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Monthly Archives: October 2011

Piles of hearts

Ok, so not piles.  Just one pile.

There’s been a slew of weddings among my friends recently.  Obviously, this is the perfect time to play with paper and make some nice cards for them.

This is the card I made from one of my friends (since sixth grade) who got married last month (thus it is safe to show the card now).  I got the template from Extreme Cards and Papercrafting.  It’s a pretty good source for interesting pop up cards.

I used some nice garnet colored cardstock for the card and this interesting sugar crystal patterned cardstock for the pile of hearts inside.

The hearts decorating the front of the card are from the cutouts inside (I had to make it more than once because I messed up on a quarter of the card, which necessitated doing the whole thing over again…SUGH).

Lettering was courtesy of my printer, which I then embossed onto the card and filled in by hand.  Remember, I am having serious misgivings about my handwriting still.

My Life, Deleted

No, not my life.  It’s the title to Scott Bolzan‘s memoir he wrote after a traumatic brain injury in 2008 about his subsequent recovery.  And yes, this means this post is one of those rare book reviews.

Scott Bolzan, former NFL and USFL player, former successful businessman, former pilot, had an accident in which he slipped and hit his head.  He now suffers from one of the more severe cases of retrograde amnesia in medical history in that even now, his memory has not returned.  So, since then he’s had to relearn many things, like who his wife and children are, and even what a wife is.  His memoir is a rather inspirational story of relearning what it is to be himself and how to be himself after 40 some odd years of his past experiences were taken from him.

It’s a pretty good book and an easy read, as most memoirs are; I finished it in a few hours.  It gives an interesting view on human relationships as Mr. Bolzan had to (re)learn how to be around all his old friends and relatives much like a child.  But unlike a child, he has coherent, well-formed thoughts about these situations and can express them much better.  It’s very interesting insight into that whole process.  It also rekindles my old interest in psychology.  The brain is a fragile and mysterious thing and yet it commands so much of our daily lives.

We should probably all wear helmets all the time.