Rene Marker

The county I live in has a public library. The main branch is in my town which is the county seat. The library is right across the street from the courthouse. There are 5 other branches in smaller towns in the county. The other town which is about the same size as mine (and wanted to be the county seat back in 1848 when the county was formed) has their own library not associated with the county library. I had my own library card as a kid and would borrow books quite often as did Mom. She loved to read. I had to get an updated card 10 years ago when I got my first Kindle. I borrow books using it from a state wide ebook project. My library is a member of that project so I can borrow any ebooks, audiobooks, digital magazines and video that they have available. All of the branches have activities for young and old and everyone in between! Most activities have specific times they are available. Some of them are tech help, science club, book club, storytime, time to play euchre, various craft nights and even escape rooms! They also have a group for knitters and crocheters! I participated in it for awhile... knitted a lot of scarves for me! My favorite part of our library is the genealogy section. When I started researching 30 years ago, I would go there to look at all the microfilm of old newspapers and genealogical records since nothing was online at that time. They even have a lot of books and family histories that have been donated over the years. Even now with all the genealogical information available online, there is still information that cannot be found online. When the library did a remodel several years ago, they moved the genealogical section into a room that has a locked door and it has a camera that the workers can monitor it when someone is in there. Quite often materials would disappear when it was out in the open. The genealogy society got this area started and the library was kind enough to give them the room for the information back in the late 70's/early 80's. From a small corner to a room of its own, it has really grown. It does get a lot of visitors from out of town as well!

I've got a lot of older layouts about my dogs throughout my life! I've had 4 dogs. One from the age of 9 to about 23. It was another 22 years before I got another dog. Less than 2 years later, I got a 2nd dog and had them for quite awhile. After they passed, I waited 18 months before getting my current dog. She will be my last. I found training a dog in my 60's was not as easy as training a dog in my 40's!!! Here are 2 layouts about them.

No scrapbook pages yet but I did get some photos. My cousin is going to get some more to me that she took with her phone. We had an awesome time, just sitting in my driveway. It started cooling down 5 to 10 minutes before totality then warmed back up after it was over. I saw today that we dropped 8 degrees Fahrenheit during it. We had almost 4 minutes of totality. My solar lights in my flower beds came on but luckily I had remembered to turn the motion light above my garage off but the video still recorded! So I have video of us watching and our comments during the totality! Many of my neighbors had lights come on during the darkness. The weather was just gorgeous with very few clouds in the sky. Temps were in the low 70's which is unusual for this early in April. I live about 1.5 miles north of the county fairgrounds. They were open for camping all weekend and had entertainment, food stands and vendors all weekend. Then viewing of the eclipse on Monday. We could hear the crowd screaming, yelling and clapping during totality. We also saw a couple fireworks off to the southwest during totality, not sure who did those though. This is the one and only eclipse I will probably see. The next one in Ohio is in 2099... I would be well over a hundred years old so doubt I'll be around for it! Not even sure I would be around for the big one that will cross the USA in 2045 and if I would be, I don't think I'll be traveling to see it. I am so glad that I got to see it and very thankful that we had perfect weather since Ohio weather in April can be hit or miss. We had clouds on Saturday/Sunday and today has been cloudy with thunderstorms tonight. Monday was perfect!

There was a report on a news station out of Dayton last night on the cost of hotel rooms. This is what they found out about the 2 hotels in my town. "In Wapakoneta for the weekend of the Eclipse, Comfort Inn is priced at $632 while Holiday Inn Express is $1,243." A town about 45 minutes from us has these prices "In Bellefontaine, the prices range from $895 to $1,167 in total." Bellefontaine is in the path of totality but the duration will not be as long as ours since it is east of us. They are fully booked!

This morning the chance of rain for me was up to 25% in the afternoon hours starting around 2 p.m with temps in the 50's. Totality is at 3:10 p.m. I just looked before hopping on here and it is down to 20%. Temp now listed at 63. So it is ever changing. If the weather isn't good, we'll just have a party anyways!

@Ann Seeber In the layers palette double clicking on the layer will open the properties menu. On the bottom of the general tab is a checkbox to "highlight in layers palette". When you click on the checkbox, the colors show up in the box to the right of it. Mine is always yellow. When you click on the color, it brings up the color palette and you can choose any color you want. There is a screenshot of the layer properties that shows what I'm talking about in this blog post about linking and grouping: Linking and Grouping in PSP | Scrapbook Campus

I use grouping and linking the same as you. Grouping for resizing and linking for indicating layers that go together. I don't usually rename layers. Because when I drag and drop into the layers palette, the file name is the layer name. When I use the raster-to-mask script for photos, my last step when I'm satisfied with the placement of the photo is to use the "Merge Group Rename" script which keeps the photo file name on the merged group layer. To be honest, the only vector layers I use on my layouts are text layers. I only use the other vector layers for the Build-A-Kit stuff, not on my regular layouts. On my regular layouts I should rename the text layer but I don't since I keep track of kits and fonts used on a spreadsheet.

I use grouping a lot when I have a bunch of layers that I want to resize proportionately. But it only works when they are all together in the layers palette since all layers in a group have to be next to each other. When I have layers that are separated in the layers palette that I want to move together on the layout (like a cluster that might have layers above and below a paper mat/photo layer) then I use the linking layers options. That works well for that. Another way I use to show what layers are "connected" to each other is to use the color coding in the layers properties.

Right now the weather forecast for me is 65F and cloudy skies. I was talking to someone that says even if it is cloudy you will experience the darkness that comes along with the eclipse. They went to a talk given by a person that has seen many solar eclipses (the guy goes all over the world to see them) and that is what he shared with them about the experience. Evidently he has been to them in all weather conditions! My cousin, her husband and their 2 granddaughters are coming in Sunday morning to avoid the traffic issues on Monday morning. A different cousin is friends with a state highway patrolman and the patrolman is saying that anyone that is driving in from out of town should fill up their gas tank before they come because there could be issues with gasoline availability on the 8th! My cousin and I discussed food and we will be eating at my house both days so we don't have to deal with traffic in town or the extremely busy fast food places. Quite a few businesses in town are closing that day if they don't deal directly with the public (like fast food restaurants and gas stations). Other businesses might be open but will close at noon so that their employees can see the eclipse where they want.

Yeah, with my shaky hands at times, paper cutting like this is a big no for me. I do have an older cutting machine that I could use if I wanted to do something like this. My handwriting has also gotten worse in the last 10 years. My formally pretty cursive handwriting is no longer pretty. So I do very little of anything with my hands that need precision!

Not a whole lot of snow this winter for me. We did have extremely cold temperatures in January and the only snow that my neighbor had to plow my driveway happened January 19th. He got it cleaned off before my cousin and I returned home from Columbus after my surgery. Now we are in the rain and thunderstorms season. Had a storm this afternoon although it rained with the sun shining... and a rainbow happened. I did get photos of it and there is a very faint double rainbow. On March 14th, we had a terrible storm aka a tornado warning. I spent over an hour in the basement. Luckily the power didn't go out so I could still watch a news station that was carrying only storm coverage with reporters live in the viewing area. At one point it hailed and Peyton was barking at it since it was so loud. There was an EF-3 tornado formed and touched down just 3.5 miles from the city limits and hit a RV trailer camping area. Lots of damage but no serious injuries. The tornado ended up going over 31 miles and into the next county. In that county it touched down and destroyed many homes (most were mobile homes) in the Indian Lake area. 2 towns are on the south side of the lake and both had damage. There were many injuries and 3 deaths. It was still an EF-3 at this time. I pulled drone images from Facebook and did 2 layouts about it.

I can sit in my front yard to see it. I'm in Ohio. My cousin that lives in southeast Ohio is bringing her 2 granddaughters up for the weekend and to see the eclipse on Monday. They are so excited about it. All the schools in the area built the day off into their school calendar. The buses would be on the roads during the time leading up to the actual almost 4 minutes of the eclipse. My town is also expecting up to 70,000 people coming to see it (traffic nightmares for a town of 9,000). Estimates for the county are up to 130,000. The county only has 45,000 in population. The reason my town is expected to be the place to be is because it is the hometown of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. We have a museum in town that is all things space and actually looks like a moon! The town is going all out with various events scheduled from Thursday to Monday. The city and county officials have put out lots of information about what to expect with the influx of people in town. They also suggest that we do all our grocery shopping, getting gas for the vehicles, prescriptions refilled etc before the weekend. Another thing they have talked about is the fact that the cell towers will be swamped with people trying to connect so service could be intermittent. They did say that if you can, we should connect our phones to wi-fi so that we would still have access in case of emergency. It really is interesting everything that the officials have been doing. They've been working on this for over 2 years to make sure they have everything covered. I can't wait!!! Here is a layout I did for a challenge at The Lily Pad in January that shows the path through Ohio.

Styles also evolve. My beginning layouts were a lot like what is being done in the Boot Camp course. Over the years I have changed but yet still mainly do what I call a "clean style". But the embellishments I add have changed over the years. Even now my style is evolving as I'm learning to put together clusters of flowers/greenery/ribbons/other elements on my own that are pleasing to my eye. They are usually small clusters and/or minimal embellishments. They don't overwhelm the photos and the story behind the photos. Once in awhile I will do a layout that has more clusters that are larger than normal when I feel the photo will work well with that kind of layout. It took me years to get to where I am today! My first layout was done on December 30, 2007 and has 3 photos (with rounded corners!) and a title. That's it. Nothing else.

I have not heard about anything like that near me. But then I wouldn't go if there was. I am not a fan of cats at all.

When I read it, I immediately thought that it might have to be 2 books!