Good morning everyone!  I'm a little frazzled as I begin getting organized and ready to go to the Weston Price/Wise Traditions conference in Indy this weekend, but I'm super excited to see a bunch of old friends, some real food superstars, and many of my awesome blog sponsors.  My conference trip sponsors, Perfect Supplements, aren't able to make it this year, so I'm hanging out for them — I'll be handing out their coupon cards, and they'll have some great conference deals on their site.  My friend and assistant, Jill, and I will be popping in and out of as many speakers as we can and grabbing the best soundbites and pictures to share with you.  We'll probably put some stuff on Facebook, but mostly it'll be on Twitter.  (Like my Facebook page here, or follow my Twitter page here.)

Guess what I've been working on for months now?  Organizing home videos…  WOW, what a job!  (Warning, those of you not anal about saving, documenting, backing up copies of pictures/videos will want to skip this section.)  These are home videos that included some tapes from 50 years ago or more, one of my relatives must have had one of the earliest movie cameras.  Then came my own videos with our great big video camera, which turned into the handheld camcorders, then they got smaller, and they went from VHS to DVD formats, and THEN came the beloved iPhone to make things much easier (especially if you have a Mac computer).  Years ago I got all the VHS transferred to DVD (I did this all myself, manually, and that took hours, too), but knowing how things change, I wanted to get all the DVDs onto a digital back up in a cloud.  I did that with Amazon S3 storage, but THEN, because my anal nature knows no bounds, I wanted a backup of THAT, because what if the S3 all blew up, right?!  So as we speak, those are being transferred onto my hard drive, which will be stored in my media safe fire box, because what if there was a fire?  I scare myself sometimes.  Anyone else as wacko as I am?

Look what we did Saturday night:

Remember our friends Joe and Megan?  Their daughter Maggie was in the local high school drama, The Secret Garden.  She's a freshman and this was her first production — this girl is a natural, she seemed completely comfortable up there!  She has been singing to us since she was a little girl and now wants to pursue acting and singing as a career — I know she'll be big someday.  🙂  Here's a good picture of Megan and Maggie:

The show was quite the tear-jerker though.  It was a beautiful story, but a lot about those who have passed visiting their loved ones in dreams.  I'm still more emotional about Mom's passing than I thought I'd be by now, and also a friend of mine just passed away, so I was sort of a mess.  Marla's funeral is tomorrow.  She was 46 and leaves behind a husband and two young daughters — I used to take care of them when did day care.  Marla had a very strong faith, though, and she was ready to be done with her earthly body that had fought cancer too many times.  When I went to see her she was in pain, but quietly whispering along with her praise music.  (This song will always make me think of Marla.)  She asked me to remind her of my Mom's name, she had been praying for Mom after we got the cancer diagnosis in June.  I told her and with tears running down my face I said, “Will you give her a hug for me when you get there?”  She nodded yes and smiled.  Her peaceful spirit in her last days was jaw-dropping.  I'm not sure how those looking death in the face like Marla, or those with loved ones in their last days, or those who are mourning, how they get through it without knowing Jesus.  (Don't get the whole Christianity thing?  Start here.)

Let's lighten things back up!

So the other day a guy came to our door with a political flyer in his hand and asked if we'd vote for him.  I said what I always say, “Are you pro-life?  Because that's the first issue I look at.”  He got a funny look on his face and stammered a bit then said, “Well, yes I am, but I'm running for city councilman.”  I laughed and said, “OK, yeah, so I guess you don't have a lot of opportunity to vote on life issues then.  Tell me this then, what do you think of smart meters?”  We then went on to have a good talk about those.  He didn't know anything about the dangers or the security and privacy issues, so I'm glad I asked!  (Here's my post about that from last week:  Why You Should Say NO to a Smart Meter — Even if it Costs You.)

That's it for my rambling today…

Now CLICK HERE to see the links and all the juicy scoop I found for you this week…