Two Weeks of Company

I can't believe it's been a month since I wrote anything. I took my grand-nephew, who just turned 14, to my sister's. She's his grandmother. Grandpa took Adam to his son's in SE Ohio. Dave has 72 acres on the Hocking River, with woods, hills, etc. They gave Adam an old riding mower to ride around the place and he had the best time. I let him take my digital SLR camera, a Canon Rebel XT, my binoculars and my spotting scope. He took some good pictures, watched deer with the scope and birds with the binoculars. Meanwhile, Kay and I went scrapbook shopping, went out to eat, and just had a relaxing time.

Things weren't so relaxing when I got home. I spent a whole week cleaning and trying to get ready for company. On Aug. 15, Kay and our friend, Becky, from Pennsylvania, arrived, with all their scrapbooking stuff. Becky's little car was packed so full that when you opened a door, stuff fell out! We went to the country concert at the Darke County Fair on Sunday night. Josh Gracin opened for Terri Clark. It was good, but pretty loud. We had seats on the track, which means we got rained on for the first half! It didn't rain too hard, though.

I entered three photos in the professional division of the fair and got a second and a third. I'll post those pictures. I was disappointed Adam didn't win anything, but he had some nice pictures.

On Monday, our other friend, Karen, came with her scrapbooking stuff. We spent Tuesday at the home of a high school friend, chatting on the deck, eating, sitting in the hot tub, eating, etc. Wednesday we went to Dayton and went scrapbook shopping, which was NOT good for my budget. They keep coming out with all this awesome new stuff we think we need to have!

My family room is big (it used to be a garage), so I could get four big tables in it, arranged in a square so we could work on our albums and see each other at the same time. We got a lot of great pages done, although I spent most of my time cooking and trying to organize my stuff. I moved it all into a room next to the family room, so it's taking awhile to get it all organized.

Karen went home Friday and Kay and Becky stayed till Monday. Oz and I were tired out! We're used to being here by ourselves.

Now it's back to work on ICL lessons and finishing the proposal for the book I hope to do on pioneer life. I want to send that in tomorrow.

I'm also participating in the Lieurance-King Summer Article Challenge, which is to write 30 articles for article directories by September 30. I'm a month late starting, but if I do one a day, I'll make it. I post them on ezinearticles.com and people can pick them up free to use on blogs or in newsletters, as long as they include the box with my information. I found out today that someone changed the title of my article, Simple Composition Tips to Improve Your Photography to Simple Composition Tips to Improve Your Nudes. She also substituted that word a couple of places in the body of the article. Now I'm trying to find out how to get her to take it down. I can't see any way of contacting her. I guess that's one of the hazards of posting to the Internet.