Vacation album...

I won't post the entire vacation album here, but I kept it pretty simple. One of the biggest time-savers was printing all of my pictures as 8x10 collages using these awesome digital template pages (yes, I tweaked the template some...cropped to just the photo area and stretched the sizing to 8x10 dimensions). After plugging my pictures in, I had them printed at Sam's Club. I was then able to simply use the 8x10 print directly...no need to mess with a gazillion photos and sizing them initially to print to the right sizes...no need to cut them all down...very cool.

Meanwhile, I printed my titles and journaling for each layout (gotta love when the titles are so easy...just place names for the most part)...typical of me, I just printed everything on plain cardstock. With that and my printed pictures in hand, I just had to add a strip of paper along the bottom and assemble the pages while I was at the crop. Here are a couple:

In addition, I added an 8.5x11 page protector between each layout with memorabilia from that place...pressed pennies, brochures, ticket stubs, etc. Hard to photograph, but this might help explain:

Really nothing too fancy or complicated...Altogether, it came together so quickly and the boys and I are thrilled to already have that album complete! They've been enjoying looking through both it and their mini-vacation albums, and that's at least part of what it's all about, right? :) 

Okay, off to get something done...watching the Olympics all day pretty much obliterated productivity, LOL!

Five for Friday

Feeling random...

1. Yes, I promised pictures of those vacation album layouts. I'm working on it. Have them all photographed but haven't finished cropping and all that as of yet. In the meantime, I did manage to help the boys finish (mostly) their own little vacation albums. They've been so cute reliving it all with each other. :)

2. I have a confession. I have a Facebook account but no real idea how to use it. A friend, ahem, "made" me join, LOL, and I've actually enjoyed reconnecting with old friends who've found me through this. But. I haven't added anything to that profile...I kinda figure that's what this blog is for and have this address there. So, when people leave me messages on my "wall" (I think that's what it's called) I'm not sure what the proper etiquette is...do I reply on that person's wall?...do I email them?...do I reply on my own wall? Seriously. Comments welcome!

3. I've not been posting as regularly here lately...sorry. Nothing in particular going on...just lots of little stuff trying to get life in order and all. ;) Today, for example, I've been going through the boys' toys and sorting stuff to take to the local gently used store. Amazing how many toys these boys have accumulated (and I purge fairly often)...a LOT of it is simply that the things they do like tend to have many pieces and they tend to collect things (yes, I'm sure they get that from me). So. Lots and lots of cars and legos and k'nex, not to mention books and games. Oy. Anyhow, purging...feels good.

4. Asher and Micah had well checks this week...both healthy as usual. (And no shots Yay!) Ash finally broke the 40 pound mark (he's six) which is frankly amazing considering how picky an eater the kid is and always has been. He's still only in the 5th percentile for height (yeah, he's totally gonna blame that on me when he gets older, lol) but finally made it past the 5th percentile in weight, so that's good. Micah, on the other hand, still has no issues with weight. He's at more than 34 pounds now (just turned three, so that's about the 70th percentile)...something his brothers didn't manage until they were five. Honest.

5. And, last but definitely not least, a very happy (slightly belated) birthday to my awesome mother-in-law!! (Her birthday was yesterday...August 7...though it's just past the midnight mark here, it's technically still the 7th there.) We're so looking forward to your visit in a few weeks and have your gift and card ready to give you in person. :)

Okay. That's five so I'll stop. Hopefully I'll have those layouts (likely just a sampling of them) ready soon!

Happy Birthday, Marti!

Today is my good friend Marti's birthday! This past Saturday, I had the privilege of scrapping with her and a bunch of other fantastic ladies at our local scrapbook store. It was awesome. I finished our entire vacation album from our Colorado Springs trip. Yes, really. 43 pages roughly. Woohooo!!! I'm working on photographing stuff to share today (it was overcast yesterday) and will try to post later tonight. In the meantime, thanks to all those wonderful ladies and please go wish Marti a happy birthday! :)

A quick shout out...

I've vented here about poor customer service in the past so figured today I'd do a quick shout out to Camillo at my local Sam's Club for his outstanding assistance today!

Here's the story. I generally print my pictures at home. I took 816 pictures last week on vacation. I'm going to a crop tomorrow and have this crazy idea of trying to actually scrap the entire vacation. So. I decided that printing the pictures at Sam's Club would be more efficient and inexpensive overall. I sorted and cropped and arranged all the pictures into 8x10 collages (28 of them), figuring that will be easier to deal with than sizing all the pictures individually and printing them that way. I did this in Photoshop and know for a fact that each file was sized appropriately (8x10 at 300 dpi). With me so far?

So. I go to upload them to Sam's Club photo website. I've always been fairly happy with my prints from Sam's (love that I can pick them up locally...my Sam's is moments away). I've never been thrilled with their website interface. Usually, though, I'm only doing 4x6 prints and it's aggravating (download time, navigating the shopping cart, etc) but doable. This time, though, trying to order 8x10 prints, it kept telling me that these images were going to need to be cropped. Now, I knew they shouldn't need to be cropped since I made them just the right size, right? But. I went along with it and tried to crop them like it asked. Wouldn't crop to include the entire image. Argh.

Finally I gave up and burned them all to CD and decided to just take them to the store and load them on those machines there and have them printed while I shopped. Needed to go there anyhow. It's all going fine until we got to the store...the two machines that did one hour printing uploads were both occupied. They're hardly ever being used when I go there. I've never seen both in use at the same time. Sigh. So, the boys and I settle in to wait. (Yes, I know we could have proceeded to do our shopping and then come back, but then I'd have needed to come back an hour later and getting three boys in an out of the van when it's nearly 100 degrees outside isn't the most fun thing in the world.)

Anyhow, apparently, though, both of the women using the machines didn't do any sort of cropping or prepping ahead of time and had a year's worth of pictures to go through one by one or something. (Yes, I recognize and appreciate that it is their right and privilege to use these machines at their pace and all that, but seriously folks, it's just common courtesy in my humble opinion to do some of the prep work at home so that you're not at the machine for more than 30 minutes.) Still. The boys and I were doing our best to wait patiently. Honestly, they were very good.

Where does Camillo come in? Well, after we'd been waiting there for about 20 minutes playing "rock, paper, scissors" and the like, he waved me over. He seemed to recognize that I knew what I was doing and asked if my pictures were all ready. I explained my website story and he nodded sympathetically. (He's not a fan of the site either and gave me an 800 number for future "help" reference.) He then ushered me past the "employees only" blockade thing and loaded my images directly to his computer, letting me stand there to ensure that we had the size and cropping correct and that everything downloaded right. With my order successfully entered, (the other two ladies were still at the machines with a couple more people still waiting also, btw) the boys and I headed over to the food court to get some ice cream for them for their patience. (We'd been at the photo area for about 30 minutes overall.) While at the food court, Camillo came over to refill his drink and let me know that my order was almost done. Dude. If I'd had a gift basket or something in my purse, I'd have given it to him. Really.

So, that's my "quick" shout out to Camillo. Thank you from the bottom of my heart! You made what could have been a very long experience at Sam's Club into something so much better and I totally appreciate that you went that extra mile to help me when you could have simply let me wait in line. You rock!

Day Five...

Whew. Day Five. We weren't sure what to expect when we headed for North Pole, Colorado...home of Santa's Workshop. We figured perhaps we'd spend a couple of hours before heading north again. We ended up spending more than six hours there...and enjoying every minute. Let me explain. Santa's Workshop has rides (from kiddie style to big kid fun)...reasonably priced food...specialty gift shops (a boy's shop, a girl's shop, a candy shop, a Christmas shop, etc.)...an actual North "Pole"...and a live Santa to visit year-round. Add to that the fact that the weather was pleasantly overcast for a change so we didn't need to tote drinks with us the entire time, and you've got one rockin' day.

Obviously, the boys loved the rides. That's a given. Not all rides were created equal, though. Rides like this:

were quite popular with the boys...where they got to just sit and ride around in circles and push buttons that made obnoxious noises while pretending to steer. :) Here's another:

Yup, all three loved stuff like that. Asher, however, was the only one willing to ride the "bigger" rides with Nathan:

Aside from this one, they also rode the Tilt a Whirl and some Dive Bomber ride. Noah and I agreed that so much spinning quickly in circles (and at great heights in two of the cases) wasn't our idea of fun. (Micah, too, obviously.) But Asher loved being the "brave" one and totally delighted in his own exuberance all day. Seriously, the kid had a permanent smile. :) It was beautiful.

In the end, we managed to convince Noah to ride the little Sky Ride with us (basically like a ski lift/gondola sort of nice sedate ride not terribly high off the ground but still definitely aerial)...though I had to promise to keep my arm across him the entire time in addition to the safety bar. That was cool. But we simply couldn't budge him in his refusal to ride the Ferris Wheel. It's the highest Ferris Wheel in the world (elevation about 7500 feet). Micah loved it. It was one of his favorites of the day and one of the few rides that we went on more than once. Here are Micah and Nathan's legs below Asher and I (there's an empty and covered seat between us):

Lots more pictures of rides...but that's enough for now. :) After we'd made sure to hit all the rides we wanted to get to, we turned our attention to some shopping (in the Boy's Shop and the Candy Shop, of course) before departing as they were closing for the day. Yup, spent all day there. Before we left, though, we were sure to get this picture:

The boys had just come out of the Candy Shop (note the suckers, which Micah had chomped and finished before we hurried to the exit)...imagine Noah's surprise when he went to lean against the pole only to discover it's actually made of ice! Truly. Very cool. :)

And that's our vacation in a nutshell. Plenty more to say about it, but if I put it all here I won't get the pictures and journaling prepped for the crop I'm going to this Saturday with some friends. ;) Will need to get to work on that if I'm going to get the most pages done, eh?