Twelve Thirty One Two Thousand Six

The Family Get-Together was a success! The pool was a big hit with the kids. Jake (the Mineral King) supervised (seen above with his daughter). We had a total of 44 show up! We had lots of food, fun and laughter!

I spent hours and hours each day (for over 2 weeks) scanning, editing and adding photos to my computer (over 1200). Some of the photos dated back to the 1920's and 1930's. Some were in good shape and some were in sad shape. A lot of the photos were in black and white, some were in color but had a gawd awful yellow hue to them. The majority of them had thumbprints on them that showed only after scanning. Waaay back when, the person taking the picture must have thought they had to stand back about 50 feet from their subject, so I enlarged the photo to bring the subject up close and personal and then cropped it to get the excess background out of the photos. I removed unwanted items from the photos. One photo of my brother and his wife... they were standing near a canyon in Colorado with a gorgeous backdrop of a snow-capped mountain but there was a man standing behind my brother's elbow so... I took him out of the picture! I was able to make a CD for each family member to take home. I attempted (and failed) to make a DVD slideshow with accompanying music. I worked on it for over 15 hours but the program I had wasn't the one I used before and it wouldn't work. I was so disappointed! I had one section of just baby pictures... about 20 of them... and the Bobby Darin hit, "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby" to accompany it. So instead, I set it up on my laptop to run a slideshow through the screen saver. It was on top of my stereo in the corner of the living room. People wandered over and watched it and tried to guess who was who. Even though I had organized all the photos by family and dates, I set it to random shuffle. At one point, there must of been 20 people standing there trying to guess who was on the screen and what year it was taken. I still plan on making the DVD slideshow... found the program I like (Only Daughter had it and brought it to me)...but not until next year {ha ha}.

I am so glad I followed my heart and had the family here. The loved ones who have gone on before us were smiling down with happiness to see us all together.

One final note on this last day of 2006... Only Daughter is ENGAGED!! Her finace (I can finally call him that!) surpised her with a trip to California and proposed to her while they were in San Francisco. He is a wonderful guy but most important... he loves my daughter and treats her like a princess! Congrats to the happy couple!!!!! Looks like a fall wedding!

Happy New Year to one and all!