Claire and I put together a notebook of all of our past Christmas cards since 1987. Although Claire has been around for the shortest time, it appears she has made the most artistic contributions to card designs. This includes her “Last But Not Least” illustration of Santa and the reindeer making one last stop on Christmas morning.

Before color printing was readily available, we used to sit around the table and hand color in each card with color pencils. This pre-dates Claire who was amazed to find out we did this. I pointed out one of the early cards that Nicole and Danny helped draw. As we sat around coloring in the cards, Danny suddenly exclaimed, “I forgot to draw arms on Santa!” He had colored in several of the Santas before realizing this.

Brian is one of Nicole’s co-volunteers in Armenia. This is a nice story that I think sums up what it is all about…

http://briangilmer.com/wordpress/?p=193

For her high school graduation, Nicole got a Flower Power iMac, which was a very rare Mac. It was only on the market for about 6 months. By the end of her college senior year, it was acting up. CD drive didn’t work all the time. It would power down. She got an eMac for her UGA graduation present, and at some point I refurbished the Flower Power to pass on to Fiona. Grant reports Fiona did not use it much, so it was eventually passed down to her Grandaddy.

Dad always liked his Mac better than his “Dell” (he called all PCs dells). But the power supply, fly-back transformer problem kept getting worse, and it could not be turned on for very long without powering down. Helping mom clean out the basement on Monday, I took the Flower Power home to prepare it for its last trip.

Today I backed up all data, zeroed-out the hard drive using target disk mode, and hauled the Flower Power off to the recycle center.

Cow’s are featured frequently on Mac5. Here is one in a tub. Kathy’s latest painting found in the Stonegate gallery and hanging in the kid’s bathroom (which is used, Ted.)

[Found this in an experimental domino blog on Yoda. Not sure if the date was when this happened or just when I was experimenting.]

Monday 10th, March 2003

Riding home from the Girl Scout father / daughter dance where Kelly, Mary Claire, and I all danced to oldies dressed in Hawaiian outfits, Mary Claire asked… “Dad, when you were born, did girls wear Poodle skirts.” Kelly jumped in, “That was in the 50’s.” I added, “And I was born in the sixties.”

Thinking about that, she then asked, “When you were born, were you free?” I asked her, “What do you mean by that?” She said, “You know how Martin Luther King helped make people free.”

I was surprised by her question. “Mary Claire, when I was little, I wasn’t black.” Kelly started laughing. I went on to explain how when I was born, there was segregation, but that I was little when Martin Luther King helped get rid of separate seating on buses and in restaurants, so I didn’t really remember things being segregated.

“She thought about that…. “Well did you have big hair?” I asked, “Do you mean an afro?” She said, “Yes.”

I had to explain to her again, that I wasn’t black when I was little. Kelly kept cracking up.

Posted by Jeb 02:14 PM

Kelly and I went white water rafting on the Ocoee River with the SJN Life Teen Saturday. It started off very cloudy and cool on the drive up to Tennessee, but by the time we arrived the sun was out. We had a fun, warm trip. The water was high and the waves full. Kelly was the first to “ride the bull”, which means sitting on the front holding onto a rope. She had the wildest ride as we ended up spinning through some rapids, and she got knocked back into the boat by a huge wave of water. “For a second I as drowning,” she said. But she thought it was fun.

This photo sequenece shows Jacqueline riding the bull (and falling off, too.)

Here’s a little song just for you! (You’ll also find it on your new iPod.)

Love, Dad