Good Old Mountain Music

What a great time we had last weekend! A real family get-together to celebrate my nephew's wedding two weeks ago. The picture above shows me on the bottom row with my brother Chris, John, and John's son Ryan. The standing row is my brother Tim, sister Katy, brother Pat, and my Dad. Really fun to have all of the siblings there except one, who lives in Southern Florida.
I mentioned that I was busily working on several projects last week. One was ordering these two posters with pictures of the wedding. You can actually just upload your digital shots to Walgreens.com and order the poster. You can add as many photos that you like to the collage poster. They were a big hit, especially for those who were not at the actual wedding. The wreath above the posters is adorned with flame azalea that I picked on the mountain that morning.
In addition to picking the pig, there was another kind of picking going on...the pickin' and grinnin' type. My brothers always provide guitar/banjo music when they get together...but the younger generation took over at the party, with various ones taking turns on guitar or mandolin. Above are my son Dave on guitar, and friend Big Mike (6'9") handling the mandolin.

The other project I made last week was a DVD of all the wedding pictures, set to three different songs by the country group Alabama. If you have a computer with Windows XP, it probably has Windows Movie Maker. It is a rather simple procedure to import your pictures and drag them to the storyboard. Then you can adjust them to go along with the lyrics of your songs. I have very successfully used this for rehearsal dinners and other picture shows.

Finally, here is a parting shot of one of the hillsides on the mountain in the late afternoon sun. The trees have leafed out and are in many shades of greens and pastels. We often see deer playing on this hilly meadow.