Almost Christmas

Fog on the Dike

http://nature.desktopnexus.com/wallpaper/533601/

http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/343912

Hello all...I wanted to post this photo my husband took with my old camera last week. I wish I could say I took it but I was home working on Persona designs while he enjoyed the last day of hunting season.  The iGoogle theme is available, too and called Early Morning Fog by MaDonna.

We did our Christmas decorating over the week end. Instead of lots of tinsel and shiny things we chose to do a more natural look. So we went out and cut holly, western red cedar, Alaska yellow cedar, noble fir and pine boughs from our trees. We put them on the hearth and coffee table. The smell is wonderful and all the little cones on the boughs are so pretty. I had some left over boughs, so I filled a big clear glass vase with greenery for the dining room table and a smaller clear glass vase for the kitchen table where all the food will be. Of course we put up some of the old standards, mainly items my wonderful Mother made over the years. So we are pretty much ready for Christmas Eve. That will be our main celebration this year. All three of our children, and 6 out of the 7 grand kids will be here. One grandson can't get too far from home as his son is due any day and may even be here by Christmas.  One great grandson will be joining us on his very first Christmas. The food is figured out. We don't cook a big Christmas eve dinner, so a lot of snacking is in order. My daughter is making her super potato salad that my Mom taught her how to make. We will have sandwich makings and I HAVE to cook the chicken wings! The kids and grandsons love them so I will make 10# again this year. I thought I might share the recipe with you. This recipe is for 3# as most people won't want 10#!

OUR FAMILY CHICKEN WINGS

3# chicken wing pieces placed singly in large cookie pans with sides

(I use jelly roll pans)

1/2 cup soy sauce

1/2 cup water

2/3 cup brown sugar

1/2 Tablespoon garlic powder

Heat the above just until steaming and pour over the chicken wings. 

Cook at 300 to 325 degrees for 3 hours. Turn 3 times.

The kids usually take turns turning them as it takes me quite awhile to turn 10#.

If you decide to make them, let me know how you like them.

I want to wish you all a wonderful, happy Christmas or whatever holiday you celebrate. Take time to write or phone loved ones that can't share the holiday with you. You never know if they will be around next Christmas or not. My wonderful husband turned 75 last week and I will be 72 in a few months so at our ages we want to let our family know how proud we are of them and how very much we love each and every one of them.

I also want to thank all the people that are using my designs and have written to tell me how much they enjoy them.  Thank you.

And to all a good night!

Family Values

Family Values

http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/307601

 

I was so surprised this morning when I checked the Up and Coming Persona's to see that one I made just for my own enjoyment was gaining popularity. These are cherished family photos. My parents wedding picture, my Dad in his Army uniform and with the car he was so proud of, my beautiful Grandmother and the Great Grandparents I never got to meet.

This will be short and sweet but I was so happy to see others actually using this specific design when everyone is busy and thinking about the holidays that I just had to post this. It made my day. Thanks to all who are using it and now you will know a bit about my history and how much I value my family.

December, December

December Sunset Barn

December Sunset

http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/338537

December is here and time to start thinking of Christmas decorations. Time to take the fall decoration off the door and put the reindeer on.

The latest news is I got a new camera and haven't really learned how to use it and all of its settings yet. Probably never will. It has an automatic setting and I am sure that is what I will use most. I did use the sunset setting the other night so I could try it out. The December Sunset Barn shot turned out really well and the December Sunset Persona turned out clearer than my old camera, so that is good.

I discovered that a bunch more of my designs are on iGoogle now. Took a long time for them to show up and in the mean time I gave up and threw the paper away with the names of the designs on.!  I use iGoogle as my home page and am really happy with it. You can set it up to your liking and that is why I like it so well. Anyway,  if you use iGoogle and want to use any of my designs, you can go to where it says Change Theme from.....and when the search page comes up, put MaDonna in the search and some of my designs will come up. Winter Snowman by MaDonna is the one I am using now. It goes with the Persona called Winter Snowman Collage. So now that I know it, I am going to be adding some more to the iGoogle site. I will just be patient and wait till they show up.

The new venture I wrote about several months ago turned out to be a dud. The fellow that brought it to my attention and asked me to help design got too impatient because things weren't selling right away. So I am no longer involved with him or his sites.

I also found out that Persona's can be rated. I didn't know anything about this as I don't do a lot of surfing. I just work on designs and screening. But I noticed someone had mentioned it. So I clicked on the link. I honestly don't know how you go about rating them, but you can go to:   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/personas/ and rate designs. Looks like you have to sign in to do it, but if you have time and want to try rating designs, let us know how it works out. Mozilla hasn't done a very good job of making people aware of this feature, so it isn't very popular yet. Let me know if you figure it out.

Today is Pearl Harbor Day so think about all of our men that lost their lives on this day many years ago. And hope something like that never happens again. If we could only have peace all over and not have things like today to have to remember!

Hope you all have a good week and don't get too tired and busy to let your loved ones know you love them. 

Till next time!

I DID IT!!!

As you can see I managed to change my blog header picture from the sunset photo to a photo I took Thanksgiving Day of our barn while it was snowing. I will probably go back to the sunset at some point but wanted my blog to look a bit more like Christmas. I am thinking of using this as our Christmas card this year. I always make our Christmas cards as I like them to be personal. Hope you like the change.

On To Christmas

Country_Christmas

http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/335506

Thanksgiving is over and it was a wonderful day with family. We had a snowy Thanksgiving day this year. It was beautiful but it made getting around hard for people and many didn't get to be with family they had planned on. We had family together for dinner and it was great. Our youngest great grandson got to be with us and he is growing too fast. What a joy they can bring. There is no way you can not feel good about everything when they bless you with a dimpled smile.

I am working hard  on Christmas Personas right now. I have way too many finished so should really quit but have many ideas. I have made some collage themes using old wallpapers of Christmas houses all decked out with decorations and lights.I love the old homestead, farmhouse pictures because I think that is when Christmas was celebrated the  way it should be. Today Christmas is so commercialized it really upsets me. Seeing Christmas advertisements before Halloween is ridiculous.

I am trying to re-do my blog and actually add a snowy picture but to be honest I forgot how to put the photo in! It was easy when I first designed it, but apparently I am trying to skip a step or something as I am ending up with the same sunset photo., which is OK, but....I wanted to change it.

I hope you all have a great week and I will continue to work on the blog and get it up to date. 

Re-Working

Waiting for Santa

http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/326800

I decided to re-work my blog "look" last night. I will change it to a winter design around Christmas, I hope. The forecast is for snow tomorrow and over the week end, so I may even replace my sunset photo if I can get a good shot of the fresh snow.

The Persona I am showing today is a picture of my 2 oldest kids sitting on the stair steps. I put it on our Christmas cards in the late 1950's. They aren't  cute chubby faced kids anymore, but have grown into wonderful, caring adults and have children and one has grandchildren. I am very proud of my family as you can probably tell. I have Personas with my parents and some of my grandparents in designs. I am even making designs with some of the family dogs! 

I am really missing my desktop and Photoshop. I have a file all ready to work on when my grandson brings it back. It needed a turbo boost to be able to keep up with me.

For all of you that have Firefox they are getting ready to introduce Firefox 4 to the public soon. I am looking forward to it in one way and another not. Sometimes the changes that are made are something I wouldn't really like, but you get used to it in time and I am sure they will have all kinds of new features to it.

Woke up with a headache this morning and that scared me because I was afraid I was getting the really bad ones back, but it has slowly faded into the background enough that I can tell it is still there but not enough to  keep me from working.

This will be the 52nd Thanksgiving dinner I have cooked! There will be fewer here, but we will be thinking about the others.

I probably won't be able to get back to posting here until after Thanksgiving so I want to wish you all a wonderful, warm Thanksgiving and I hope you can have family with you.

Christmas Chickadees and Thoughts!!!

Christmas Chickadees 2

http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/329405

Well, I finally got back to my blog. I have been very lax on posting again. I just get so busy with work and life that I fail to get on like I should. But then again, I think I warned everyone in the beginning I might not keep this up like I should

I have been very busy with designs. Making many, many in advance. I have started putting on Thanksgiving and Christmas designs. Even a few spring ones. I am ready for spring already and we haven't even had our first frost here. I had to let my grandson (computer genius that actually made my desktop) take it home with him to update it. The hardware is getting a bit tired and this last week Explorer started crashing. I know I work too fast, copying and moving files around, but that is me. I just work fast. My husbands favorite words are "Slow down!" But if I slow down, I am afraid I might not start up again! I am always finding bruises and can't even remember hitting myself or running into something! So maybe my memory is going also! Oh, well. On to the next thing to do. 

I don't have  Photoshop in my laptop so won't be making any designs this week so by the time I get the desktop back my head will be so full of ideas and scratch pads filled with my scratchings that  I probably can't read them. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just go in and get some new hardware for ourselves? When you are my age that sounds like a really good idea.

Never fear, I have whole USB drive full of designs ready to submit this week so you will still find new designs at my design page.

My favorite birds are chickadees so thought I would share one of my Christmas Chickadee designs with you. I just submitted it today so hope everyone will like it.

I have received some wonderful letters this week from people and I would like to thank all of you for taking the time to write. Magda from Australia wrote me the most wonderful letter this week. She has a way with words that make you think of beauty. Thank you, Magda, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts with me on my designs. And I am glad you are using them. If people don't use them, I would quit and find something else to do.

I have finally started feeling like my old energetic self and the horrible head aches have quit. Hopefully I will be better about getting on the blog and writing.  

You all have a great week end and enjoy life.