Thursday, November 8, 2007

Losing Cool Points

In the few postings that I have written, I have undoubtedly racked up quite a number of cool points. I mean, I have a beautiful wife. Cool. I have 4 wonderful kids. Cool. I listen to cool music. Cool. I used a word (chil-laxin') that most of you have probably never even heard. Cool. Stewie Griffin is on my BLOG page. Way cool. Oh, yeah and probably the coolest of all is the fact that I am an Army helicopter pilot. COOL!!

So, why is the title of my post "Losing Cool Points?" Well, I have a confession to make. I have a hobby. A hobby that is considered by most type-A personalities to be on the lower end of the "Cool" spectrum. What is a type-A personality? Well, it is one that enjoys rather exciting activities. You know, activities like skydiving, scuba-diving, downhill skiing, motorcycle riding, etc. By their very nature, helicopter pilots are type-A personalities.

My hobby? Scrapbooking. OUCH! I can feel the cool points being stripped from me. Okay, well let me clarify. I don't get out the papers and glue and pics that I just picked up from the photo lab at Wal-mart. No, I do it all on the computer, digitally. Armed with my digital camera and my sweet computer skills, I enhance my ordinary family photos into a story or emotion that can't really be told or felt by just looking at the photo.

So what got me into digital scrapbooking? Well, actually, the pre-cursor was another one of my hobbies, (ready for this?) genealogy. I know......I am losing cool points left and right. Okay, so I am a history major and the history of my family intrigued me. So when I started researching my family history, I started collecting all these photos of ancestors and such. Now, if you just look at a photo, especially an old one, it really means nothing without a story. So, that's what I desired to do, put a story with these photos.

Well, my mother-in-law suggested scrapbooking. Well, I tried it. First doing a wedding page for my wife for our anniversary. It was alright. But I wasn't too thrilled about all the paper and glue and embellishments and photos......in general, I wasn't thrilled with the mess that was made and needed to be cleaned up every time.

Then my mother-in-law suggested scrapbooking on the computer. She demonstrated some of what she had done and then she helped me do some of my own. And I was hooked. Since then I have done some 30 pages or so. Some of them genealogy related, most focused on my kids. In fact, the pics of my kids on this blog are some pages I recently did. Above is one I recently did and I think is among one of my favorites.

So I purposely mentioned my un-cool hobby early in my BLOGing so that ya'll will forget it early and I may recover my cool points quicker. However, I will continue to post my pages, both old and new, as time and topics permit.

Take care. I'm going to bed.

2 comments:

Burgdogg said...

Oh yeah...you just lost some cool points...Wait..you weren't cool anyway..the only thing cool you got is that you fly two...two army aircraft...Mr Apachawk, oh and of course your family is cool. Anyhow...perhaps you best look for other places of coolness..if you would get some blood and guts on your blog that might be cool, or perhaps if you went out and fired some rockets that would be cool..but scrapbooking...wait I like to create scrapbooking pages too...although I suck! So I guess we will both have to be uncool Apachawk pilots with cool familes.

Anonymous said...

National Geographic has links to the National Genographic Project. I would say this is a must for any geneology buff.

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