Technology

A friend of mine from high school contacted me on Facebook this week. How cool is that? I hadn't heard from her in over 20 years, not that I'm that old or anything. Technology has definitely made a difference in keeping my family close. With people in 3 different time zones, some with small children, some with none, and all kinds of different jobs, email can reach people on their time. I write an email, send it and my parents and all my brothers and sisters can keep up with what's going on. I don't have to worry, 'Did I tell you this?' because everyone was told. For over 7 years, email has kept us connected. It was great 7 years ago when we were planning a surprise party for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. That was fun and so much easier with email.
Before email we tried to stay connected by sending an 'add-on' letter through the family. Person 1 wrote a page, put it in an envelope and sent it to Person 2, who added their own page and sent both on to Person 3, and so on. Eventually, Person 1 would received the envelope with all the letters from the family. Person 1 would then remove their original letter and add a new one. It actually made it through the rotation once or twice. This kind of slow information sharing is so foreign to the youth of today. Snail mail is rarely used. How sad. It just feels good to get personal mail. In fact, I'm making a small Halloween box for the Singer to send to her at college. You know someone really thought of you if they send you paper mail.

The Rays won last night! Sheilds did a great job. Although David Price in the last game of the playoffs was quite spectacular. 3 more wins and the Rays will be World Champions. To think it was LAST year that they had the worst record in the league. More than one person has commented that maybe dropping "Devil" from their name has helped. I love hearing the cowbells ring while watching the game on TV, but don't know if I could handle the din of noise in person.

The Imp is off to an overnight, straight from school, so I'll have time to sew today. Less than 2 months till Christmas and I've got lots of creating to do. Speaking of creating, I've had a blast scrapping the last few weeks. The all day crop on Saturday was simply wonderful. It was amazingly well-organized, tons of goodies and freebies, and I got much done. I've managed to get through the graduations from this past May and am now working on our trip to NYC. My goal is to to have Utah completed by Christmas. Crops are neat because you can see so many different types of scrapbooking. My purpose/goal of scrapping is to create an attractive display of our family's history. I write more than alot of people...I want to remember the event. I include non-perfect, out-of-focus pictures because I'm not making a contest-winning product, but one for my family. There are many new gadgets/accessories people are using in their books: brads, ribbons, 3-D stickers, etc. I think they take up too much room. And many designs show a single photo on a page with lots of other stuff. Not my style. I really like my books. You can definitely see a progression in my style from when I first started, but the last few books are pretty uniform. Everyone says the number of pictures taken sharply declines with an empty nest. I figure, I'll finally have time to catch up on my back-logged pictures.