Maui Reunion -

Last night we got together with the group that went to Maui in December. It's mostly co-workers and spouses and a great group of people.

We enjoyed a delicious dinner, then had the most fun looking at a slideshow of all the photos that everyone took and reminiscing about how much fun we had on the trip.

We also had a chance to present the Uhlmanns (our hosts for the Maui trip) with a photo book as a thank you from all of us. I had the privilege of putting it together for them. It took a long time, but was well worth it when we saw how much they seemed to enjoy looking at it. They were genuinely surprised that we had made a personalized book just for them. I think Steve enjoyed seeing some of his photos in the book since he enjoys photography as well.

And the surprise for me was that the rest of the group gave ME a thank you gift for putting the book together. It was so sweet of them, but TOTALLY unexpected.

I posted a link on the right side of my blog that takes you to the site where you can preview the first 10 pages or so of the book (which is 90+ pages in all). Once you get there, if you click on "full screen" view you'll get a better look at it.

I will say that I enjoyed the process of creating the book and want to do more in the future. It may even replace my scrap booking to some degree. Blurb.com has very easy and intuitive software with dozens of templates available. I think I even read that you can create your own templates if you can't find what you want in their selections. I ended up creating two different books because I thought the first one that I made was too small when it arrived. The second one was easier because I already knew which photos to use and just copied the text and templates generally from the first one.

I did have a little trouble with the file crashing at one point, but Blurb was very helpful and able to repair the file so that I didn't have to start over again, which was a lifesaver. It took a little while to get it fixed, but they upgraded my shipping on the book order so that it still got to me in plenty of time for the presentation party.

Now I need to make a few revisions to the file to make the book specific for Terry and I. I'll add pics from our anniversary and free time excursions and take out some of the "thank you" content from the other. That should be so much easier than starting from scratch though.