Here’s what the stage looked like – a beach scene, complete with a dock coming off the stage (our church’s handyman built it!):

The back four panels were reused from vacation Bible camp. They actually had six panels, with an airplane and banner starting on the fourth panel and going off to the right, so we covered up the airplane with the “2012″ sign and painted over the last two panels to use for our side wings.

The left side wing was painted simply with some rocks, ocean, and sky. We had paper surfboards left over from VBC, as well as a tall lifeguard chair from VBC, which we reused.

For the right wing, I painted ocean, sky, and a lighthouse. I used cardboard for the top part of the lighthouse and we jury-rigged it to the panels with an actual light that went around and around! We just happened to have those “siren” type lights in the attic — we pried off the red light cover and used yellow tissue paper in the window of the cardboard lighthouse top to help mute the effect. It really looked awesome!

Just cardboard wasn’t really providing enough support, so we added some random stakes that we found on-site for more support.

The right side of the room was decorated with the remaining paper surfboards and butcher paper palm trees that I cut out in advance and had volunteers put up.

We edged the ping pong table with a grass skirt (compliments of Oriental Trading Company).

A volunteer used my sketch to draw and cut out large hibiscus flowers and we put them up against the back wall.

On the left wall, we had the kitchen area edged in grass skirts, burlap netting, and lights. The sign was from VBC as well.

I worked on the entryway, cutting out waves from long rolls of butcher paper and pinning them to the wall. We had rather flimsy cardboard piers from VBC which we reused as well.

More grass skirts for the table and entryway!

The final touch was the annual balloon drop — except we used beach balls instead! (Sadly, the entire net came off the ceiling instead of opening up as it should have, so the effect was ruined.)

And another mishap was that the 2012 sign, made out of heavy cardboard, fell down and needed a bad duct-tape patch job.

One more mishap – although we tested all the Christmas lights in the morning when we were putting them up, by evening a whole strand had gone dark.

In another room, we set up a beach drink area with virgin margaritas and pina coladas, which were very popular!

Some of the leaders and volunteers came dressed for the theme, as well!

Activities that night included an outdoor fire pit for intimate hanging out (complete with s’mores components):

A velcro wall:

… and we spent the last several hours all together in the main room for the annual lip sync contest, a new “talentless contest,” and lots of games and prizes!

The main issue is referenced in this short SharePoint Forum post, SharePoint 2010 dialogs with rich-text controls don’t work in IE9. Basically, if you take out the meta tag that forces IE8 compatibility (<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8″ />) the dialog windows with rich-text controls stop working. You can’t edit the rich text fields, and you can’t “save” at all even if you don’t touch the rich text field. This obviously causes problems when you are trying to have an IE9-branded experience on pages such as calendars, tasks, etc. that use the rich text field editor.

I’m truly surprised that this hasn’t been fixed yet by the SharePoint team. If anyone has any ideas on how to circumvent this issue, I’d love to know it. (Besides the obvious and annoying answer of reverting all our pretty designs back to IE8, of course.)

Props to Heather Waterman for helping to pinpoint the issue.

This year I did 30 “My Day” drawings – sort of like tiny daily journals, in picture form, in my 3.5×4.5 Moleskine notebook. It’s fun for me to look over them and see the many milestones that have occurred – from the demolition starting on the outside of our house for our upcoming house addition, to Matthew being completely weaned, learning to push himself on the toy car, and starting to walk a lot. It’s also interesting to have proof of how poor my sleep quality is, thanks to children waking up at odd hours and my own messed-up biorhythms, and other work-at-home parents can relate with that tough balance between being productive and being there for your kids.

To my surprise, I didn’t hardly create any of the realistic pencil sketches that I’m most comfortable with, but I ended up doing a lot of sermon notes and writing/illustrating quotes that I wanted to ponder. Below are some of my favorite ones, but you can see the entire set on Flickr.

My one pencil sketch:

My one non-Moleskine drawing:

I had one recipe:

All of my Moleskine ink drawings were done freehand – no pencil sketching beforehand.

Some of the “My Day” drawings:

Example of sermon notes:

My favorite drawings from this year have been the quotes.

And, I had a few random comics and drawings here and there.

Finally, this is my favorite drawing from this month, and maybe one of my top favorite comics of all time that I’ve created.

Now that NaNoDrawMo is over, I can reclaim my early mornings and late nights of scribbling furiously in my Moleskine. Steve can heave a sigh of relief that I’m not asking him constantly “what time did we go to bed last night?” and “hm… what else did we do yesterday?” I didn’t feel like I was able to put quite as much effort this year into exploring different art forms, but I’m very happy with this body of work, as they all ended up fitting an overall theme of documenting my life and thoughts.

But more background first – at the SharePoint conference (2011), Heather became known as “SharePoint Conference Mom” because of her self-described mobile pharmacy. She had neosporin, band-aids, advil, tylenol, and much, much more, and took care of everyone around her.

These, of course, inspired some comics when I couldn’t sleep last night…

(see chicken codes)

(see bucket-related codes)

(see bedroom codes)

My friend Elise took it upon herself to redo the room, and she recruited volunteers to paint most of the walls a dark semigloss grey, with the front wall (slate blue in the photo on the left above) and the opposite wall with the main doors (bright yellow in the photo on the right, above) painted a bright semigloss blue. She asked me if I could paint a lighthouse silhouette that was the main graphic on the t-shirts and also add the youth group’s theme verse, “let your light shine before men, so that they may praise your Father in heaven.” Since I’m always a sucker for painting murals, I said yes.

Here’s how it looked after I chalked it out with yellow sidewalk chalk (the only thing I had on hand). Since I don’t have a 15-foot level (or any level), I used painter’s tape, two volunteers holding each end of the tape, and my eyeballs to get straight guidelines for the words (they stuck the tape on the wall, then I chalked a guideline). The lighthouse took a few attempts to get right – I had to keep climbing up and down the ladder to step back and look at it – first it was too narrow, then too wide. It took me about two hours to chalk the whole thing.

Elise gets credit for the paint choice – she picked out a flat black to go over the semigloss grey. She wasn’t exactly sure how it would turn out, so she told me to use my judgement as to whether to use the same paint for the words or to use something else. I decided to paint the lighthouse first and then decide. While I was doing this part, some smart-alecks made remarks about “oooh, painting black on black.”

To my surprise, with the glare from the overhead fluorescent lights shimmering off the semigloss paint, the flat black paint stood out very distinctly. (In the picture, the grey looks lighter than it does in person – it really looks almost black.) I decided to go ahead and do the words in black, too. I went with a kinda grungy slash woodcut sort of effect on the spur of the moment.

Here’s a closeup of the flat paint against the semigloss grey.

Here’s how it looked when I was done with the words.

I was happy with the way it turned out, but I was inspired to add some accents, using acrylic paint that I’d brought from home. I mixed cadmium yellow with a metallic gold paint and applied it to the candle flames on the “i’s.”

Then I washed off the chalk lines with a wet rag and called it a night! Total painting time was also about 2 hours, so this whole thing was a 4 hour project.

I’m very happy with how it turned out, and so was Elise and the rest of the youth group! The first Sunday that this was unveiled, everyone came in, gave a start when they saw the bright blue wall, then turned around and did another double take at the mural.

Here are some of our favorites:

Board books

• Any Sandra Boynton book – Moo, Baa, La La La, Pajama Time, Barnyard Dance, Perfect Piggies, etc.
• Any “Gossie and Friends” book by Olivier Dunried
• Any “Sing Along Stories” book by Mary Ann Hoberman (we have enjoyed Yankee Doodle, The Lady with the Alligator Purse, The Itsy Bitsy Spider)

Picture Books

Cock-a-Doodle Quack! Quack! by Ivor Baddiel and Sophie Jubb

Baby Rooster doesn’t know how to wake up the animals on the farm! He tries asking the other animals what they say, but finally the wise barn owl gives him a hint. I never got tired of reading this book, maybe because Baby Rooster is such a perky and tenacious little guy.

Darkness Slipped In by Ella Burfoot

I loved this book! The hardback version uses a shiny overlay gloss varnish on black ink to make the Darkness character subtly come off the page. In a nice little twist, Daisy is not at all afraid of the dark even though he comes up and tries to eat up all the light.

“I’m Not Cute!” by Jonathan Allen

We just recently discovered this book and Steven thinks it’s really “wunny” (funny). Baby Owl keeps getting hugs from other animals who say how cute he is, even though he really wants to be acknowledged as a huge, mean, stealthy hunting machine. Or does he?

(I am sure I will think of 5 other picture books that I love after posting this, so I reserve the right to add updates!)

My friend-coworker-boss Heather recently had close family member pass away. I drew a picture for her. I sketched it out in my Field Notes memo book, scanned it, then traced and colored it in Illustrator. Then I imported it into Photoshop to add the texture.