Happy New Year!

 Wow! That was a long break from the blog!

Life got busy there for a while. Hopefully it will slow down a bit. We've had some challenges with Micah's van breaking down in Fargo (90 miles away) when she and a friend were shopping.  They rented a car to get back home. (Micah's sister, Missy, who lives in Fargo helped them out, thank goodness!) But then Adam and Micah had to take two vehicles and a trailer back to Fargo the next day to return the rental car and trailer the van back to our neck of the woods. They got snowed in in Fargo for a night due to an ice storm, but finally made it back. The van was quickly repaired by an acquaintance who is a mechanic. Thank you, Lord! 

After this was taken care of Audrey had an issue with a growth on the roof of her mouth. It was scary to look at and kept bleeding. Many phone calls and doctor visits later she and Adam drove down to St. Paul (4 hours away) to an oral surgeon to have it removed. They don't seem to think it's anything serious, but it's been sent in for analysis. They spent the night in St. Paul last night because it was snowing pretty hard. They are on the way home this morning. Glad they took Adam's 4WD pickup! 

We had quite a bit of snow here, too, last night. Micah kept the woodstove going yesterday, and Adam's dad came this morning to stoke it on his way to work. We're so thankful for family! His dad's electricity went off last night. We're only a mile down the road, and were thankful it didn't effect us, but I think it must be back on by now.

We had a great Christmas. Lots of excited kids and way too many presents! :) I had breakfast with the family next door and watched everyone open gifts. It was a fun day!

I found some "senior easy-on-the-knees" ballet exercise videos on a YouTube channel called jessicasmithtv. A change of pace from walking videos, though she has some of those as well. I hope to use a variety of videos to keep things interesting.

I've cleared the art supplies off of the dining room table and have begun putting a puzzle together. I haven't done a puzzle in decades! This one is from a thrift store, so I'm hoping the pieces are all there. It's a painting of some folks acting out Romeo and Juliet on a stage. It looks like a pretty old puzzle. 

 

I just started reading The God Who Is There by Francis Schaeffer. My mom was a Francis Schaeffer fan and I like him, too. I read L'Abri, which was written by Edith Schaeffer, many years ago and I used a video series called How Should We Then Live? with my kids when we were home schooling many years ago. I'm still in the introduction and I'm hoping it won't be too difficult to follow. :)

I'm going to try some bread baking. Haven't done that in years! I found a really simple crusty white bread recipe made using a Dutch oven, which I don't have. But creativity is encouraged and I think I can make do with two cast iron pans. I'll try to take photos if I do it and we'll see what results!

And here are a few of the cards I've made lately. Probably forgetting some of them. Oh well. 

A Trash to Treasure swap. The host sent us some paper scraps and we had to create some ATCoins.

These were from a swap entitled "Let It Snow". Did you already guess that? :)

And with that I will sign off for now. It's amazing how much mental effort goes into a brief post like this. I'm tired! Ha ha. 

Wishing and praying for a happy new year for everyone! May God bless and lead you all through whatever the new year holds.

Shalom family and friends! 

The stork delivers again!

 I'm a little late announcing that on November 23 grandchild #18, Colton Scott, joined us, weighing in at 7 lb. 1 oz.!  His parents tell us he's a keeper and everyone is doing fine. :) He lives with his parents in Longmont, Colorado. 

I hope you've all had a great holiday season so far. I'll have to catch up on blogs after I post this. I think I'm spending too much time on YouTube! I've been watching a lot of episodes of Sherlock Holmes lately. This is an old television series starring Ronald Howard that I'd never seen before. I like that they're only 30 minutes long. The Basil Rathbone version is usually an hour or so long and is more like a movie. I like both!

Our church usually has a Widows Luncheon at Christmas time, but wasn't able to have it this year. So, instead, they gave us each a nice gift box. 

And here's a little picture of Miss River May. Hope you can see it. 

Once again, I'm hunting around through my pictures looking for something interesting to talk about. Not that my family isn't interesting, but I guess we all have fairly routine lives. Micah has several doctor appointments for Adele, in preparation for some dental surgery. All of the doctors seem to be an hour or more away from home, so we'll be on the road a lot in the next couple of weeks. (A physical checkup today, a covid test next week and then dental work on the 22nd.) It will be nice to have that behind us!

And now, let the randomness begin!

Some inchies...

These were for a swap in which we had to use at least one postage stamp on each card with a theme of performance arts.

Backgrounds that someone will add collage elements to...

Barncat. You can't tell from this photo, but this guy weighs about ten pounds...or more. He looks like a raccoon!

More backgrounds. These three were made from a very old Czech primer. It was in bad shape, so I wasn't too hesitant to use it for collage.

The next three are macro shots of butterfly wings. (Backgrounds, once again.)

I'm not sure if I've shown the next four cards. We received an envelope from the swap host containing odds and ends and we had to use at least two items from her bits and pieces for each card. We call this a Trash to Treasure swap.

I was babysitting Sully yesterday while Micah and the other four kids went somewhere. I got a paper cut from a book I was looking at and Sully ran to the kitchen, climbed up on the counter, found a band-aid (Wonder Woman?) in the upper cabinets and then proceeded to extricate it from the wrapper and bandage my finger. He insisted. Quite the emergency first aid responder!

A couple more I'm not sure if I've shown... This was another swap which required the use of postage stamps. This time with a bird theme (on at least one stamp). The backgrounds sometimes make more sense when you can see what country the stamps come from, lol.

The previously shown fat cat, joined by another.

A Sully gift. I couldn't resist! I also got the three girls and Sully bow and arrow sets. (With suction cups.)

Rudolph the Cheeky Reindeer by Adele. He made me laugh out loud!

God bless and shalom to all my family and friends out there!

And Meeeerrrryyyy Christmas, if I don't get around to posting again before then! :)

Belated Thanksgiving Greetings!

 I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and were able to gather with loved ones in some form or fashion. I awoke not feeling well on Thanksgiving, so plans to join the family next door had to be scrapped. Micah delivered some food to my door and it was delicious! Otherwise, I just vegged and watched lots of YouTube videos. I had a temp of 98.6, which is about a degree high for me, lol. But, no, not the 'rona virus. Just regular stuff. Still feeling under the weather today. My granddaughters have delivered several drawings they made of the Thanksgiving feast. I feel like I was there! I think that's a cherry pie on the bottom. I know Adam made one and intends to make another pie today! :)

The kids have been enjoying the small amount of wet snow we have right now.

Something interesting happened on a Facebook book group I'm part of. (Inspirational Regency Readers) One of the gals on there has the same maiden name as me. (Foreman) She also mentioned that she's going to college to study geneaology. (BYU-She's Mormon and I think they are sort of known for their interest in geneaologies.)  Well, I couldn't pass up that obvious opportunity. I said, "Suppose we're related?" She was wondering the same thing. So I shot her a copy of a short geneaology my uncle made years ago. She shot me a PM back saying that my great-grandfather, Ulysses Grant Foreman, (yes, that's his real name) was her 9th cousin, 4 times removed! I don't see any reason for her to lie about it, so I'm thinking it's pretty cool. I just recently figured out what a first-cousin-once-removed was, so this type of relation is sort of a mind bender for me, ha ha. Anyway, that was fun. I suppose we'll keep in touch via Facebook. 

Gretchen, you mentioned that you didn't see the first 6 of my 12 Days of Christmas cards. I don't see them either! I checked back to some older posts. So, I'll try to post them here again. Then I'll probably have a huge list of CRRR cards. (The ones where I make a background and two others add things. So they don't look like much here.)

(Update: I later realized that I had taken a post down temporarily to do some editing. That's where these photos were hiding, lol.)

And here come the CRRRs, if my computer cooperates.

Quite the hodge-podge of cards. As I've complained before, my photos show up willy nilly all out of order on my memory card, so it can be confusing to know what I've already posted. Not to worry. Just ignore them. Ha ha.

Well, I'm getting a little cross-eyed from wrestling with the photos, so I'm off for now. I'll come back and read blogs later. Thanks for all your nice comments! 

Have a great weekend and shalom, everyone!