this done, i'd let go of the expectation of adding in photos. even though it makes the list more fun. since all my photos for the last 20 years are in scrapbooks, and i'm not up to digging around in them right now. i also didn't mean for this to become a timeline for my life. so i'm not worrying about getting all the important dates and moments in there. they happened, that's all we need to know. lol! anyways, enough explaining. honestly, it's my blog and i can do my list like i want too 😉

21. i worked in grocery for about 13 years, for 2 different companies. i went from curtousy clerk, to checker, to stocker, to frozen food and ice cream, to the pricing department, to managing the pricing department, to price comparing at competitor stores, to working general merchandise, to night crew stocker and checker, and back to the pricing department.

ETA: i did some college here and there for a few years. just never got super serious about any one subject. i mainly just worked. held some extra jobs on the side here and there. office job doing accounting. and retail clothing store, doing cashier and stocking.at one point, i was working grocery full-time, and retail part-time. always busy.

22. since i worked in grocery a lot, the few guys i dated and married (that i can count on one and a half hands), were all ones that i met through the grocery store. either working there, delivering there, or being a regular shopper there.

23. since moving out of my parents house, i have lived in 4 different places. 2 condo's, a tiny little house, and our current house. each one felt so big at the time. but we quickly filled each one up with "stuff" and now they don't seem big enough. ETA: yep, lived in northern california all my life.

24. i started official scrapbooking when i was about 25. right before alyssa was born. i used to believe in scrapping EVERY SINGLE photo. so if i had 40 photos of her eating in her high chair, i scrapped all 40 photos of her eating in her high chair. this would explain why she has 4 FULL albums, just from her first year of life. lol!

25. i used to love making floral arrangements. mainly using dried flowers and silk flowers. i would make things in vases, baskets, buckets, things to hang on the windows, things to put on the tables, and things to hang over doors. i would also dry apple slices, and make wreaths out of them. my mom still has some of my little creations decorating her home. 

26. i have never been a morning person. i worked a normal, office job for about 2 years (doing accounting). and it was the hardest thing for me to get up and to the office at 7:00 or 8:00am. i then went back to grocery, and was doing pricing, which meant i had to be at work at 2:00 or 3:00am. like 2:00 in the morning. or the middle of the night, depending how you look at it. that was so much easier for me.

27. i have never been very good at doing makeup or hair. i can't do eye makeup for anything. it always ends up looking goofy or trashy to me. lol! i have never curled my eyelashes or waxed anything. i've never found a lipstick that stays on for longer than 20 minutes. thanks to my mother-in-law (alyssa's grandma), i have an entire collection of hair products, since she works in a beauty supply store. i don't know what half of them are for, or how to use them. i don't know the tricks to styling hair. i sort of fake my way through it, and stick about a zillion bobby pins in my hair to make it look like i knew what i was doing.

28. i'm terrible with directions, and finding my way places. i think part of it, is because i'm not always paying attention to where i'm going. maybe it's the kids in the car, talking my ear off. or me yelling at them to "knock it off". or maybe i'm by myself, and talking to myself about all the things i need to do. bcause i really do that. whatever the reason, i'm never really paying attention to my surroundings.

29. i was always really bad about buying the girls toys ALL the time. anything they wanted, i would get. i would even buy them stuff, when i was by myself. we had about 10 times more toys and books, then they could have ever needed. looking back, it was overkill. they didn't need it all, they never played with it all, and it was a waste of money. lesson learned, and we keep things simpler these days.

30. when we moved to the house we have now, i decided to quit the grocery business and start a daycare business in our home. i wanted to do something, where i could be home with the girls, who were 2 and 5 at the time.

31. on a whim, i decided to try and teach scrapbooking classes. i remember calling up my lss, and going down to talk to the owner and show her some of my work. i started teaching a few weeks later, and taught 2-3 classes a month for the next 2 years. and the owner dina and i became super good friends, and our youngest daughters are BFF's 🙂

32. during the girls third year or so of soccer, alyssa's coach at the time somehow talked me into playing women's soccer. now, i grew up playing. but at this time, i hadn't played in about 15 years. when you havn't played in that long, it's not the brightest idea to join a team that had been playing together for a few years. hard to fit in, when they all have their groove going. and also not a good idea to play on a team with no subs, when you havn't run at all in years. lol! i lasted about 2 games, and then a ton of them got rained out, and i never went back.

33. mid-way through my 30's, i decided that i had too much clutter in my life. so i got rid of almost every country knick knack in my house, and started going with a clean and simple decor. i also NEVER had photos on my walls. they were all in scrapbooks or put away, waiting to be in scrapbooks. but i finally started having my favorite photos enlarged, and display them on my walls for everyone to see.

34. at some point, i stopped using capital letters when i type. i'm not sure why. it's just easier, and i like the way it looks. although, if i'm doing an important email for something more business-like, then i do use the capitals. but when i write with pen and paper, i write in all capitals. i think this comes from my days working in the pricing department at the grocery stores. i used to make a lot of signs, to hang on displays. and that was always using capitals. so i guess i just kept that up, even after i left. it's extremely hard for me to write in lowercase letters.

35. a few years ago, i was diagnosed with a chronic pain disease (fibromyalgia). it came out of nowhere and hit me like a ton of bricks. for a few years, it was the hardest thing to deal with. but it never slowed me down. it became a new "normal" to me. and while i hate to jinx myself by saying this. i honestly feel really good these days, and wonder if maybe it magically left the way it magically appeared. and now, i'm off to knock on a bunch of wood.

36. we never go on big vacations, or travel much. and yet, in the last year and a half, i'll have made 5 trips for scrapbooking gigs. 2 trips to utah (the golden ticket trip, and a making memories meeting and training session), and 3 trips down to southern california (for the infomercial shoot, for CHA, and this weekend for CKC). i'm actually getting more comfortable with traveling, although i'm still a homebody at heart.

37. i'm not the greatest speller. and apparently, i spell "havn't" wrong every single time i type it. i'm told that it's spelled "haven't". my mom says it annoys her every time i write it. lol! i never use the spell-checker. sometimes, i even see spelling errors on my layouts, but i rarely fix them. just being honest.

38. i have some serious focusing issues. some might call me scattered. i'm always thinking or doing 27 things at once. and i very sporatically work on them all at the same time. if i slowed down and did things one by one, i would probably get more done. instead, i run around in circles half the time, taking even longer to accomplish any one given thing.

39. i forget everything. even things that someone told me 3 minutes ago. i've been know to email myself, with little things that i need to remember. we were at alyssa's soccer game one saturday, and i remembered that i needed to grab a pony tail holder for sarah's game. so i called and left myself a message on the answering machine, since i knew i would forget by the time we got hom 20 minutes later. any time the girls ask me to do something, my response is "make me a note".

40. i'm so grateful for my life and where i'm at. i have a gorgeous family, a loving husband, 2 amazing girls, a fun job with great kids, lots of wonderful opportunities in the scrapbooking business, family that loves and supports us, and friends that keep me sane and listen to whatever i want to talk about 😉