Thankful Me

Photo: A red heart hangs from a wire. "Ten Things of Thankful" is written to the left of the heart I'm tired today. I'm excited for this upcoming week, because I will spend it with my mom at RootsTech , a large genealogy conference, but right now I'm just tired.  I don't write well when I'm tired, but I don't want to miss participating in the Ten Things of Thankful blog hop.  So, here's a perfunctory list of things I am thankful for: a new, working thermostat the pile of yard waste is decreasing, and the pile of mulch is increasing spending an evening with my youngest daughter book club visiting with several friends at various times throughout the week recognizing and acting on promptings figuring out how to scan photos as TIFF files finding a fire pit for our fire pit area getting taxes done as always, John Ta-da! I did it!  Won't you join the Ten Things of Thankful community?  Joining me this week: The Prolific P

Photo: Two photos of families standing in front of covered wagons. The photo on the left is in black and white; the one on the right have been colorized.  I learned recently that MyHeritage.com  can colorize photos for free, and I have been having fun uploading old black-and-white photos of ancestors and seeing how a little bit of color makes them seem more real. (Thankful #1) RootsTech is coming up at the end of this month (Thankful #2) , so my mind has been on family history work. This past week, I helped my in-laws get their StoryWorth books ready to publish. I highly recommend StoryWorth as a tool to help get family stories written down and preserved for posterity! I've learned a lot by reading the stories that my parents and in-laws have written. (Thankful #3) Saturday morning, John and I spent time doing outside tackling some projects. When the fence was put in, some plants needed to come out. John worked on minimizing that pile of plant waste by putting it through

Photo: The view from my front porch. Snow covers the street and yard. The groundhog predicted an early spring; Mother Nature proved she doesn't take orders from a rodent. Snow fell and fell and fell, and it felt more like Christmas than February (thankful #1--the snow was beautiful, I didn't have to go anywhere, and I just enjoyed the quiet day). It also felt like Christmas because some of my children came (thankful #2), and we finally exchanged presents with youngest son and his girlfriend, who couldn't come in December (thankful #3--no more wrapped presents taking up space in my bedroom!)  Photo: A photo of some of my family (including Drexel) We laughed a lot and played games (thankful #4). Our house was filled with friends of the kids, and thus even more laughter and games (thankful #5). Drexel (thankful #6) mysteriously managed to add a blue streak in his fur. Photo: Drexel, normally just a typical yellow lab, shows off his blue streak on his rig

Photo: A yellow pedestrian crosswalk sign. Pictured on the sign is the typical figure of a person, as well as a figure of a chicken. I love this sign, because there are multiple ways to interpret it. Perhaps the boy is taking his pet chicken for a walk. Perhaps he is being chased by an angry bird. In any case, he has a designated crosswalk and a nice new sign, to alert drivers to be on the look out for all sorts of two-legged pedestrians.  Whether you are strolling along with a beloved animal companion or running for your life, there are things to be thankful for. I hope you look for and find them. Here's what I've noticed this week: 1. I'm thankful for that chicken crossing sign. It made me smile. Then I learned that it went up as an Eagle Scout project, and I was even more impressed with the initiative that scout had. 2. I'm thankful that, after all of these years of blogging, I figured out a work-around for those times that I have difficulty transferrin