The Reasons to be Thankful

What a wonderful three days we have had! Doug and Susan arrived from Austin about 6:00 PM on Wednesday and it was non-stop talking and eating until they left yesterday afternoon. I felt like I was surrounded with all the things for which I'm thankful.

This is Mike and Doug and wives Betsy and Susan studying the Toy-r-us catalog to get ready for Santa.

Doug and Susan along with our newest family member Dexter who is now almost 8 months old.

Mike getting lots of instructions on how to carve the turkey. We had lots of people....19 including children and baby. You might think the baby doesn't count but he put away an amazing amount of potatoes, green beans and butternut squash. He LOVES butternut squash. But we had more than enough food for this crowd. Gary the son with the catering company prepared our Thanksgiving dinner along with all the others he was being paid to do. This should have made it all very easy but you would be surprised how much planning had to go into getting it all heated and ready to be served.

With my new camera I tried to capture this gathering.....not just a picture of this child or that person but more the activities that were going on and especially something pertinent about each child this year. I'm very happy with the camera but the camera operator sometimes has lapses in intelligence especially after a glass or two of wine. On Thanksgiving Day, I could see that the flash wasn't covering enough distance and on the menu once or twice I saw a -1. I kept checking the menu of the flash. It wasn't set to any -1 setting. The next morning after the influence of the wine had been slept off, it dawned on me that there is a flash exposure adjustment on the camera too. I don't know when it had been set to -1....maybe when I was playing with the exposure mode adjustments. But with Photoshop I was able to salvage the mistake....at least for the pictures on the net. If you are family reading this or if you are a friend who wants to see more of this Thanksgiving gathering and all the reasons I have to be thankful, you'll find The Mercer Thanksgiving 2005 pictures here.