Tuesday Evening

Click to embiggen

In 1956 my grandparents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. The family had pictures taken and the photographer made the above picture of the family. My grandparents are on the trunk. The daughters (6 of them) are the branches. First my aunt Sis, then Fran, my mother (Ruth), my aunts Jean, Ellen (never married but a lot of fun) and Jo. Jo is the only one still alive and she is a treasure. She has a computer and has just started a Facebook page. I was invited to be her friend but since I deactivated my Facebook account I couldn't do it. The cousins were more like brothers and sisters than cousins. It was the finest family a person could have been a part of. My sister scanned this in and sent it to me and I wanted to share.

I have been exploring a couple of things on the computer. First I found out that if you go to the profile and click on Ames in my profile you will find a list of all the bloggers from Ames. There are 1000 of them and one of the first on the page was one of my former students. Rob Vidimos has been in Rome studying and he has blogged his experience. It is a great blog and if you are interested he has some great pictures of the eternal city and his trip there. (He also spent some time in London) The blog is called When In Rome.

I only scrolled through about 500 of them so there are more but it was fun to find Rob's blog. I also found out that if you click on the Top Des Moines Blogs on the top of the Live Feedjit and you can find another list of blogs from around here. I don't live in Des Moines but evidently my computer connection is hosted from there because I show up as Des Moines on Feedjit. One friend who also lives in Ames shows up as San Francisco where his computer is hosted. I like the Feedjit so I can see who has been reading my blog. It is fun to see old friends. Anyway I discovered a blogger in Des Moines who wrote a wonderful account of her neighbor coming to borrow a half a cup of flour. He gave her a couple of banana oatmeal cookies and I want the recipe. There are so many great writers out there. I have now subscribed to both of them.

Then my friend Bob - emailed me about another site called Alltop. It is an “online magazine rack” of popular topics. We update the stories every hour. You can find hundreds of websites and blogs linked from there. And of course I spend way too much time looking around the Internets. I book-marked that site. I still use Google search for everything. I look up phone numbers and directions to places I want to go. I really don't know what I did without it.

Hey - Thanks for stopping by, I appreciate each and every one of you. ARTYAL. Hugs, j