Tag Archives: Shelley

Cooper HS Holiday Party

This post is horribly late. Shelley and I attended her first holiday function with her coworkers from Randall Cooper High School. We had a lot of fun and enjoyed the departmental basket give-a-way. We were not lucky enough to land a win, but fun was had by all. Below are a few shots from the evening’s events.

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First Day of School – 2009

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Today was another momentous day for the Wykle family. Many firsts were accomplished today.

  1. Shelley started a new position at Cooper High School as a full-time Chemistry teacher.
  2. Eli started kindergarten at his beloved Little Red School House.
  3. Natalie caught the school bus from home instead of suffering the “before & after school care” program at the local YMCA.

Here were a few shots from the Goodridge “open house” hosted on 08/18.

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At the day’s conclusion, all were happy and excitedly discussed their productive “firsts”!

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1st Annual Wykleville Book

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In an effort to continue documenting the life and times of the Wykles, I decided to take a stab at producing my own “blog book”. I wanted to take some of the more important post from the Wykleville site and document them in a book form. I also wanted this to be a surprise for the Shelley as a Christmas gift. After seeing some very neat samples online, I went and researched the different companies that provide book production. I settled on using Blurb after reading many positive reviews and a one week turn around. Blurb has their own free software that is required in order to upload the book. It also has simple production tools  and upload the book. I found the software a bit limiting and not allowing me to achieve the effects that I was after. So I expanded my search and found FotoFusion. It is a nice piece of software that met my needs. After a free trial, I found that it was quite powerful and easy to use. It allows you to easily crop, rotate, and re-size the photos. It also has many different photo frames allowing you to create different looks for each of the pictures that you drop in. Finally, the front and back cover was created with a Microsoft Autocollege product that takes a folder and creates a nice college of pictures. 

I created each page in FotoFusion and then drop them into the Blurb software in order to upload the finished product. 

You can check out the finished product here.

Who’s Older Now?

Another year has passed and our birthday season has concluded with Shelley’s 35th birthday. The festivities kicked off early with the present unveiling on Friday afternoon. She was quite surprised to find a brand new Dell computer (Inspiron 530s) with 19″ widescreen LCD. On Saturday morning (officially her birthday) she received many kisses and the compulsory birthday cards. One card played the “chicken dance” and the other played the “hamster dance”. The new musical cards are quite fun and the kids do enjoy them so much. Eli even performed his artistic dance impression of the hamster dance. The birthday was concluded with a dinner out at O’Charley’s.