Daughters Of The American Revolution

This has been a hectic, but wonderful, week!  Along with my on-going preparation for the Great Lakes Mega Meeting in a few weeks, I held my Stampin' Up! team monthly meeting for the MemoryINKers, then we received a gift of a FREE CAR from some friends (more details below), and yesterday evening I was able to attend an event that left me feeling inspired and proud to be an American!

Last fall I received an invitation to speak to the Louisa St. Clair Chapter of The Daughters Of The American Revolution.  Naturally I had heard of them, but I didn't know that much about what this organization was all about. I can't do justice if I tried to explain it myself, but the link above can take you to their site.  However, let me again state that I was proud that I was born in America, very impressed with the good works of this chapter, and with the ladies I meet last night. I found them all very kind and a few even told me they were excited about my presentation.  I wish I could do a profile on each of them so you could meet them as well.

The meeting was held at The Grosse Pointe War Memorial  on the shores of Lake St. Clair.  This is a beautiful mansion that is a state and national historic sight. I had attended my niece's wedding here in October, but it was held in the 'wing' to the right of this photo past the trees and shrubbery.  This time I went through that front door!  What a beautiful place. The DAR meeting was held in the 'wing' to the left in the Artist room.

 Here I am with the Chapter Regent, Grace Smith. The second picture is of my table-mates during the meeting and dinner (which was so delicious!).  Then I snapped the 2nd & 3rd photos during my presentation to show how we tend to have photos of everything.  So what do we do with them?

This shot is about half of the ladies in attendance.

I spoke mostly about the precautions we need to take with our photos, touched on organization, and of course scrapbooking.  I think it went well, and I hope the ladies had a good time. The laughed at my jokes so that's a good sign.   Below is a photo from my very first scrapbook.  I created this book in early 1970's before there was much (if any) information on how to do it safely.  Sadly, this is just a small sample of the memories that have been damaged.

Don't let this happen to your photos too!  Sign up for one of my classes on scrapbooking, or attend one of my T.A.C.O. crops to meet with other 'crop-ers' as we save our memories safely!

P.S. Notice the little photo on the bottom right corner?  That's a picture of MY FIRST KISS with Bobby Lucier.  I wonder how he is doing.

Our "New" Car

I couldn't believe it when my husband, Michael, told me that some friends of our from church, Tyson & Darcy Scott, wanted to give us their car.  Tyson was looking for a new one and stated that, rather than try to sell it, he felt strongly that he should give it to us.  At the time he thought it was so that we could we have a second car again.  Between the time we heard about this amazing gift and Tyson's new car arriving we found out that our car was unsafe to drive and could not be repaired (frame & engine mount issues).  Had we not known about the upcoming blessing from the Scott family we would have been in high-panic mode as we tried to purchase another car.  Instead we borrowed my mother-in-law's car for a while.  Isn't it amazing how God works things out in perfect timing?

This isn't the best photo of my husband (light blue shirt) or Tyson, it was very sunny on Wednesday, but here they are with the title and the car.  It's a black Toyota Corolla. Please remember the Scott family in your prayers and ask the Lord to pour out blessing for them and their young family!  THANK YOU TYSON!!!

Oh....it is a stick shift and it has been a long time since I drove one of those.  Today I toke my first trip in the car.  I drove about 1/2 mile before I released I still had the emergency break on!  OOPS!  Happily I was able to catch on to the clutch & shift method without embarrassing myself . . . too much!

Next time I will post photos from projects made by team at team meeting.