I STAND CORRECTED

I am going to say that #5 was indeed taken at Don & Ann's house in town. I don't know why I thought it was out at the farm. Ellen confirmed it for us. Thanks Ellen and welcome to the 21st!

Jerry-Ellen-Sherry, if anyone out there has any old (or new) family pictures you think would be fun for people to see, please e-mail them to me and I will use them. I could even get to take part in guessing.

Bob was so shocked to see Ellen had been on my blog, he made the long trip upstairs to tell me. During a football game no less!

Picture #6. I think we all knew it was Shannon. If it was in Germany Kellie, she probably wasn't kicking any enemy butts. Don't think there have been any of those there since WW II. She did serve 2 yrs. there during her enlistment and just got back with Kevin after he finished serving his last tour before retiring.

To this day, I find it impossible to believe that some idiot in this world put an M-16 (or whatever it is) in my babies hands and let her keep it for 4 years. With bullets for God's sake! Real ones!

To make a long story short, I got a device for my computer that allows me to read and recover the pictures I have on over 300 floppy disks I had from my very first digital camera. I also got an external drive to store them on. The floppies are read, stored and soon to be burned to Cd's. On to my current, modern day picture Cd's. They are now all stored in my external drive also. When Colleen was home last, she thought it would be a good idea for me to pull out all our old family pictures-scan, burn and save them to my external drive. A few thousand pictures later and.........................

I said I wouldn't post until I was done with my project. I lied. (Inadvertently.) I came to a screeching halt. You might even say I suffered a major setback. About 400 pictures back, I started noticing white spots on the pictures I had scanned. I cleaned my computer screen and my glasses. They were still there. Then I noticed bits of dirt under the sealed scanner glass. Don't know how it got there, but Best Buy said to bring it in and they could do a general cleaning. When I got there, the guy took one look at it and gave me one of "those" looks. He told me that wasn't dirt under the glass. It was small pieces of plastic being ground off the gear as my scanner was dying an agonising death. Cost to fix it would be more than getting a new scanner. An hour later I was headed home with my new scanner. So cool! It even has wireless capabilities. That means we can print with it from any computer in the house and they don't have to be connected to it. The lady who sold it to me said it was very easy to install. All I had to do was take the disk that comes with it and go from computer to computer and install it.

Why I believed her, I will never understand. There is NOTHING simple about computers and installation to me. I had to know all about web keys and phrases I didn't even understand to install the darn thing. I called a computer tech and he wanted $75 to do it for me. I called best Buy and asked if I could just install it as a printer-scanner and skip the frills. They said sure. It was a nightmare and several phone calls to various hot lines before I got the %$&@ thing installed myself. No wire-less-no fax (which I never wanted in the first place-just plain old printer scanner. I still don't quite know what I did to make it work.

It seems like I have had pictures coming out of the woodwork. Everywhere I turned, I would find a few more. I also came across the box I have been putting obituaries, those little programs you get at funerals and a small number of wedding programs and articles about people Bob and I have known through years. I brought it up and we spent a morning reading and talking about them. Then I thought I would scan and save them. So much information. Birth dates, date of death-some even had write ups of their life stories. If there are any future genealogists in my family, it will give them some names and dates to start with. Now I wish I had been more diligent and kept more of them. So many didn't make it as far as the box. If anybody has any old ones, please e-mail me copies.

My post is almost finished and everything is in place to "finish" my project. The only thing I have to do first is delete the last 400 scans, get the pictures out again and redo them.

It may be a few days before I post again. In the meantime, here is #7.