Welcome to my blog

by Anna Laurene Arnett

If you're hoping for some pictures, come again.

If you'd like a lovely format, come again.

If you just want to know what in the world an octogenarian widow has to say about anything, read on.

If you like it, post a comment and come back.

If you don't like it, post a comment and come back anyway, just to see if it gets any better.

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For months, or weeks, or at least days, I've considered, been tempted, and even tried to create my own blog site.  I'd get almost to the end of the instructions and get stymied and give up.  Somehow, even with a post-graduate degree in teaching English and (according to Reader's Digest Word Power) an excellent vocabulary, I find computer instructions often just do not speak my language.  It took me months after agreeing to an update to find how and where my documents disappear.  All this, even though I've owned and used a Mac since 1984, the first year it hit the market.

If I'd just known that in five minutes a talented granddaughter could open this blog, I'd have had dozens of posts for you to read by now.  

Yet, this first one is hard to even begin.  If it isn't good, will you ever come back?  Please don't give up without at least two, or three, or four, or more tries.  

Now, it's time to introduce myself.

Hi, I'm so happy to greet you.  I'm Anna, mother of seven, grandmother of twenty-nine, and great-grandmother to at least thirty-six. (One of these days I'll get around to counting them.)

I'm at the age when I ought to be sitting on a front porch somewhere, rocking, knitting, and watching the world go by. Well, I do sometimes, when I can work it in, but I prefer my LaZboy upstairs to a front porch.

Actually, I'm not that old.  I'm only eighty-four.  And I'm ready for new experiences.  I hunt up a few of my own, like writing and publishing, and my posterity provide me with plenty of other opportunities.

For example, I'm calling this blog Frespa Fan, because I am one. My oldest grandson concocted the idea of a membership spa that would combine the casual elegance of a country club with all the luxuries of a day spa.  I've been pampered there, and I love it.

My son Mark had his documentary, "Baby Boomerang," (I'm in it) shown again last week, this time at the Gone With the Film festival in Hollywood, and was awarded "Best Documentary."  Of course, he deserved it.

My two middle sons have done great things with the 492nd Bomb Group website and have great plans for more historical research.

A daughter and her husband are doing a handcart trek next week.  They're the oldest ones in this group, it seems.  Kat will do well, for she and her older brother and sister joined a dozen others last January to re-enact the POW forced march of nearly sixty miles from Stalag Luft III to Spremberg, Germany 

I'm the president of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit historical organization, but my kids do most all the work.

I'm ready to settle down and get my memoirs completed and ready for publication.  Well, at least the first volume.  I'm trying to get it to read like a novel.  Only trouble is I can't do much to manipulate the plot.

A grandson and his wife both graduated suma cum laude from ASU last week, and two granddaughters graduated from high school this week.

We're planning to move two or three cows into the back yard and become milkmaids.  Raw milk is much more nutritious.  The enzymes are still there.

I think I can find enough things to blog about.  If you have any questions, just ask.  That's what the comment thing-a-ma-jig is all about.

Goodnight, and sweet dreams

Grandma Anna