This is my warm-up page for the upcoming 2023 Travel Project.

I started with the photo of my dad, taken at Camp Pendleton during Boot Camp in his freshly issued U.S. Marine Corps uniform. I clipped it to the grouped Eudaimonia FotoBlendz 1-2 (adjusted size), then placed on Eudaimonia Artsy Paper 4 followed by an olive-green textured paper, blend mode Hard Light, 52% opacity. I added the text boxes and customized the Travel WordART Cluster 1-6 by changing the ‘Oh’ to ‘One’ using the ‘e’ from another cluster. I also extracted the butterfly from the AP4 and placed above the WordART cluster with a Drop Shadow.

Current Me: I have high hopes and much trepidation to complete this book about my dad’s service in the U.S. Marines during the Korean War in the 1950’s. I’ve always been the family member who takes pictures and documents events. I have photos he took at Boot Camp and S. Korea, and letters he wrote home, plus the telegram to his parents that he had been injured shortly after arriving in S Korea. My hope is to try to understand how an 18-year-old kid would be changed forever, affecting how he eventually raised five kids in the Tough-Love Marine kind of way.

Future Me: I will be grateful I took on this daring adventure and thankful to have been able to share this story with my brothers and their kids. Future Me appreciates how I accomplished such a daunting task. And hopefully I will have learned to be more tolerant, forgiving and understanding of others.