I'm back!

I can not believe how quickly the past three days passed! It was a terrific weekend, though. It just went way too quickly.

I got up at the butt crack of dawn on Friday morning, loaded up the car, and was on the road by 7:00 (which included a trip back home after realizing I forgot my coat). I just leisurely drove down and made a few stops on the way. Once for breakfast in Woodburn, once in Salem to pick up a couple of letterboxes, and then a quick stop in Albany to pick up one at the library. How fun is that? I made it down to the house (which is south of Newport) just before 1:00. I thought I would be the last one there, but it turned out I was the first one there. So nice! Christine showed up about a half hour after I did. Michele, Ritha, and Elaine stopped in Lincoln City to shop at the Outlet Stores and made it there about 3:00. Charlene and Kathleen got there about 8:30. Char picked Kathleen up at the airport on the way to the beach. She had been in Disney World with her family for Spring Break. I think she needed a vacation from her vacation, so she came along.

The weather was typical for the Oregon Coast in March - both nice and nasty. Friday and Saturday there would be periods of beautiful warm weather, followed by quick bursts of wind and chilly, pouring down rain that only lasted a few minutes (usually when I had just found the letterbox and was stamping in to my log book). Sunday it rained almost all day. It made driving interesting. I must have used up half my reservoir of windshield wiper fluid on this trip. Good thing I topped it off before I left. Not such a good thing that I washed the car before I left.

I took a bunch of pictures of the house before everyone came and we messed it all up. What a great house! You can see it at http://www.agatheringplace.net/. I’ll be posting some of my pictures here later. I need to figure out how to do the photo album thing like Deb has on her blog. Anyway, the house was really great. It is on the beach, but you can’t get to the beach from the house. It’s on a 25 foot high cliff overlooking the beach, but you can still see the ocean from the living room. It has 5 bedrooms, 3 baths, a huge great room upstairs, and a big porch with a hot tub. The beach access is about a quarter of a mile down the road and very secluded. Even though there were a gazillion people driving around in Newport, there were hardly any others on the beach and only a few staying in the houses around us.

Once everyone arrived and settled in we started dragging out all of our scrapbooking gear. Three of us were doing digital scrapping, three were doing traditional scrapping, and Kathleen was knitting (she’s a big scrapbooker, but didn’t bring her stuff since she came straight from the airport). I took every scrapbooking item I owned, which turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. I was working on the pictures from our Mexico cruise (yeah, that was in 2003), but was having problems finishing anything. I don’t know why, really. I kept getting distracted by other things and couldn’t settle down and focus. Too many choices, I guess. I did a couple of nice pages before I decided to put it aside to work on something else, but started going through all the pictures I brought and showing them off to everyone. I used to be so much more interesting than I am now!! The pictures I brought were all loose ones that hadn’t been put in an album, and there was quite a variety. There were wedding pictures, cruise pictures, lots of camping and beach trips, pets, Christmas, Easter, birthdays, and all kinds of interesting ones. I had divided them up by year into two boxes, and had a lot of fun looking at them. I liked seeing us all young and skinny.

I learned something for next time. Plan what you are going to work on and have an idea what you are going to do with the pages before you go. Taking everything I owned, and everything I wanted to scrapbook was too much. It was nice to have all the supplies and paper and stuff there, but I had too much to work on to really settle. Christine had a plan for her scrapbooking and did 20 pages or more! Show off. Michele and Charlene were learning Elements 4.0 and experimented with different pages. Michele downloaded pictures from everyone’s digital cameras and made some pages of our weekend right there. I’ll post those later, too. Ritha puttered around with some digital pages, which surprised us all. Whenever we get together to scrap at her house (she has the best stuff and a room dedicated to scrapping) she is so busy taking care of all of us and helping us with ideas that she rarely ever completes a page. Elaine, who is a new scrapper, did just a couple of pages, but they were amazing! She spent a lot of time making die cuts and cutting out letters with Ritha’s Sizzix machines (man, are those cool!). She did some really cool stuff. I probably should do that too.

One thing we have to do next time is have a “show” at the end so we can see what everyone did. I was so busy with my own stuff, I didn’t get to see a lot of what the others did.

After a while I found a bunch of BC’s baby pictures. He was such a cute kitten. I got really sad looking at them, since Sunday was the one year anniversary of his death. I thought about starting a book for him, which is something I have always planned to do for all my pets, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it this weekend. I had to laugh at some of them, since he documented being such a little brat to Sweet Pea.

We each had a meal group that was in charge of one meal’s preparation and clean up. It worked really well, because no one was stuck in the kitchen the whole weekend. We took turns taking care of each other and it was just really nice. I thought it might be awkward to vacation with co-workers, since I had never done it before, but with this group of ladies it was so comfortable and nice. We made fun of each other, teased each other, and were kind to each other. It was like what I picture being with a bunch of sisters would be like. I can’t believe no one thought to take a group picture. Duh!

Sunday came around too early. We all pitched in to clean the place, and haul all the junk back to the cars. Before we knew it, it was time to go home. I drove home through Lincoln City and picked up a few letterboxes on the way home. It rained most of the way home and traffic was heavy. I got stuck in traffic on I-5 for a while because of an accident, but for the most part it moved right along. Boy was I pooped when I drove in the driveway at about 5:00.

I can’t wait to do this again. We are already planning another weekend in November, exclusively for digital scrapping. I’m counting down the days!