catching up with pages

I fell by the wayside pretty quickly with Shimelle's class. Things seemed to suddenly get pretty lively around here what with granddaughter's moving in and DS2 moving house.

I have promised myself that I will complete Journal your Christmas this year and already have my covers made and the basic pages done. I have chosen to do it 6x6 this year because I managed to do LSNED because it was 6x6 and I had all the elements ready to go.

I have manged to do several pages for several albums in the past week or two. A couple of family tree pages where I am using old photographs and also a couple of more up to date ones to add to the 2010 album. I opened the box that belonged to my grandmother. The one she kept all the family pictures in and there are hundreds of them. The good thing is that way back in the 1980s I sat down with my mother one weekend and went through the box with her and she put names to all the faces and - this is the best bit - I wrote the names on the back of the photographs with a pencil!

Ten years later Mum had her stroke and lost her sight. I am not sure why we chose that weekend or why we stuck at it even though it was getting a bit boring towards the end of the second day - we had to do the ordianry stuff as well, like cooking dinners and answering the phone because the men were doing important stuff in the shed.

I am so glad we did do it because now both Mum and Dad are gone so I have no one to answer my questions. Having looked through the box again I am even more glad as I now remember that all my grandmother's brothers looked alike when they were young so Mum had to look at each picture and remember what she had been told by her mum "That's Jack, oh that's Arthur, That's Claude, he had a glass eye, That's Bill, that's Harry, he died in the great war"

I have a separate album for each branch of the family, I have no idea how these albums will be divided up after I am gone. Perhaps I should give them to a record office or something so that they stay together. Perhaps I will have to leave them to just one of my children - perhaps I'll think about it another day.

Scrap Rat stamps

Ooh, just seen the giveaway on scrap rats blog
http://scrapratblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/are-you-ready-to-win.html?spref=fb

I think they look fabulous so I am off to see if I have enough money to spend in their shop

ETA I have had a look and they have marvellous stuff! vintage book pages, fantastic stamps, lots of interesting stuff. They had several things I desperately needed so I spent some money - and they have a free to UK mainland postage so that's even better!

http://www.scraprat.co.uk/shop/

lovely place

Out for the count

I was woken at 3am on Saturday by a really raw sore throat. So raw and painful it gave me a headache!

I had two paracetamol in the draw of the bedside table so I took those with the last of my water and hoped for sleep. I must have slept a while and then woke again with an even worse throat so I staggered down stairs for more water and ibuprofen. no strength to climb the stairs so I curled up in my chair with the bettermaker blanket. Mr M was so good. The first thing he did when he got up was make me a drink and bring me more painkillers. He did that for two days! as the sore throat faded and the runny nose and sneezing took over. After that had held the stage for 24 hours the coughing really began.

All this conspired to make me totally forget about True Stories. I haven't read a prompt yet, but I will. I feel a lot better as long as I don't actually do anything. I had to see to my girls today, Mr M will feed and water and check the nest boxes. He will even put more shredded paper in if it looks a bit dirty or thin but he just cannot do the cleaning out bit. I had to get in there and give it what my granny called a good bottoming. Now the girls have clean bedding in the nest boxes and clean paper under the perches. As it is quite cold at night now I will be putting some straw in around the nest boxes because they both seem to prefer to sleep in the nests rather than to perch - probably because they are ex-battery hens.

Anyway, the reason I haven't done any True Stories yet is because I have been attacked by a virus but now I am getting better.

Watch this space

The demo was fine, the car park was hard

The demo was good. Even if I do say so myself. There were 30 people there and only two had seen me talk about scrapbooking before. They knew what I would be doing so they sat at the back.

Several others had that go-on-entertain-me expression on their faces. Well, you would wouldn't you if you have gone to the AGM of the family history society you expect a speaker who talks about parish registers or census indexes or stuff like that. You don't expect the person who you have just re-elected to the chairman's job to spread out a pile of paper and card and strange looking gadgets and start talking about your precious old photographs of your ancestors.

It took me two minutes (I kept one eye on the clock) and I had the first genuine laugh. After that they were leaning forward to see more clearly what I was doing. I had prepared two pages, one with two pictures of my Dad for the album I am making about him and a more modern one of me with some special friends.

I did the page for Dad first, I explained the reason I was doing the album and why it is still incomplete even though Dad died in 2003. Then I showed them the pictures and explained my reason for choosing them. I talked about storage of old photographs and gave them a few things to think about regarding old photographs. I hope I also gave them the tools to take ownership of their photographs.

I told them what I was going to do, then told them what I was doing, and then held up the result and showed them what I had done - that's teaching that is.

I then suggested that they might have questions and the first one was "can you do another page?" so I brought out the bag with the other page saying, "here's one I prepared earlier" and did the other one. Then we had to stop because the time was running out and we had to be out of the hall. I think that I might be asked to speak at some of the society branches - so I am really pleased that it went well.

This kind of gives me confidence to organise a crop in the hall across the road. I wouldn't want to "teach" but I know I can stand up in front of a room of people and demonstrate how to achieve a simple page. I am sure that once the first crop has happened we would be able to organise more.

The reason I say in the title that the car park was hard is because as we were leaving the hall I caught my shoe on a tiny kerb around a little fowler bed and spread my not inconsiderable bulk across the tarmac. I was carrying a plastic box with all my alphas in separate containers under my arm, quite a large box. and that hit the ground first forcing my arm and shoulder to go into shapes they were never designed to attain. The result was pain. head-swimming, eyeball twisting gutwrenching pain. It didn't last long and there was no serious damage to my physical health. My ego however took a terrible beating. Can you imagine the embarrasment of falling over in front of so many people?

I'm just glad the camera was in the other box and Mr M didn't think to get it out and use it.

True Stories

I resisted for ....ooh at least 24 hours, and then I just could not think of any real reason why I wouldn't desperately want to be a part of the new class "True Stories" over at Shimelle.com

http://www.shimelle.com/

I love to write and I love to see how other people set about writing so I am bound to learn something.
Today I am chairing the AGM of Gwent Family History Society. It looks as though I will be elected to serve for a third year, and I have to say that I really quite like it. The other thing I am doing today is talking and demonstrating "Heritage Scrapbooking".
I dislike this use of the word heritage but understand that the English language is always changing because it is a living language and all that guff. I don't have to like it though, do I?
I thought the purpose of language was that words had meanings so that when they were spoken other people could understand what you were saying because of the words you use. So why have we suddenly started to use a word that means one thing in a place where the exact opposite meaning is intended. The simplest example is using the word 'bad' to mean 'good'.
This is when I know I am getting old... ~sigh~
Anyway, I am demonstrating how to make a scrapbook page using photgraphs of ancestors. I will be putting forth my thoughts about copying old photographs, conserving old photographs and using the original photographs in scrap albums about family history. Stressing all the time that these are personal views to be listened to, thought about and ignored if they so choose.
I will photograph the pages and perhaps get Mr M to take pictures of me doing the demo and try and get the pics on here as soon as I can.
Perhaps this will encourage me to organise a crop in the hall across the road - I have been thinking about it for a while now.

Last Day of LSNED

Today is my daughter's birthday. My first-born. I woke up this morning remembering what that day was like so many years ago. I remember being terrified. Looking back I can see that I was just so young, too young really but I had no choice at that time.

Lots of conflicting emotions now though, and then I had one of those thoughts. You know the ones. They pop into your head and you try hard not to think them because they are going to change the way you think forever more.

So there I was, hopping on one foot while I got dressed and suddenly thinking "Really Profound Thoughts". This is how it went

If I could go back in my life and know what I know now, would I change anything?

Well, would I change anything? NO.

My reason is simple. If I change one tiny weeny little thing in my early life it would mean that I would be different, my life would take a different course and I wouldn't be where I am right now. I like where I am right now. I adore my husband, I love my children to bits, I think my grandchildren are the best things that ever came into this world and my darling great granddaughter is just the sweetest little girl ever to be seen. Would I be prepared to lose any or all of this just to get rid of one of the heartaches I had when I was young? no, and no and no, never!

That would be the same as asking a mother to choose which of her children to cast out of the plane to stop it crashing. I would have to jump out to save my children because I cannot choose between them.

So my lesson for today is that I am truly blessed and absolutely content with my lot in life. Aren't I just the luckiest person? I think so

Today I Learnt.....

That shouting and swearing at the printer will not make it use the yellow ink cartridge you have just replaced if it doesn't want to. I also learnt that it doesn't make me feel any better if I do shout and swear so I shan't waste the energy with that again.

I seem to have found some extra energy from somewhere because this morning I have cleaned out the chicken house and given them nice new shredded paper in their nest boxes (not that they are laying at the moment) I have put a load of towels in the washing machine, ironed Mr M's shirts for work next week, ironed a pile of T-shirts for me, peeled and diced the vegetables for lunch (Mr M is off work because we planned to go away) made the tuna and yogurt topping for the baked spuds, put the diced veg in the actifry to roast, sorted the pictures I want to scrap for my birthday weekend and sent the order to snapfish.com, made a cuppa, answered the phone several times and then ate lunch. Now I am waiting to go and collect Miss E from school and then I can sleaze in front of the TV for a brief while until it is time to go to Guides with my daughter and show a group of 12-14 year olds how to make a bag from a pair of old jeans.