With Picasa the photos are not online unless you put them online. The program you download scans your computer in folders you designate and it indexes them, it doesn't move the files. You edit all the photos on your computer. You have the option to create an online web album account and send any photos you want to it. You can use the web albums without the program or the program without the web albums. It just is an easy option if you want to use both because they are designed to be easily integrated. They regularly update the program to integrate with new things. You can send them to a printing service, blogs, Facebook (I think)... even my Grandma's digital Ceiva picture frame. I have all my pictures on my computer and backed up to an external hard drive (there is a backup option in Picasa also). Then I just pick which photos I want to put online within the program and click upload to web album. Each web album can have different privacy settings: private with login required to view, viewable only with a direct link you give to people, or viewable to anyone from your main gallery. I actually have two web album accounts. One for family photos and one for my garden pictures. I can login/out from the program before I upload to my web albums so they go to the right one. Then there is also a setting if you want your public albums to show up in searches. You can set copyright info for the pictures and embed watermarks if you want to go that far too. I guess it would be easier if I put a link to it :) I would recommend reading the faq before installing. I had a family member install it without doing so. When it started scanning for all the pictures on her computer to index them and add to the Picasa program database on her computer, she started freaking out and thought they were all "online!". No I don't work for Google, I just really like it :) My only major gripe is that the web albums don't allow for sub-albums. If it did I might use private albums to backup all my photos and pay for extra storage space. You get 1GB free for web albums, but it is only $5 a year for another 20GB. Here is a link that might be useful: Picasa

Yes, Woodnymph, I had a circle pin after I was married and got quite a few comments about it. I paid $1.00 for my old book, The Shepherd of the Hills by Harold Bell Wright with illustrations by F. Graham Cootes, at a family estate sale. It gives a copyright date of 1907 in the front and says "Published September, 1907." I thought I had made a clever buy but found that there are a zillion copies available. It is in very good condition, and the bookshop owner who looked at it for me said it might bring $10. In it, though, were two postcards with postmarks that I can't make out. They have 1 cent stamps on them and very pretty handwriting. One has a picture of a young couple rowing on a lake and the other of the Masonic Temple in Bloomington, Illinois. That one says the writer is not going to school that summer but is saving herself for San Francisco in 1915. I don't know who either of the senders was but did know the recipient who was the aunt of my aunt-by-marriage. When my daughter was young, we did manage to acquire a complete set of The Little Colonel series, some of them from a private owner who lived in Peewee Valley, the setting of the books. The books themselves are not all of the same set, but some of them are the oldest edition. They are not in good shape, but she is proud of them and keeps them carefully on her bookshelves. I feel like Methuselah on this forum. My mother was a primary school teacher in one-room schools at the beginning of her career. In them, classes ran Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4 every year with 5 and 7 offered one year and 6 and 8 offered in the alternate years. If you started at age 6, you went straight through, but if you started at 5 or 7, you either had to repeat, go ahead and drop back to pick up the year you missed, or skip it and go ahead. Since I was the oldest child, my mother taught me to read at 4 and took me with her to attend first grade at 5, meaning I had to either repeat 4th grade or go to 6th. I did go on and never had 5th grade, which may explain why math was always my poorest subject since that was the year that long division and common fractions were introduced. At any rate, that meant that since my birthday is in July, I graduated from high school at 15, starting college in the fall of 1952. We had the suite-type dorm mentioned above, and my roommate was my best friend from high school (and still is). We had the rules about signing in and out, curfews with later nights on weekends, no one smoked, boys couldn't step foot outside the living room of the dorm. We did our personal laundry in the bathroom sink, but there were ironing facilities in the basement. Housekeeping gave out one clean sheet every week, and you were to put your top sheet on the bottom and the clean sheet on the top each time, taking the other one back to be laundered. We wore stockings and hats and gloves to church and formals to the dances held in the gym. It was certainly another world to...

I'm laughing because my "editor genes" haven't left me since I retired; they've just slowed down. I woke up this morning with the realization that I may have typed "reign" instead of "rein" in a post I wrote two days ago. It's a common mistake that always jumps out at me when other people do it, but then I went and did it myself. Correction made. Not to worry, Nutsaboutplants--I'm still absorbed in the book. I did move it downstairs, and I actually want to finish it quickly. I'm interested enough to want to know how it ends, but I find it disturbing. It's an unsettling book.

That’s pretty funny. Weird, but funny. You could give the kids squrt bottles of mustard, relish, and ketchup (“hi, I’m bpath, I’m from Chicago, and I put ketchup on hot dogs.”), and let them ”dress” the passengers!