November 20, 2009: When I retired from editing Hang Gliding and Paragliding magazine two years ago, my big goals were to travel with George during the "off season," and to learn to use Photoshop and create scrapbooks of our adventures. This blog is mostly about the scrapbooking goal, and I have to say I'm really enjoying discovering Photoshop's many and varied applications to scrapping. Thank you, Linda Sattgast, for getting me started with Scrapper's Guide's kits and tutorials. I've always thought I haven't an artistic/creative bone in my body, but I'm great at copying, and for the most part I'm delighted with what I'm able to turn out.

The really fun thing about the "Mom" scrapbook is discovering all kinds of things about our family history. Neither Mom nor Dad was ever very vocal about their past – heck, with seven kids to raise, they probably didn't have either time or energy to be thinking much beyond the immediate, urgent family needs! Mom has a couple of photo albums, which up through Patty's babyhood are pretty much in chronological order. BUT for the most part none of the pages have anything more than a date and location, if even that. Makes it tough on the archivist! I've been having surprising success using Google to find information about, for instance, Dad's army years (actually found his name on a roster of fighter pilots who trained at Millville Air Base), or the hurricane damage that Mom and Dad recorded (photos were identified only as "Hurricane, September 1944"), or the "Jersey flood, 1945" (I had no idea Pompton Plains lay in the "most flood-prone river basin in the U.S." until improvements were made in the mid-1900s).

While she was visiting Mom in Florida recently, Ginny helped Mom "page through" the draft, online version of the family scrapbook. Mom's memory isn't very good these days, and she gets tired really easily, but Gin said she found the scrapbook really cool. Whew! Mom's always been a bit nervous about anyone handling her photos, so I was worried that she'd get riled up about my working with them. Maybe Mom just wanted to make sure the photos, and the history they capture, didn't get lost. I'm doing my best, Mom!

Today I scanned a bunch of photos from the early- to mid-'50s, the first batch from within my memory. It's pretty cool seeing our old house in Pompton Plains, the cabbage-rose wallpaper (I remember the ordeal of stripping that off, spraying it with vinegar and scraping, scraping, scraping...), the kitchen with its black linoleum floor and countertop, our old toys, Holy Spirit church and school, Grandma and Grandpa's flagpole.

Rob and Gin boxed up a bunch more photos and Fed-Ex'd them to me, should get here next week. I bet I'll have to go back and update some of the pages I've already created, and slide some new ones into the lineup. And Uncle Harry is coming for lunch tomorrow – he may be able to help me identify some of the people included in Mom's photos of her first years with Dad, before we kids started to come along.

What actually inspired me to add some words to this so far scrapbook-pages-only blog was a book I just finished reading (and laughing over, again and again): Julie & Julia by Julie Powell. Julie's personal-growth project was to cook her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, or MtAoFC, as Julie refers to her bible, in a year. Julie blogged her successes and challenges (in language much more emotionally charged than anything I'm capable of!), and it was a riveting, hilarious read. So, with the expectation that no one but siblings (and probably not all six of them) will ever read this, and the certainty that no one will get many laughs out of it, I'm carving into this blogstone the ups and downs of the family scrapbook project, and my challenges and inspirations as I delve into the depths of Photoshop's scrapbook potential.