Laura's birthday book

For the past few months, I haven't done much of anything except put together this gigantic photo album/scrapbook tribute to my sister for her 30th birthday, which was Nov. 26.

I have to admit, I can see why people really get into scrapbooking. There are about three huge aisles of stuff at A.C. Moore, and although I started out planning to do everything by hand, I ended up finding some neat ready-made stuff that made things go a lot faster.


The book is an alphabet of things that have to do with Laura: Childhood memories, favorite actors and baseball players, etc. So there were a lot of inside jokes from when we were kids, including excerpts from Colin McNaughton's obscure 1970s alphabet book, ABCs and 123s. I also had a lot of fun making little clip art in Microsoft Publisher.

The front cover is a painting in acrylics and it's supposed to look like "The Castle in the Pyrenees" by Magritte, because for some reason I thought he was Laura's favorite painter. (Turns out I was wrong, but at least she liked the clouds, I think.)

The back cover is also painted and it depicts the constellation for Sagittarius, which both Laura and I were born under.



The "Happy Birthday" scene at the end of the book has Brak, Zorak, Jimmy Fallon from Saturday Night Live, some Smurfs, a Muppet, and two Giants baseball players -- Barry Zito and Tim Lincecum -- having a birthday party for Laura. It is loosely based on a dream she described to me, but apparently Jimmy Fallon did not appear in the dream after all.

Actually, I just liked the picture of him playing the guitar.