Even though much of the internet has slowed down due to Christmas festivities, Twitter stayed busy providing excellent resources for Sandwich Generation senior home care givers and grandparents. Here's a sampling:

SENIOR HOME CARE GIVERS

Prepare for the New Year: Learn about more advance directives and 'Do Not Resuscitate' orders.

Health tips for aging adults.

Elderly couple meets in retirement home, falls in love, and marries on Christmas Eve. Via LarisaBelliveau

Alzheimer's Disease May Stave Off Cancer and/or Vice Versa.  People who had cancer seem to be less likely to get Alzheimer's DIsease. Via @caregiverforum

It is definitely vital to keep a list of medications for aging parents or yourself in your wallet! How medication mistakes happen in the hospital.  @ElderCareRN  (via @caregiving)

Alzheimer's Disease Doesn't Take a Holiday. via @Mike_Gamble

10 Signs an Aging Relative May Need More Help. via @caregiving

New Year's Resolution suggestion: Do Your Own Will free online. 

GRANDPARENTS

Sprittibee has a great list of resources for homeschooling programs.

Piggy Paint Nail Polish: The Safe Nail Polish for Your Grandchildren including a fun giveaway.

WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT

God is true.

"I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world." - Mother Teresa Via @CarePathways

I know it's after Christmas, but these gifts are great all year long!   Christmas gifts: To your enemy, forgiveness. To a friend, your heart. To a child, a good example. @BillHurlbut
 
SANDWICH GENERATION

The Best Photoshop Resources of 2009 – Design Reviver. via @andysowards

LED traffic lights aren't melting snow, leading to accidents! Be extra careful in the snow if your city uses them and be sure to warn your aging parents, as well.

Caregiving

SandwichINK enjoyed being a part of the EldercareABC Blog Carnival last week. You can find my post with several others of interest, on such topics as “Can Seniors Go On Living at Home?,” “Medication Management,” and “Overcoming Loneliness.”

Very Interesting info – Couples have a lower risk of dementia!

Exercise can improve memory in a person suffering from Alzheimer’s.

Getting creative with your senior care is the key. Here are some great tips to help bring out your creativity.

Grandparents

Here are some excellent tips for grandparents to help their grandkids learn about reading!

For those of you who have autistic grandkids, here are two very helpful and interesting articles:

• Technology and Autism
• Protecting Your Autistic Child

Sandwich Generation:

Tech – For Business and Pleasure

• For all you Sandwich Generation Photoshop Geeks, here’s an interesting collection of Glow and Light Effect Tutorials in Photoshop:
• Remember yesterday’s post about my computer driving me crazy? I really appreciated the cute videos at Sugar Pine Realty!   They gave my senior mom and me a good laugh!

Family Friday at @HomemakerBarbi has an interesting post, Family Vacation Road Trip Planning: Breaks & Stops. Great ideas for a multi-generation vacation with your family.

Family Doctor Mag has some great Twitter health links.

If you or someone you care for is dealing with chronic illness, you’ll be interested to know that Rest Ministries announced the opening of their new bookstore.

WOW! Scientists have developed a mind-controlled wheelchair.

Have you ever thought of retiring overseas?

I’ve got some excellent links for you that first appeared on my Twitter page. In fact, there are so many, I’m going to do half today and half tomorrow. Don’t forget, if you want them hot off the press, come join the conversation at http://twitter.com/SandwichINK .  Without further adieu…

Disaster/Emergency Links:

Here is a great site for disaster/emergency information – CBS News’ Disaster links – http://tinyurl.com/gdj4u

Encouragement – Jesus said…Be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

Salmonella Outbreak and Peanut Butter Recall:

A full list of peanut butter recalls: http://tinyurl.com/8vaywm Thanks to @FamilyDoctorMag  for finding it.

Here’s a definitive statement about the peanut butter and salmonella situation, issued by the FDA – http://budurl.com/CDCPeanut

Encouragement – Great is His faithfulness; His mercies begin afresh each day!

Small Business Information:

If you run a small business, or perhaps have an adult child or elderly parent who does, this is an excellent list of small businesses who use twitter: http://tinyurl.com/8kmvdq Written by Anita Campbell and found by @Donna606.

Speaking of small businesses, Daiv Rawks pointed out that if you use signs on your car to advertise your business, you’re more likely to get calls if the letters are easy to read in a quick second or two at freeway speeds, which many of the fancy curly fonts are not.

Encouragement – God is the strength of my heart & my portion forever.

Blogging/Tech Info:

If you are blogging or thinking of blogging and haven’t yet tried Microsoft’s Live Writer, here is the latest version  complete with the newest auto-complete tagging feature. I haven’t tried using that aspect but will try to give it a whirl in the next couple of weeks, after my life starts settling down from all the various colds, bugs, etc. we’ve had going on around here. http://tinyurl.com/wlwtags A big thank you, again, to Brandon Turner who does such a great job for Microsoft as part of the Live Write team!

Another quick note for all you bloggers. Did you know that WordPress 7 lets you drag and reorder your plugins, etc.? I didn’t until I read a note from Chris Brogan! I can’t wait to test drive that feature.

If any of you use Google gmail and other products such as Blogger, Feedburner, etc., please be extremely careful if you have to delete one of those accounts. Apparently it can be very easy to delete all the accounts when you only wanted to delete one account! And once they’re gone, it’s almost impossible to retrieve them even if you discover your error within a minute! A friend discovered this, and in researching options for her, I found several other sad recountings of similar happenings. Might even be best to make them private and not use them, but don’t delete them!

I loved this quote that buildthemup found: If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1000 MPG. Bill Gates Isn’t that the truth!!!

If you use Photoshop, here’s an interesting article: 12 Common Photoshop Mistakes, Misuses & Abuses- http://is.gd/fodk – Thank you to Dawud Miracle for that good info

Hey hey hey, Baby Boomers. We’re the hot topic at computer tech shows! According to Marc Middleton at Growing Bolder, “This weekend, the [Consumer Electronic Show] CES hosted its first annual “Silvers Summit” to discuss how older Americans shop for and use consumer electronics. I’ve been using and loving computers since a year after they came out. I’m very pleased that they’ll continue to age well with me!

Have u ever heard of a warm mouse? I hadn’t but I learned. It sounds wonderful for those with arthritis or carpal tunnel. I haven’t tried it but thought I’d pass the info on for others who might be interested. [The site no longer has the information listed but you can go to http://www.warmmouse.com/ instead ] Two ideas for those conditions that I have tried successfully are to use an oversized mouse and to use a wrist brace. I personally love the glove that goes on with a built in pad made of tiny balls. The one I use most often is called a Smart Glove by IMAK

Encouragement – the gift of God is eternal life IN Christ Jesus our Lord.

Here are some terrific Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes:

“Everybody can be great because everybody can serve.” Caregiving found that one.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." Found by Copyblogger.

"Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, What are you doing for others?" Found by Mr. ElderCare.

Encouragement – God’s Word is a lamp for my feet and a light for my path.

Real Estate Information:

Is your city (or your elderly parent’s city) on the list of the top 10 worst foreclosure cities in 2008? http://budurl.com/10WorstForeclsCities

Several of my elderly relatives enjoy reading about Dubai. Some of yours might as well. Did you know that the world’s tallest home is in Dubai-2559 ft and 160 floors! You can fit a lot of grandkids in there http://budurl.com/TallestHomeIn Dubai

Encouragement – Greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world.

That’s it for tonight. Check out Part 2 tomorrow, with links specific to health, elderly parents, grandkids, and more…

A picture is worth a thousand words – but what do you do with a thousand pictures? One love we in the Sandwich Generation often share is that of photos of our beloveds. Thanks to the gifts of all of my talented children, I am truly blessed with thousandS – yup, you read that S correctly – of photos. Pictures of kids and grandkids, of parents and grandparents, and of places we’ve been and places we wish we’d been. They all excel at making good use of those pictures – online, in Creative Memory albums, as part of a dvd, and more. But for those of you who are more like me, OK on computers, but not as gifted creatively, here are some things I’ve discovered that have helped me have fun with the photos too.

GIMP

Photoshop is a wonderful piece of software that is very complicated and VERY expensive. Photoshop Elements is also wonderful and much less expensive. Then there is the really frugal option, GIMP. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program and is a totally free software program that is usually compared to Photoshop. You can find the latest version at http://www.gimp.org/downloads/ . You click on DOWNLOAD GIMP 2.6.0, save it, run it, and voila, a photo editing software package that is, indeed, very close to Photoshop. One slight warning, it can also be as difficult to work with as Photoshop. You know how it goes, the more goodies they build into the program, the harder it is. There are some books on how to use GIMP  (very expensive ones) you can purchase through Amazon. Or you can stay frugal and find some free ones online. I just discovered them today so I can’t tell you how good or bad each one is, but there were some that looked especially good! I found and copied these onto my hard drive to use as reference:

The GIMP website has a manual for GIMP 2.4. The most current version for download is 2.6 so that should cover most of what GIMP offers. You can find that at http://docs.gimp.org/en/

Beginning Gimp – From Novice to Professional is a 549 page manual at Scribd available for free download as well. You do have to sign up to be a member. I had already done that last week for another project so I just logged in and downloaded the PDF version. I started with the text version but that was hard to read, so I would recommend staying with PDF. You should be able to go to http://www.scribd.com/doc/4064601/Beginning-Gimp-From-Novice-to-Professional-eBook , and press the download button. It will then ask you to log in or register. Once you do that, you can then select to save it onto your hard drive (I download all my ebooks into a file called Ebooks in My Documents). I had only recently heard about Scribd and am very pleased with it so far. It looks to be an excellent resource! As they explain in their FAQ, Scribd is “a free, web-based, document sharing community and self-publishing platform that enables anyone to easily publish, distribute, share, and discover documents of all kinds.”  They have thousands of works online already and it’s sure to keep growing.

Grokking the Gimp can be found at http://www.freebieslinkshare.com/Ebooks-PDF-Magz/free-gimp-e-book-grokking-the-gimp-1/ . In case you are wondering what Grok or Grokking means, don’t feel bad. I didn’t know either. After researching it a bit, I have come to the conclusion it means “to understand.” So this book could also be called Understanding the Gimp.

The GIMP cheat sheet, located at http://www.lugod.org/presentations/gimp-saclug.pdf ,  is dated 2003 so I’m sure there have been some changes. Nonetheless, I will be keeping this close at hand as I’m always trying to remember which button does what. If I used the program every day I wouldn’t need it, but since I only do it in the spare time I can carve out between caregiving, grandparenting, blogging, and Awana-ing, I need all the cheat sheet help I can get! 

If you really want to dive deep into GIMP, here is a GIMP users group site, which offers, among other things, a tutorial of 2.6. http://www.gimpusers.com/tutorials/gimp-2-6-new-features.html

Well, that should keep us busy for at least a day. Tomorrow I am planning on telling you about some other great and free (or downright cheap!) options for photos. Until then, I hope you have fun Grokking GIMP.