Santa must be telling my husband nice things about me. I got a new toy for christmas! It’s a medium Wacom Bamboo Fun drawing tablet that I really, really, really, really want!

Actually, truth be told, with just 2 more days to go before Christmas, my darling husband was still telling me that he didn’t have a single gift for me yet. I know he wasn’t kidding. It slightly (take note, just slightly) piqued me since I bought him his gifts (take note of plural form of the noun, gift), like, two weeks ago.

What’s with men and shopping and gift-giving anyways????

So I did what any normal and good wife would do. I dragged DH to the nearest Best Buy and showed him what I want for Christmas. I held up the Wacom Bamboo and the Western Digital External Hard Disk in front of him and said, “Take your pick. I’d really like to see either one of them on Christmas eve when we open the gifts. Please.”

Ha. Ha. Ha.

In fairness to him, DH also gave me another gift that made my heart melt - a gold and diamond angel pendant on a necklace that he got from Zales. This one, I didn’t give him any hint about - he figured it out himself. So I guess, he’s not totally clueless about what makes a woman happy Thank you, my darling, wonderful, loving, sweet and thoughtful husband.

But the Bamboo tablet, I am sooooo enjoying! My sister has one and I wanted one for myself, too, since we’d be using it to create digital scrapbook kits. Speaking of digiscrapping, because of the holidays and getting all my websites started up again, I haven’t been giving our business that much attention. So hopefully come 2008, I’d be able to work on it more and help my sister manage our store more. The digital scrapbooking business is really a tough market and the only way to make sure that we would come up with original work is if we create our stuff ourselves.

Back to the tablet. I’m still re-educating my hand-eye coordination that when I draw on the tablet using the pen, I have to look at the screen instead of the tablet to see the results of my hand movements. It needs a little bit of getting used to, much like that first time you’ve ever used a mouse to navigate the cursor on your PC. But I’m getting there. A few more days of practice and I’d be getting rid of the mouse and just use the pen to navigate everything on my laptop. Coolness

Eversince I got it Christmas eve, I haven’t really sat down and tried to make something recognizable. I was just test driving if the pen wrote, if the mouse directed the cursor, if the little buttons on the tablet did what they were supposed to do. I also have a little problem with photoshop now because for some reason, the default brushes look like calligraphic strokes. And I’m still trying to find out how to get it back to the old circular strokes. But this afternoon, after cleaning up the office of the christmas clutter, I returned my laptop to my working desk (cause I’ve been using it in the bedroom) and placed my new toy in front of my keyboard. And I started to use the tablet more seriously this time.

So here’s my first official attempt on using my new toy. Don’t mind the jagged lines. I still have to get used to how hard or how light I should be holding the pen. But it isn’t that bad, is it?