Good morning and Happy New Year's Eve!
This morning I had a FaceTime meeting with my Sign It! collaborator. We got the vocabulary and sentence translations squared away so later on this afternoon I need to make a tutorial video for those who will be in the shows to study so we're all on the same page as to how to sign words. Just like voices, ASL has regional accents so some areas will sign something differently and we want to use the most universal signs. Plus we'll save a lot of time on set if we don't have to discuss how to sign something.
Now I'm cleaning up the kitchen and preparing to take down Christmas. I'm leaving the tree up for now because I have a photography project I want to do first but everything else is coming down.
Our tree is unique to our family. All the ornaments are "heirloom" ornaments, starting with mine and Steven's. My mom started a tradition of giving each of us 4 kids an ornament that represented something significant from that year or something that represented us that year. I've continued the tradition with my own children. This year's ornaments were from our family vacation to Colorado (Breckenridge). I want to take pictures of each ornament and write down the story behind the ornament. I have an iPhone app called Project Life that lets me slide pictures into pre-designed templates and add pre-designed digital cards that are either for decoration or I can type in journaling. I've used the app for other scrapbook projects and I love it. I think I can get this ornament story project done by the end of January. That's my goal anyway. I got a good camera for my birthday/Christmas, along with a tripod so I'm excited to see what I can do with it.
Also on the agenda for today: I bought a whole bunch of sparkling apple cider bottles to give as New Year's neighbor gifts since I was way too busy before Christmas to do Christmas gifts. I found a cute tag that says Have a Sparkling New Year so I'll cut those out (they're circles), punch holes and use shiny gold and silver ribbon to tie the tags to the bottles, then this afternoon we'll take them around.
Tonight we're going to hang out at home, eat, watch movies and play games. I don't think Alex and Nathan will last to midnight, so at 8:55 we'll go outside with sparklers, count down to "midnight" (hey, it's midnight SOMEWHERE at 9 pm Mountain time, LOL), wave our sparklers and "ring in the new year" with them. Then we'll put them to bed and do the same thing again at midnight with Christie and Jordan.
Hope you all have fun celebrations tonight, whatever you are doing!
Merilee
