Nikki-ann

Long suffering regular visitors will have already experienced one blog move from me just a few months ago. I’m hoping not to make a habit of it, but once again this blog is on the move, this time to an entirely new domain.

You can now find me at Notes of Life.

This domain will still be here for a while and in time will probably point to the new domain, so don’t worry if you forget to note the new address!

Happy Easter!

My arms are aching!

After much debating (and checking my finances) I decided to treat myself to a Nintendo Wii. I got mine from Argos yesterday as they’ve currently got a promotion on - spend over £100 and get a £10 gift voucher (which I used to get £10 off the 2 games for £30 promotion!).

So far, I’ve just been playing on Wii Sports and it’s certainly energetic (if you’re not a sporty person). My favourites are the tennis and boxing, although I’m not so good at baseball (but then I was never any good at hitting the ball in rounders at school!).

Even Dad has had a go (he’s in his 70s!). He chose boxing. He kept getting closer to the TV and I was getting worried he’d punch the TV if he got much closer! He certainly got into it.

I may invest in a Wii Fit when my birthday comes around in June. We’ll see…

We have a couple of boxes of old family photos. We don’t know who some of the people are in the photos, but others provide small windows in to the lives of ancestors.

The photo on the right is one I scanned in on Sunday afternoon. It shows my Great Grandparents stood outside their home on the Shropshire/Cheshire border. It helps show how my Grandparents lived. Unfortunately, I’ve been told that the house has long gone so I can’t see what it looks like today. However, the cottage they moved into in their later years still stands and looks a lot like it did back in their day.

The photo needed a bit of a tidy-up. It was under-exposed and torn around the edges. So I cropped it down and use a couple of different adjustments (in Photoshop CS3) including Brightness/Contrast and Exposure.

Other items I scanned on Sunday included a couple of family wedding photos, my Great Great Grandmother Mary Jane’s obituary and a wedding notice for a Great Great Aunt.

I really need to set aside more time to sit and scan more photos. Something which might help with this is the Spring Break Scan-a-Thon (29th March - 6th April) and the next Scanfest on 30th March (as mentioned by Miriam at Ancestories). I think I should mark those dates in my diary and maybe I’ll get through some of those photos.