I can’t muster up enough energy to dig into any kind of topic with great gusto tonight.  I think I should hang it up for the evening and get ready for bed soon.

I spent quite a bit of time this evening researching digital scrapbooking.  I have an idea for something I’d like to do with our end-of-year (now first of the year!) newsletter that involves creating a memorial page for all the people in our family and circle of friends who died last year.  I was thinking of creating a digital page that looks like a scrapbook page and printing it out.  It would include pictures of Uncle Nelson and his wife Pauline who both died last year.  My Aunt Jo also died last year.  My husband’s brother-in-law’s sister’s husband, known fondly as Sonny, passed away in February after a year-long bout with  melanoma.  (Lorraine and Sonny and Dale and I are aunt and uncle to the same set of neices and nephews: Dale’s sister’s kids.)   That was a great loss.  And in my circle of friends, there was Rob, a 42-year-old man who committed suicide in March of last year, and 25-year-old Fiona who died in August of metastatic melanoma.  I’ll include Uncle Mort, my favorite uncle, as well even though he died in August of 2006. 

I want to use the computer for this so I can easily print out the page once I have the photographs positioned and labeled, but I’ve never done anything like this before.  Hence, the amount of time online tonight, checking out a few websites.  If I were to buy a scrapbooking program, I’m not sure what to buy.  Any suggestions out there from folks who have done this sort of thing?  Any recommendations on software?

Anyway, after all that, I made a scrapbook kind of page from a site that offers free templates and will then send your creation like an electronic greeting card.  I pulled some photographs of Dale and me and sent my creation to Dale in Wales, telling him I love him!  At least the evening wasn’t all for naught!

And speaking of my husband, I realize just how fortunate I am to have him in my life.  I was young when we met.  I was 15 and he was 20.  It got serious right away, and we were engaged the summer I turned 17.  I was an engaged woman my entire senior year in high school, and we were married three weeks after my high school graduation. 

I had the good fortune of falling in love with an intelligent man who was in the Mechanical Engineering program at the University of Akron at the time we met.  Ergo, after his college graduation just before our wedding, he started working a professional job with a professional wage.  It was a good enough wage to support his family of him and me and allowed me to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.   He was able to foot the basic necessities of rent, food, car, utilities, clothing, etc. and was very supportive of me exploring the options of post-secondary education.  I worked as well, but my income went towards eventually paying my college tuition, and I graduated with my own professional degree with no student loans to drag us down financially.  Earning that college education was the most sensible thing I’ve ever done towards my own well-being and self-esteem.

It could have played out a whole lot worse.  Imagine, for instance, if I had married that guy I loved at the skating rink, the one who couldn’t read or balance a checkbook!  I think he worked his whole adult life as a janitor for the Board of Education.  I don’t think we would have been living on his income while I went to school!

I’m a lucky woman to have had blessings enter my life the way they did.  I met and married a stable, intelligent, loving man who supports me emotionally, psychologically, spiritually.  His stability and steadfast love has allowed me to grow and face the issues from my past.  My self-esteem is what it is today because he knew when to push, when to stand by my side, and when to step aside.  He let me face the world, knowing I’d always have the security of his love to come home to.  He has given me such bountiful gifts that have allowed me to become whole and self-appreciating, a state that I can’t see myself having reached if I had followed one of the more self-destructive paths that were available to me in my youth.

Life has been very, very good to me, and I’ll end tonight with a thank-you to the Higher Powers for allowing this to happen.