This holiday newsletter that was supposed to go out by the end of the year or shortly thereafter….  The holiday newsletter that DIDN’T get finished that long New Year’s weekend because my Windows Vista got boogered up by a software disk I put in the CD drive…  This holiday newsletter I can’t seem to get back to writing now that I’ve lost my momentum….

Well, now I’ve come up with yet another idea and have decided I want to not only write a few news stories but I want to do a memorial page for all the folks who died this past year in my family and amongst my friends.  This past year has been incredible in terms of losses.  There was my Aunt Pauline in January, followed by Aunt Jo in February.  A longtime friend of my husband’s also died in February from complications of his diabetes.  Sonny, married to Dale’s brother-in-law’s sister, died in February.  Rob, a 42-year-old friend of mine from LiveJournal, committed suicide in March.  Uncle Nelson died in July.  Fiona, a 25-year-old friend on LiveJournal, died in August.  And even though he didn’t die in 2007, my favorite Uncle Mort needs to go on there.  He died in August 2006.  No wonder I want to make a memorial page!  Jeez, I really need TWO pages just to get everyone on there!

But now I’m obsessing about this memorial page and can’t seem to get anything done towards getting this letter out the door.  I would like to make a digital scrapbook page with our photographs and then be able to just print it out.  I don’t have a digital scrapbooking program, and I don’t know if it’s worth investing in a scrapbooking program or not.  I don’t know anything about the programs and don’t know which one to choose.  Would the program even have what I want?  There are lots of digital scrapbook pages online that focus on birthdays and graduations and vacations and birth announcements, but I haven’t seen a simple kind of memorial page that would allow me to just insert some photos, some dates, some memorable words and leave it at that.  No balloons, no streamers, no bright pink flowers or gold stars.

I went into Michael’s craft store last night to look around at their scrapbooking materials and see if there was anything I could pick up and work with.  I couldn’t believe the tons of stuff in there!  Aisles of it pertaining to scrapbooking!  It was overwhelming and I wandered around in the aisles for quite some time.  In the end, I left without buying anything.  I didn’t see what I wanted. — if I only KNEW what I wanted!

Sure, I could start from scratch and make my own page but I’ve never done any scrapbooking and I’m not sure where to start pulling it together.  I’m not that “crafty.”  But I keep thinking about it… and not accomplishing anything in the meantime.

Maybe once my husband gets home Saturday evening, I can bounce some ideas off him and come to some decisions.  He’s kind of an artsy-craftsy person.  He may be able to help me pull something together and get me “unstuck” on this project.  I need to DO something!

Our holiday newsletter this year is going to be in honor of Groundhog’s Day.  Hey, good holiday, right?   How many of you have had the privilege of getting a Groundhog’s Day greeting?  Yeah, we’re kind of different…