Look what Brown did for me! (see end of post)

Hello everyone!

I hope you all had a most wonderful and blessed holiday season! Our days were filled with good food, fun times with family, lots of presents (including a new camera for me), music, movies, and a little bit of relaxation. We were going pretty much non-stop, but we enjoyed every minute of it.

In the days leading up to Christmas, I made cupcakes for the entire kindergarten at DJ’s school, my sister and her fiancé came to visit and we made save-the-date cards for her wedding, the youth group decorated our Christmon tree and went caroling to some of our home bound parishioners, we visited Bristol Motor Speedway and experienced the Speedway in Lights (which includes one lap around the race track), we had the Christmas program during our Sunday morning worship followed by a birthday party for Jesus, and we went to Grove Park Inn in Asheville, NC to see the entries for the National Gingerbread Competition. Here are some highlights (click on the collage to view it larger—huge actually):

Well, I tried overnight to upload the video of the first part of the song that DJ & AJ's classes did in the Christmas program, which included DJ's solo and AJ's tempertantrum. Apparently it is too large. But he did a beautiful job, and those of you who I think might really want to see it, I'll try to email the video to you. But, after a little coaxing (and the fact that we skipped her verse and went on without her), AJ decided to sing her part.

On Christmas Eve morning Michael, the kids and I had “our Christmas,” and that evening we had a traditional Christmas Eve Candlelight service at the church. My new camera was delivered in the afternoon, and the pictures from church are currently stuck on the memory card. However, please take note of the beautiful clock on the left side in the center. That was made by a member of our church from some of the wood from one of the two trees that were cut down in our front yard.
The next morning, after returning some overdue movies (yes, on Christmas day!), we drove down to GA and spent time with my dad’s family and then went to Michael’s parent’s later that evening. Friday morning we got together at my mom’s house for brunch, and throughout the next week we got to see even more family and several long-time friends. We also got to eat at some restaurants that we can’t frequent in TN. All those pictures are also stuck on my memory card.

In unrelated news, it truly is my desire to get this back to your regularly scheduled blog soon. I’ve posted before about having computer issues and about the Picasa program, but I’ll give another overview including the latest info. Back in September we started noticing problems with our computer. Michael tried various things and finally decided that one of our hard drives was dying. Sometime in October the computer at his office crashed. He took part of our computer to the office to test something out, so our computer was in pieces and non-functional for about a week. In November we purchased a new computer, and after Michael got it all hooked up, we realized that the wired part of our wireless router was not functioning (the wireless part worked fine). After determining that it was not just the cord, Michael’s brother was gracious enough to ship a spare router to us in December. In the meantime I have been trying to get accustomed to the new computer (namely Vista) and become familiar with the Picasa program, which Michael has decided is THE way to download, store, view, etc. pictures. Yesterday, I finally got my files transferred to the hard drive on the new computer and began downloading pictures from both of my cameras, when Picasa crashed the computer, which of course decided it needed to install updates instead of rebooting. Fortunately, by this morning it seemed back to normal. On top of that, since we returned home from GA and I have been trying to use this computer and be dutiful in my email correspondence, my email account has become extremely temperamental and will send four consecutive emails and 30 minutes later refuse to send any for the next 12-hour period. So these are a few of my frustrations.

On a positive note, however, Stampin’ Up! has a new Idea Book & Catalog being unveiled to the public on Monday. I received my shipment of the Spring-Summer 2009 IB&C earlier this week!

Sweet wishes!