Ed's Birthday Celebration December 1984

Here we are at Thomasina's annual gathering to celebrate Ed's Birthday! I love this photo, it is a good photo of everyone involved.

From looking back at my photo album, we had lots and lots of terrific gatherings at and with Thomasina. Not just Ed, me and the (our) kids, but all of us. It is a such a great pleasure for me to look at these photos, it would be a shame not to enjoy them again! I'm thankful the old albums finally fell apart and made it necessary for me to actually touch and remove all these thousands of photos. I'm having fun rebuilding the original albums, weeding out a few (very few) photos, scanning some and building new online albums. I think I've reached the end of the old falling apart albums. They had adhesive pages that were very hard on the photos. I've been as careful as possible, but some photos were lost to the glue. I've bought nearly a dozen new albums at Target with acid free pages and no glue against the photos, but some damage has been done, of course. I've decided "NO" to matching albums, instead choosing to make each album unique. I'm basically trying to keep chronological order for the physical albums, but in the online I'm doing by topics. The beauty of my Adobe Photoshop is tagging and sorting is easy.
I've purchased a back up hard drive that is external and I'm doing some photo storing online at sites such as Flickr, photobucket, snapfish, picasa and some others. I would place them all in one online site, but if that site goes bankrupt, then I would lose too much. Another advantage of various sites, is that each site offers unique toys I can implement with my photos. Its just plain fun.

From time to time, these gatherings involved all the various aunts and uncles of Ed, including Sara, Tony, Freda, and of course, Aunt Rosie. Thomasina really knew how to put out a spread we all enjoyed. She didn't worry about having a relatively small space to party in, she had a packed house for sure!