Travel Tuesday

As you read this, I will be on my way home from a short, but very productive couple of days in St. Louis. 

The purpose of the trip was to finish the work of putting Janet's scrapbooks together. You might recall that my trip a couple months ago was for Jeanne and me to start cleaning out her scrapbook room. That's when we discovered 273 double-page layouts that needed to be put in scrapbooks. We started that instead. It took 8 hours to sort the pages in to categories and get 6 books put together. By my estimation, we were going to have approximately 21 books.

Here's how it landed:

All tolled, we had 15.5 hours in to the project---times 2 (since there were two of us working) for a total of 31 hours. My approximation on the albums was off by 3--we had 24 scrapbooks when we were finished. Plus, we took a little time to organize a few things like putting all adhesives together, all extra scrapbooks and pages, the trimmers and a few other things. There is so much to be done.

Jackie took some of the albums home the last time we were here. But here's how they stack up today!

This was the second time I've ever dealt with top-loading albums. But, I had never dealt with adding the extenders. Jeanne told me it was hard. She came prepared. She has this rubber finger "thingie." I was like, "What's up with this?How do you even have this?" At that point, Jackie overheard us as she was working in Janet's office. She came out and tossed these on to the table:

What? Is this a "thing?" They look like rubber thimbles! I didn't know that this was something people used nor have I seen them for sale in a store. Jeanne said she used them in her work. Not really sure why. Anyway, they certainly helped hold the screw in place as we were tightening it from the other side! Jackie mentioned that her mom had many more of these. Apparently they must come in handy to have them around the house. I can still learn new things every day!!

So, the albums were the main reason I went to St. Louis. But of course, I make the most of my trips to by visiting as much family as possible. I got to see Evie and Josie while we were at Janet's working on the albums. The girls were there--going through some things they might want to keep that belonged to their Gram. We discussed "Camp Aunt Barb" for this year--they'll be down to Nashville in a little over 2 weeks. I'm excited about that!

At one point, Josie came and laid down next to where I was working.

I said, "OMGosh Josie, how can you be laying on that stinkin' dog bed!" She replied that, "Smoky didn't use it and Izzy didn't use it so it's MY dog bed!" I thought that was pretty hilarious! 

We visited my sister, Janice both days for a couple hours each day. She's in a nursing home and is right where she needs to be. She's content and calm. She still knows us and can make sense now and then.

We visited Jeanne's grands: Travis and Nathan and discussed Camp Aunt Barb with them. I bought a coupon thing Travis was selling for his football team. Then I coughed up a few bucks for Jeanne to take all 4 kids to go to 5 Below (a higher end dollar store!) and lunch afterward. 

Then we went to Johnny and Adrea's to see their kiddos--Logan, Rosie and Theo. Darn, I didn't think to take any pictures.

We had great St. Louis food! We met Matt and Sharon at Donatelli's for happy hour. And, of course I had to go to Freddy's for their burgers and a turtle frozen custard sundae. 

Even though it was a whirlwind trip, we got a lot accomplished and I got my "family" fix. Butch and I have another trip planned for the end of July. I'm looking forward to that already!

Okeedokee. That's it for now.