Taking a Breather

Frost
December 26, 2007

Our Christmas celebrations were wonderfully filled with family and lots of love. All the hustle and bustle paid off so we were able to avoid the last minute shopping thing. It was a lower keyed Christmas as far as gift giving with more gifts geared towards a need instead of a want. Just the way it should be. Grandbaby who is officially a year old kept us in stitches mimicking every move. Soon to be born grandbaby was anxious to get into the action so booted poor Mom several times and decided that high under the ribcage was a perfect place to be most of the time. We enjoyed a lot of good food as well. It was a most excellent Christmas!

The thing about the Christmas holiday season is it merges with the New Year's celebrations so for us there is usually something going on almost daily. We awoke on Boxing Day to a heavy fog that settled on the trees to form a nice layer of frost. It definitely was a photo opportunity! Now Boxing Day is apparently the day to shop but for us it is a "do nothing" day. That's kind of a misnomer but really it is a day we don't go anywhere unless absolutely necessary which it rarely is. We spend the day in pj's, check out our presents and welcome anyone who stops by. Meals consist of left overs so it is a pretty laid back day.

I was gifted with MacFamily Tree, a genealogy program for Mac so I played with it for awhile. My main genealogy program is Legacy but it is Windows based so I have to reboot in Windows. With MacFamily Tree I imported the gedcom then can use that to check the dates, names etc while doing online searches on Mac something I can't do with Legacy because the Windows partion isn't allowed online due to security concerns. MacFamily Tree has some very nice features. I was also gifted with a 500 GB external hard drive for the Mac. Two of my kids helped set it up and showed me how to use it. Trust me between genealogy, pictures, Photoshop and scrapbooking I'll be able to fill that drive in no time flat. My kids knowing this helped me do a bit of computer housekeeping.

I took a breather today. It has been so busy the past few months I haven't done near as much genealogy as I should be doing and I'm lagging in learning more about Photoshop. The snowglobe from my last post and the soon to be posted New Year's post are my own creations using Photoshop then ImageReady to turn into animations. I've come a long way from this time last year! I'm now using Photoshop for digital scrapbooking so this morning I took the time to work through another tutorial for a reflection technique. This afternoon I turned my attention to genealogy once again chipping away at the brick walls. I uncovered one key little bit of information that may end up being nothing but it might be just what I need to crack that one line. So I'm pretty excited. It's always about the hunt with genealogy. Uncovering that one little key is a feeling that can't be described!