Thank you all for your warm welcome. I no longer feel so isolated and alone. My heart goes out to each of you. About me, I am a former retail store manager of 28 years. Back pain and hip problems no longer allow me to stay on my feet for any lenght of time. I am a scrapbooker, I love to cook and love spending time with my 5 year old nephew, who has remarkedly handled having an uncle with AD. Hes so very protective and gets so excited when my husband does speak or recognizes something he hasn't in a while. Hes so gracious about this. I am a kitty cat person, have a kitty named Beauti who came from a shelter and is an extremely well behaved cat. Most of my day is consumed with DH care and trying to keep him active. He just wants to sit and stare. This computer has become everything to me, library,mall, etc. as getting out with DH is difficult because he wants to go home with everyone else or gets paranoid in stores. There is not much help in this small town except for my family and I am 25 miles from a major area. So that is just a little about me .... its just doc appts and getting thru each day and the help I get from above. Thank you again.
MagnolaiRose, your 'day' sounds alot like some our ours as well. same ole stuff dayin dayout..I care for my AD husband in home 24/7 with a couple of days out for 4hrs/week. hes late stage 6 but still keeps me entertained and on my toes...:)divvi
What kind of scrapbooking do you do? I'm a digital scrapbooker and I'm currently working on a wedding album for my daughter's friend. I couldn't go to the wedding but having all the photos makes me feel like I was almost there. I'll be printing all of the layouts out in 8x8 so she will end up with a real physical album. I'm looking into ways to get the layouts online someplace where her friends can all see it too once she has it in her hands.
Starling, i got some photos like that from Photoworks.com from my sisters sons wedding album online to view. its great, you may look it over and see if it works for your scapbooks. just a thought. divvi
Starling, I am doing a heritage scrapbook at the moment on both sides of my family. Its done by hand and doing it with vintage themes of the time periods of the photos. Its almost looking like an old photo album with trims of what was popular at those times and I am printing out pages from rememberwhen about what was going on in the world, what songs were popular and what prices were at the time. My family is loving it.
Adding my welcome to the others. We live on a small farm 4 miles from our small town and about 35 miles from the shopping/medical area. Our neighbors are sprinkled out in distances of 1/4 miles etccc. This isn't all that bad considering that some of us have greater distances to travel to connect with the rest of the world.
Anyway, the scrapbooking sounds wonderful. I wish I had the tenacity to do something like that. I paint and taught art in the school here before becoming a counselor. When I retired I taught art classes after school for one year before husband had bypass surgery in 2004. I paint now but not as often as I THINK about painting.. Again, welcome.
magnoliarose, your heritage scrapbook sounds wonderful. I've done paper scrapping in the past so I know what a great look you can get. The problem with paper scrapping is that once you have given away the book, as I did with my first one, you no longer have it. With digital I just print out twice.
What I've never done before is a specific album for a specific occasion. So far 25 pages all in the same color scheme and style. There will be at least one more. I'm waiting on one more CD of photos from another person who had a camera there just in case there is something amazing available that the others didn't get. So a specific album is new and so is the whole idea of a square page. I normally scrap 8.5 x 11.
I usually scrap out of order. So every page, or small group of pages is different. I will do heritage one day and yesterday's photos from my 7 year old grandson's camera the next day.
And yes he has his own camera. He inherited my first digital camera and was extremely careful with it, but it was old and quirky so his mother bought him a very inexpensive Kodak digital that was brand new. He gets some really amazing photos. I'm going to be interested to see what he comes back with from his vacation with the other set of grandparents in Honduras.
I've tried scrapbooking--mostly vacations. I did a scrap/photo for each of my kids from the time they were born until they were 20ish. What a job that was. Nothing fancy but they really liked them.
I finished writing my own memoirs 3 years ago and distributed them at Christmas. I have just finished DH's memoirs. I'm editing now. Lots of photos and documents. I hope to have it ready to dist by Christmas. Both his and mine go from 'ancient' history until our wedding day.
My next project starting in January or February is making a DVD of 60 years of marriage. Honeymoon, first house, first baby, etc. etc. It will be about 90 minutes long with our grandson playing his saxaphone in the background. I'm writing the text and my very good friend who reads books for the blind, is going to read it. It's going to be a grand thing. I'm really anxious about starting it. Have nooooo idea how long it will take.
I don't have any particular talent--I just start something and it takes on a life of its own. Fun stuff.
My daughter did Memoir for my Mother who just passed away in May and it is so great. Everybody wants a copy. I have it on my computer and if they have e-mail can just mail it to them. At her funeral a daughter read exerpts from it as a eulogy and is was great. I have mine done, with space for editing and adding to it and also one for my husband. Just need to put the pictures in and have a daughter edit it for me.
If anyone reading about this doesn't have one done for themselves you should think about doing it for your children and grandchildren.