Thanksgiving!

For many of you, it's probably a vision like this: 

However, for our family, it's been more like this,

or this,

 

or that,

or maybe this:

or even this:

For about as long as we can remember, we've traveled north to my brother Mark's place in Leonardtown, Maryland for Thanksgiving, assuming it wasn't my year to take call.  That meant packing up the car and leaving ASAP on Wednesday afternoon, and a bunch of fun.
One year, Mark and Amy were going to be gone to Taiwan to pick up their second son from his 2-year mission there.

When we explained to our kids why we wouldn't be able to spend Thanksgiving in Leonardtown, they said, "What's the problem?!"  We ended up doing the holiday in Mark and Amy's house without them.  

That was the famous year when the four oldest teenagers, including our two sons, came in laughing in camo's around 11:30PM.  Turns out they'd been playing laser tag in the moonlight on dirt bikes in the soybean fields.  "Yeah, after hitting a couple of ground hog holes at full gas, we figured we'd better lay off."  Good call.

The kids have always played with cousins

gone windsurfing themselves,

and played with Aunt Kathleen's doggies.

There's always some cool project with some contraption that Uncle Mark has put together.

Or something to weld.

Or somewhere to sail to.

And of course, Aunt Amy and Paula always make an incredible meal on Thanksgiving itself.

Lots of good memories from lots of Thanksgivings in Leonardtown at Uncle Mark's and Aunt Amy's.

We hope you've had a great Thanksgiving also.

Dave & Paula

Thanks for the (tons of) memories!

The digital age of photography really got going between 2000 and 2010.  It is estimated that 1.2 trillion digital images were taken in 2017, with 85% of those being captured on cell phones.  The ease and quality with which pictures are now taken and shared makes the transition a no-brainer.
However, the past is trapped on prints and negatives, and in my case, slides.  Lots and lots of slides.

Paula's Rule #1 of Hoarding Avoidance is that if something hasn't been used in two years, it's outta here.  Personally, I make sure I move occasionally so that I'm not left on the curb.  For photography, that meant that the beloved slide projector and carousels, all 43 of them, had to go.

The treasured images were carefully stored where she couldn't find them, and bit by bit during the occasional stolen hour, I'm digitizing the slides with a scanner.

Doing so, occasional family classics surface.  I mean, does this guy have great hair or what?  And how about the lapels?  Cute girl, however.

Milestones in our family history are documented, and shouldn't be lost.

OK, mostly shouldn't be lost.  (Who's that kid's mother?!)

And who let her ride the trike down the stairs?

I hung this one in an exam room, and told women that their kid would look like this if they didn't take their prenatal vitamins.  Oh, stop it; she's pushing on a screen, people!

Fond memories surface, along with an occasional sniffle.

Yes, they filled the bathtub on Christmas morning to test out Malibu Barbie.  She sank.

I've also been nominated and sustained as the caretaker of my Dad's slides, Kodachromes some of which date from the 1940's.  So, I'm the good-looking guy on the left with the glasses.  GQ tried to buy this picture for a cover, but you know, some things are just too personal.  

Most of the memories are happy ones, and I'm glad she didn't throw them out.

We hope you've got some good memories saved too, and that you don't still have about 4,500 left to run through the scanner.

Dave & Paula.