Yay, Shutterfly! Boo, Photoshop!

At the end of April, Shutterfly sent me an email offering me a free 8x8 album if I bought something (anything) from them between April 23 and 27. That's an offer I can't refuse! And solved the problem of getting a bunch of my St. Louis pictures printed - everyone who went uploaded their photos there and so I could pick and choose from everyone else's pictures. I took plenty of my own but I fought with my little Nikon camera for half the trip. It hit the ground rather hard tonight (by accident!) at my nephew's birthday party so hopefully it will work better now.

I finally got the Shutterfly book done tonight about 40 minutes before the midnight deadline. I added a bunch of extra pages so with that and the shipping to Canada, the total for my 'free' album came to $12.00. I don't think that's bad at all to have almost 30 pages printed and hard-bound into a custom album. I can't WAIT for it to get here. Here's the preview if anyone's interested:

My FIRST photo book!

Sorry, Kimberly - I did end up editing a few of my layouts (read: all) - just little things that would have made me crazy if I would have printed them like that. Since I was in there re-sizing stuff to fit and moving things in from the edges a touch so they wouldn't get cut off - I adjusted some MEAN drop-shadows and changed a few elements that I would never use on a LO now. Minor stuff really but it took me ALL day. I was 99% done and previewed the book, and I noticed that *one* page had the journalling cropped off of the side. So I went back and moved the .jpeg file so it fit well on the template, re-saved and uploaded it again, but it was *still* cut off - so strange! I had to go back to the original layered file and change it but every time I tried to open the file in Photoshop, it would freeze up. Then Photoshop would take 20 minutes to shut itself down, and lock up the whole computer in the process. This went on for over an HOUR, and I was ready to rip out every hair on my head. I finally decided there was something wrong with the file on the laptop, so I had to dust off the old desktop and do it from there - slow and painful but it finally worked, but not before I uploaded that same file to Shutterfly 5 times trying to get it right.

Sorry for boring you with all that - but it was the kind of misery that *has* to be shared. On to better things - maybe a few pictures to share - oh, and speaking of misery - I'll try to upload a video of A. whining because her dad doesn't come home at 5:30 like he's supposed to. She usually can't stand any of us by 5 on any given day so she hangs on my legs and lays on the floor sobbing until her dad gets home. But the thing with him being at school is that he DOES NOT come home, so it goes on forever and ever until I manage to distract her with food, throw her in the tub and then put her to bed.

DH and both of his babies

Since that photo was taken (last week, I think) we've had a lot of rain and a little sunshine so now our lawn and the whole valley is a brilliant green. I can't believe how much it has changed in just a few days. The rain can stop any time now, the girls' t-ball practice was cancelled today and is rescheduled for tomorrow.

I finished another layout tonight - M. has a very well-loved bear called nou-nou, and he got pretty dirty at the lake last weekend. Usually nou-nou isn't supposed to play outside but she took him to the playground and he took a roll in the dirt and was very grey. M. was pretty upset so instead of putting him in the washer, we gave him a bubble bath in the sink. And we had ALL KINDS of help. You can see A. eating the bubbles in one of the pictures. When we had him all clean and towelled off, M. sat in the laundry room and waited for him to come out of the dryer. He's almost good as new again, now!