The week that was

After a huge week, here we are on Sunday night again and thinking towards yet another huge one coming up.

As for Valentine's Day, we ended up at one of our favourite pub restaurants in the next town for dinner.  Never one to disappoint, unfortunately this visit was fraught with such slow service.  The meal once we got it was absolutely over the top delicious, and I guess the fact we were using a gift voucher that someone had given us late last year was an added bonus.  But the kicker half way into the meal they put on some music throughout the restaurant.   I said to Mike that I swore I heard "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" and a bit later he could hear "Joy to the World".  A bit later "Jingle Bell Rock" came on and everyone was just giggling.  A day of romance and we were listening to Christmas Carols ... in February!

So when we went up to settle the bill I asked what the deal was with the Christmas Carols.  She told us that the Manager turned the CD player on (which obviously had not been used since Christmas) and then left and no one there knew how to change the CD.   Errr .... perhaps turn the volume down or kick the plug out of the wall people.   Still, it did make us laugh.

Last night we unexpectedly got invited to our neighbour's BBQ for dinner which was a lovely treat.  They've only just arrived and now are leaving to move up north, so it was a kind of hello/goodbye meal.  A shame, as they are a lovely young couple.

Yesterday I bought ACDSee, an organizing program for my computer.  I have resisted for so long out of laziness.  I have heard people talking about it, and tagging their digi scrapping supplies and how easy it is to find things.  It just didn't compute in my head.  But then I realised yesterday it was half price so I bit the bullet and I have spent all my spare time this weekend tagging away.  So cool.   For the uninitiated I can just type in "pink paper" and all my pink papers come up, no matter where they are saved on my computer and I just select which one and wham, it opens up in photoshop.  Why oh why have I not taken the plunge before.  No more looking for ages trying to find exactly what I want to use.   It's going to take a while to tag everything, but once I'm there, there'll be no looking back.  Plus I'm discovering things I have purchased years ago and completely forgotten I had.

I finished a page up yesterday that I had started some time ago and never quite got the journalling how I wanted it, then I came back to it with a vengeance today.   A lot of people may say I'm obsessive about scrapbooking.  Perhaps I am.  I never paper scrapped, but just love this use of technology with digital scrapbooking.  I love to tell our stories.  I love to preserve these memories so I can look back at these times and remember.  I love to see how much we've grown as a married couple, as people.  And I wanted to put all these reasons and more down onto this page.  So this is how it turned out ...

Credits Designer Digitals.

As it happens I do know who this woman is, it's my grandma.   But just because I knew who it was, no one else picking up the random photo in the bottom of the shoebox would have known.

And in case you can't read the journalling there, this is how it goes:

I don’t want to end up in the bottom of a shoe box with a whole stack of other photos in 50 or 100 years time with Mike’s children, or their children, or even their children saying “hmmm is this great great grandma Carol, or is it the lady who lived next door to them?” Or perhaps when working out the time lines our descendants might ask “I wonder if this is great great grandpa Mick or could it be great grandpa Wes, they look so similar?”

I want the people who come after us to know us, know how we lived, know who we were, know what we loved, know what was important to us, know how we felt, know our world, know what made us tick. This is why I scrapbook.

I do it so they will know.

Righto, a little bit more tagging then off to bed I go.  Another hot one, so it's the fan for me tonight.