ADSR 5 Inspires A Quickpage

Well ADSR 5 is down to the last week and it flew by this year. I just realized that we were only a week away from it being all over. Scrap Orchard was the host of challenge #10 and after completing it I realized that the layout would make a great freebie quickpage.

So after completing the original layout I decided to create a quickpage version to share with everyone. Many thanks go to Sweet Digi Scraps  for her wonderful Berry Ice Mini Kit which I used to create the quickpage.  If you like her stuff you can find more info about her on her blog: www.sweetdigiscraps.blogspot.com.

Download Link is HERE

Home Again

Well….I have been busy for the past two weeks getting ready for the family reunion in Lodi, CA which was held this past weekend. It was a blast and I was able to scan well over 200 photos plus items of my Great, Great Grandparents which were in a scrapbook brought by one of my cousins. I was able to complete 11 of 75 pages of the scrapbook I’ve been working on digitally. Now that everyone has seen what the pages will actually look like they are all excited about it. I went ahead and had it placed in the family reuion auction with the promise that the finished pages would be mailed to the buyer to be inserted into the book. My cousin Clara placed the winning bid which was $300!! I about fell over when it was announced.

Where has the time flown…..

I just realized that it’s been almost a month since I last blogged. My friend Kim has been making comments here and there about how she was looking for a message letting her know that I had blogged but I didn’t realize how long it’s actually been. Needless to say it’s been a whirlwind of a month and May just seemed to be a real short month. So I’ll give a quick recap of what’s happened around the Burress House this month.
I decided to do some followup emailing for my family reunion scrapbook project the first week of the month. I had sent out a second batch of group sheets for family members to correct/update so their scrapbook page could be as current as possible. Some photos started coming back in and I’ve noticed that either I get no answer at all or a quick answer, photos and updated info.
Then my mom, brother, sister and niece made a quick trip down to Banks, Oregon to visit my aunt who had been diagnosed with Tissue Cancer. She had been experiencing flu-like symptoms for several months and having an extremely hard time just moving around. Six weeks ago she found out it was cancer, had three to six months to live at the most and treatment might give her a month or so more but no guarantee of it and she would probably be sicker as a result.
So we spent a day with her and I was lucky enough to see two cousins that I had not seen in over 15 years. We stopped at the Factory Outlet Stores in Centralia on our way down and did about an hours worth of power shopping at Bath & Body Works, Nike Clearance Store and the Vanity Fair/Lee Outlet. I bought work pants for Mike, my sister bought tennis shoes for friends down in CA, Rachael and Michael bought some aromatherapy “Pillow Spray” that smelt like lavender that’s supposed to help you relax and go to sleep.
Then we spent a day getting Christina’s graduation annuncements done. (I still have 50 left to make tonight). We have decided to have a party/open house/luau on the Friday after graduation. The dollar store proved to be a treasure trove of luau decorations and even had “Graduation Party” stuff with a Hawaiian theme. Christina’s Cap & Gown arrived mid-month so it’s becoming “real” to us that she is almost a “full fledged adult” and could actually get married/move out if she was so inclined….but I doubt that will happen because she recently informed me that she plans on living at home until she is 41…..I think NOT!!!! Now we have begun “Graduation Gift” negotiations.
I think part of the reason that the month has “flown by” is because Memorial Day weekend was earlier than normal. We went to Millersylvania for three days of camping with the Kelly’s. Sam and I took the kids geocaching. Turns out the boys had dabbled in Geocaching while at Camp Goodtimes. We set out to find two caches (one of which was a two parter) found the first half of one then found out from some fellow geocachers we ran into on the trail that the second half was missing. Found “The Big Tree” cache, dropped off a Travel Bug at “It’s Miller Time” and we planted a new cache. I still need to go upload the coordinates for the “KB Toy Box” at www.geocaching.com and update my log book to reflect dropping off the Travel Bug.
Last week I got news that my Aunt’s cancer was more involved than originally diagnosed and that three months was on the “extremely optimistic side”. While camping over Memorial Day weekend my mom had to call me and let me know that my Aunt passed away.
So this week turned into another busy week. I went back to work on Tuesday then left for Oregon with my niece and son on Tuesday night. Attended her memorial service on Wednesday then took an extra day to visit with cousins and my uncle who had flown in from Utah. It was a nice visit and all agreed that we needed to make an effort to get together and reconnect more often under happier circumstances. I took the opportunity to update everyone’s family info in my genealogy program and was even able to have some family members identified in old family photos.

Joy’s Family Page

I completed the first page of my Smith Family Scrapbook project. This is the first “album” I will have completed that has a recurring theme. I have done pages here and there for my family but never have I tackled a project of this magnitude. I am going to be creating one page for each family that covers five to six generations of our family. This is giving me an opportunity to update our family history and share it with the entire family. Lucky for me our family has consistently held family reunions bi-annually for the past 26 years so we have a contact list that is pretty extensive and current. The finished book will be auctioned off during our family reunion this summer. Every year there is one “Big Item” and this will be that item this year. Money from our auction gives the reunion committee for the next reunion some seed money to make deposits for venues and other administrative costs like printing and stamps. Each family will get a copy of their page before the reunion.

Page Credits: Quickpage from Naturally Expressive by Cheryl
http://cyfisher.blogspot.com
Small Red Frame
Creekside Cottage Designs Freebie from the Holly Jolly Blog Train
http://creeksidecottagedesigns.blogspot.com

Only three weeks left of hockey for us!!

Actually we have four practices and two tournaments left before we leave the regular season behind. This weekend we are “off” then we travel 45 miles to Bremerton for a tournament. The first weekend of April is our “Daffodil Tournament” which we host and for the first time in years it’s the same weekend as the Daffodil Grand Floral Parade and the Spring Fair out at the fairgrounds.
I haven’t mentioned to our kids that they may miss riding the tow truck in the parade this year. Our best friend (our kids “uncle”) has worked for a local towing company for over 30 years. The company enters one of their trucks in the parade every year. Occasionally he drives the combination tow truck/bus Incident Response Vehicle in the parade and we have ridden along with them tossing daffodils out to kids along the parade route. During years that we are watching from the sidelines he pretends to “run us down” where we are sitting. His family is with him in the truck and we all think it’s funny because who ever happens to be sitting next to us (we pick a certain spot to watch the parade from) thinks the truck is outta control and runs from it while we sit there and enjoy the “show”. Their kids all love waving at their Aunt Laura and Uncle Mike and hollering at us from the truck.
Well..it’s another genealogy weekend for me. I’m still taking advantage of my free month long membership at ancestry.com and downloading images left and right. I found the passport application collection the other night and some of the applications actually have photos attached to them. As a result I have a good photo of a couple relatives that I didnt’ have before. Today I’m attacking the Canadian/US Border Crossing records. There is a huge chunk of Garbett’s and Garbutt’s that lived in Michigan that went back and forth between the two countries. I gather information on all of the Garbett’s and Garbutt’s that I come across because there arent’ alot of us but somewhere along the line we are all tied together.

A busy weekend with a Sunday morning suprise!

Well I have been camped out on the laptop all weekend taking advantage of my free 30 day Ancestry.com membership. I had to upgrade my FamilyTreeMaker (FTM) program last week when I found out that FTM Version 10 wasn’t Vista compatible. Hmm…go figure a program that is almost 10 years old not being compatible. Soooo…off to amazon.com I went and in the end I decided that the $39 it cost me to get the latest version (basic one) was a small price to pay considering I’ve only spent a total of $15 when I first bought the program almost 10 years ago and the very first FTM program I had was one that my dad bought 15 years ago but never used. The upside of the $39 is the 30 days I have to download as much census information I can. I have made good use of it and got my money’s worth out of it.
In years past ancestry.com has offered free memberships for 2 weeks and I’ve taken the opportunity and at one point I even had a paid membership for about 6 months. So I’m familiar with what they offer. This time around I’ve focused on getting every bit of US Census Data I can on the Garbett’s (any Garbett whether they are related to me or not) to augment the data I already have. I’m also going to go start downloading info on my Renfrow and McDaniel’s this next week and hopefully be able to start working on tearing down a couple of roadblocks I’ve had for years.
I’ve been able to download census images and ships passenger lists. I am excited about incorporating a couple of them into scrapbook pages. I have an idea that I’m going to play around with where I “magnify” the actual family names on the image as part of the layout itself. I may have come across the work of a fellow researcher whom if I can get the “tie-in” to my tree established to theirs has some wonderful photos. Not that I don’t have alot of photos already nor access to them …. I suppose when you are a scrapbooker you could never have enough photos!!!
Oh and on to the suprise!! We woke up this morning to a couple inches of snow…I know for most people this isn’t suprising but for Western Washington in March it is suprising. Here is a photo of my backyard (yes it’s a little neglected at the moment) looking out of my kitchen sink window.
So I decided that I’d better turn on the tv to see the weather forecast and I’m glad I did because apparently it’s supposed to get pretty windy this afternoon. Although I’m glad we don’t live near the Hood Canal (not that I wouldn’t love living there) because they are supposed to get about 5 inches of it this afternoon. There is a chance of lowland snow tonight again which really shouldn’t affect work tomorrow morning since we don’t have patients all week-the boss is in Florida. No hockey practice until Tuesday night so that won’t be affected at all either-not that it ever does because hockey doesnt’ stop for snow in this neck of the woods or any neck now that I think about it.

I visited a real cool blog this morning it was very refreshing because the blog owner is documenting her journey to get a grip on her family’s debt. She has decided to blog about it (Life in the Debt Lane) and I love her style, her candor and why she is doing it. This past month I started talking to my DH about the very same thing and how we need to create a plan to eliminate it. We don’t have a problem with how much we have to pay and we are both lucky in the sense that our jobs are pretty safe from the recession. But I’m just tired of not having a savings or emergency fund. I have a 401k and I freely admit that the only reason it gets contributed to regularly is because it comes out of my check before I even get it. Twice in our life we have paid it all off and closed accounts but three years later I find we have went right back to our old habits. We will charge this or that not really realizing that we are paying out the nose for it in the end. Two weeks ago I took the first step of pulling my credit cards out of their spots in my wallet so that they weren’t easily accessible. I haven’t used them since even though they technically are still in my purse (seperate section). I am now going to take the next step and go stash then in our safe so that all temptation is removed. I went and removed them from my paypal account so I can’t “cheat” that way and since the only card number I have memorized is my debit card it means that I’ll be taking right from the checking account if I use it. Although I don’t know if I’m ready for going “cash” only for all my purchases. I am determined for us to not “charge” any bit of our summer garage roofing project. Of course it means that we will do less camping this summer but that is okay because we have our whole life to enjoy camping.