Hey all,

I've been to Scrap-a-Ganza this weekend! It was great! I went with Bianca and with my mother. As I told you before I managed to finish my SAG album just in time Friday Morning. I had hoped to have it finished earlier, so that I would have had time to also finish all the forum friendship cards, but due to a migraine on Wednesday which made me really sick, I hadn't had time to work on anything that day. So I had to do the last things Thursday afternoon (I took the afternoon off) and Friday morning. It turned out this was the only way to get my album finished. However, I still hadn't finished the forum friendship cards. I did that this weekend. But let's recap the weekend, shall we? I'll do it in several posts, so that you can easily follow it. Let's start with Friday.

Early morning
After I had had breakfast with James and he had left for work (at 06:30 am), I started working on the SAG album again. I wanted to finish that before I went for grocery shopping. I was lucky and had the album finished around 09:00 am. Now that that was done I could concentrate on other things.

Last minute photos
I had taken two photos from myself one week earlier and had sent them, along with photos from my scrap studio, to Pixum. These two photos were especially for the forum friendship cards. Remind never to wait for the last minute to do this! Really...... It's not worth all the trouble. I can guarantee that! Why? Let me tell you? Although the package with my photos should have been sent on May 28th (according to their system), it wasn't sent until May 30, so it hadn't arrived Friday morning. Because of that I had to to take the two photos for the cards with me on a CD to have them printed. I had never worked with one of those printing machines in a shop and now I had to learn how to work with it while I had to do all the other things too! I went to our local supermarket, cause I knew they have such a printing machine. I thought it couldn't be hard, right. Just put the CD in, give the order and have everything printed. Right! Note to self: Read instructions properly before asking on of the employees for help!!!! Anyway, I started up everything and put the CD in the place where I thought it had to go. And surprise, surprise, it wasn't working! So I called one of the employees to see if she could help me. Well, no surprise there, she didn't quite know how it worked either. In the end she managed to have my CD getting stuck in the machine and she had to call someone else for help. So, someone else came. She explained me that the machine had been put there without a proper instruction for all employees, so she didn't knew much either, but she'd try to help me. First she got the CD out. Then we started the process all over again. Right then I happen to notice I hadn't read the instructions correctly and instead of putting the CD in the DVD-Rom drive I had tried to put the CD into the whole where the burned CD's would come out. Can you imagine? Anyway, continuing, everything seemed to okay, finally. I could order 12 prints of each photo, I paid and I waited. To my horror I discovered there were only 6 prints per photo printed. Can you imagine??? Not only had I had paid for 24 photos in total, I really needed those 24 photos too! So I called the employee who had helped me last time again and ask her to fix this. She started calling the service desk from the machine and in the meantime she checked the machine. It turned out, to my shame, there are two compartments where the photos are coming out. How the hell was I supposed to know?!?!?!
Anyway, in the end I had my 24 photos and I could finally started my shopping. Just to be sure I bought a roles of double-sided too, so that I'd surely had enough and then I went home at 10:15 am. I stored away all the groceries, took a shower, packed my tool-tote (read: suitcase) and backpack (with my clothing and other things) and lastly I prepared everything for lunch. After all, my mom and Bianca were coming over for lunch and then we would leave for SAG from here.

The Afternoon

The trip
After our lunch we packed everything in the car and we went to Egmond aan Zee where SAG would be held. At such a time you check everything three times and you still have the feeling you're forgetting things, but we decided to ignore that feeling. According to our checklist we had everything, so the whole event should go well for us.
The trip took us two hours. We expected to have traffic jams, but we were lucky. We hardly had any and we could easily continue to Egmond aan Zee. The only thing we regretted, was the fact we had forgotten something to drink for in the car. But we got over it :)

Checking in in the hotel
We arrived around 15:30h. Last year and the year before that we could easily park on the parking lot from the hotel. After driving around the upper parking lot we saw no place there. We hoped there would be a place on the lower parking lot, but someone else came from there and told us there was no spot either. So, what do you do then? We had quite some luggage and we wanted to park the car for the weekend. That's why I went to the hotel reception to see if they knew where we could park. The girl at the reception told us there's a temporary parking lot ("laden en lossen" in Dutch, it means something like packing and getting things out) where we could park the car, but she advised us to regularly check if there was a spot on the parking decks left. I told her there was no way we could do that, after all we would be in workshops all weekend and we simply wouldn't have time to check for a new parking place. She told us to take our chances and that's what we did. We parked the car on the temporary parking lot and got our things inside.
Unlike last years the registration desk for SAG was downstairs instead of in a desk we passed on our way to the hotel reception. So we decided to check in in the hotel first, so that we could leave our luggage in our room and then go to the registration desk from SAG. We got a nice three-persons room (it looked the same like the one we had last year) and we put all our luggage inside. And just to be sure, I immediately checked the window to see if we could properly open it. Well, we could, but it wasn't ideal. We decided to keep it shut for the moment and see what we'd do in the evening.

Checking in for Scrap-a-Ganza
Last week I had been thinking about following one extra workshop. I had seen the About me Book kit from Lisa Bearnson and Lisa was at SAG to give exactly that workshop on Friday evening. It's a two-hours workshop. In the end I finally decided that, if there would be places left for this workshop, I would follow it. I had mailed Scrap-a-Ganza to ask if I could reserve one extra ticket, but they told to take my chances at registration, because I couldn't register online anymore and they couldn't register me for that workshop through e-mail either. So while we were walking towards the SAG registration desk I was keeping my fingers crossed for the possibility to follow this workshop. Downstairs there was quite the line for the registration desk. It turned out most people in line needed to check in before they had Karen Burniston's workshop that afternoon. Thankfully it didn't take really long, so it was our turn to check in. I got lucky cause although I was told I had to pay another 10 euro's for paying through Paypal, apparently their administration wasn't in order and I didn't need to pay it. (TELL NO ONE!!!) No complaints here :) Of course we got our goodiebag and an envelope with all the tickets for the workshops, the make & takes, breakfasts, lunches and diner. After that we checked for extra workshops. Bianca wanted and extra workshop for Saturday afternoon and mom decided to take the "About Me" workshop too. Bianca already had booked this workshop, so the three of us hoped we would all be able to follow the workshop. And guess what? We got lucky! Mom and I got the last two tickets for About Me and Bianca was able to do one workshop extra with me!!! We were really happy with this! Of course we had to make sure we had all the necessary tickets, so we sat down besides the registration desk to check our tickets. They all turned out to correct, so no problem there :)

Okay, I think this is enough for now. I'll get on in another post! Talk to you later!