NOTES FROM THE HOLLER

With all the devasting effects of the forces of nature that 2010 has brought to this ole world so far, I hope this post  finds you, my friends, safe, well and happy.  We are fine here in the holler.  Just like two ole bears, we have been hibernating waiting for the arrival of spring.  I feel it is just around the corner! I did finally manage to get all my Christmas decorations taken down and packed away, and have been doing the winter cleaning: of washing down walls, cleaning out closets, etc.  Mostly, we have been sleeping by day and watching Gunsmokes by night.  My hubby is an avid fan of the old televisions show Gunsmoke and he has over 300 episodes recorded on dvd.  By the time spring gets here, I dare say we will have watched them all as we are up to episode 191 now.  I swear my house was beginning to smell like the ole saloons and stables, hence, my house cleaning! This evening, I think we will venture out into the world and visit my bro...

My digital scrapbooking journey I spoke of in the previous post has begun!  I have hundreds of heritage pages I have created over the years but many of them are not "good enough" to include in my photo book so I began my journey by browsing through my hard drive.  My hubby gave me a huge new hard drive for Christmas so most of digi-collection was deleted as I did my pc clean-up. Yep!  Believe it or not, I sent many kits and elements to the trash as well as many of the old pages I had created over the years.  There are a few pages I created that I still dearly love so I plan on redoing them, or at least updating them.  Here is an example... The original layout and credits were posted in the Scrap Artist gallery in April of 2008. Click HERE if you would like to check it out. a portion of the Newspaper Article about my family reads: "The Kiper family was among the first pioneers of Grayson County. George Frederick Kiper, a Private in the Revolutionary ...

My biggest digital scrapbooking goal for 2010 is to create special books for my family about the origins of our family.  I want to include not only the facts such as names and birth dates but I want to include special family stories and memories as well.  My mother passed away with Alzheimer's in 2008 and one of the most significant memories I have of those last few weeks is hearing my baby brother say one time, "I did not know that about Mama."  At the time, she thought I was her sister and she was wanting me to take her "honky-tonkin".  This came as a surprise to him for he did not know that when Mama still lived at home, she and her sisters often went their Father to barn dances and such where they sang and square-danced while he played the fiddle with a band.  He had never been around the kitchen table at Grandma's when all the girls would have their "hen-parties" and speak about their memories of "yesterday'.  I was...and I remembered...

We are well on our way on our  journey into the new decade.  I can remember writing a paper when I was in high school (I graduated in 1974) about what I thought the future would be like, and now I am living in that future!  In a way, I was not far off in my predictions for I thought life would be pretty much the same.  I was not like some of my friends thinking we would be living like the Jetsons cartoon but when you really think about it, things are much different...Cell phones, personal computers, and electric cars are a few of the things I had not imagined back then.  I am not into many of the new  high-tech gizmos but I really can not imagine my life without my computer! I do remember predicting a WWIII for I just could not imagine a world living in peace.  Man, being what he is, I still do not ever see that happening but I do think that most leaders in todays world still have the dream of peace for their people, unfortunately, there are lea...