My previous blog entry describes our arrival Friday.  To top it off, many of the ladies went to a Mexican restaurant around 9pm.  boo hoo!  I LOVE Mexican food but I wasn't feeling well.  I had a growing headache and I couldn't have anymore carbs with my blood sugar.  I stayed behind with 4 others in the Cookie Corner and had a cup of hot tea.  That helped immensely, as the cold ac had been settling into my bones.  Tami arrived with her son and Suzie came too!  Earlier that evening I had met Gail!  Am I forgetting anyone!  I don't want to!  It was so nifty to meet these ladies I've been e-mailing for the last year!  What a delight, but I had to go to bed.      

Saturday morning we gathered for breakfast and I finally met Cathy!  I had had no sleep the night before, and my growing headache last night became splitting by the time I woke up.  While chit chatting I kept an eye on the front door.

Dody and her on-line co-op were to leave for Starbucks so that the rest of us could take care of unfinished business! LOL Finally they left and we all headed to my room. The ladies wanted to see the quilt. Suddenly, everyone started taking pictures of us looking at the front and back of the quilt. Then someone decided we should take a group photo! One person took the same shot with many different cameras. (Remember this, there are many photos of this on may cameras!)

Then we headed upstairs to where the scrapbooks were hidden.

Marsha had made these gorgeous scrapbooks. More cameras came out to take more pictures.  (Remember this!) The one scrapbook was of memories of hilarious threads and momentous occasions on the Loose Threads yahoo group. The other was the signature blocks that were too big to use in the quilt. A week before Dallas, Marsha had asked if I could get 8x10’s of the quilt front and quilt back. I finally gave them to Marsha and she was mentally planning to crop them and put them on scrapbook pages as if they were hanging on a wall. She wanted the picture of the quilt front to go in front of the scrapbook of quilt blocks. The picture of the back of the quilt was to be the last page in the scrapbook.  How clever! But she had not brought cardstock. So we started researching the phone book for a scrapbook store and finally Tami and I found out that Michael’s was around the corner. Woo hoo! In addition, a lot of the ladies wanted bottles of water, so we would swing by a WalMart and get some cases. Because we’d need to work on the scrapbooks later, adding late pages (like mine and many others) and getting the 8x10’s into the book, we decided to move the scrapbooks to my room. Currently they had been in the room across from Dody’s and that is just too dangerous! LOL A few of us took off in Suzie’s van while the rest stayed behind.

For 30 minutes we drove around looking for Michael’s. Tami was using her palm pilot (or whatever that doohicky was-lol) and we were driving around and around. Then she made a phone call and Michael’s was no more. Ohhhhhhhh, maybe it used to be in that building that was going under major renovations. So now the search was on for a Wal Mart. They are on every corner of America, right? Not in this place. Tami was pulling up info from her PDA (or whatever that is…I had wanted to learn about those gadgets while I was there but I was too busy looking for water and cardstock and hiding presents from Dody!  LOL) Finally we pulled into an AutoZone and Tami popped out to get directions. Before the clerk could write them down, a customer said he’d lead us there! Hooray for him! I don’t think we would have ever found it if it weren’t for him! And on the way we found a Michael’s! LOL We had realized by now that WalMart sells scrapbook supplies (duh-lol) and it was getting close to lunch and I was not doing too well with my blood sugar. We all decided to do one stop shopping at Wal Mart. As we pulled in to the parking lot, the guy in the car waved to us as he drove on! Goodbye Mr. Hero!

Somewhere along the way one of the ladies got a phone call from someone in the other group, who was going to Gaylords for lunch. We had driven by Gaylords on the way and we knew that was the lunch plan. (Yea, at least we knew where Gaylords was!) I think it was Dody on the phone asking where in the world were we! The lady on the phone said we were looking for water. I could just imagine Dody asking a million questions on how difficult could it be to find water? (I know I ask a million questions; that is why I constantly fretted Dody would ask a million questions.) So I had a back up plan. You know the cowboy song, where you sing in agony, "water…water…water." I was going to do that little goofy routine if I needed to and make a joke that Texas is in a drought right now. Thankfully I never had to go that route.

We got our scrapbook paper

and water and we were off to Gaylords! Wow! Gaylords was something else! Everything in San Antonio is big. But everything in Dallas is HUGE! And there was a lake around it! I was exclaiming about that and someone was teasing me that it must be merely a Texas tank! Yes, it probably was. Texas is in such a drought that all the water of Texas must be in that tank!

We finally met up with everyone and there were more wonderful ladies to meet!  I finally got to meet Beth!  She lives only 3 hours from me!  And she brought her friend Tonya!  And Guinever arrived!  Woo hoo!  We had a terrific lunch!

This guy came and did hand tricks for us! 

I was glad when he came to our table!

Dollar bills and apples came out of nowhere!

Then we walked around.  

Here's the cute little guy looking at one of our Longhorns! 

This was a model train track...

A cool western town!

This is a replica of Palo Duro Canyon...

Here's the fascade of the Alamo...

The Six Flags of Texas...

The humongous lobby...

Then back to the hotel to work on the scrapbook pages.

Then Marsha got a phone call from Corrine. Dody was on the loose! She was going room to room collecting memory cards from our cameras to download all the pictures of the weekend onto her laptop! Uh oh! We were on the third floor, so it could take her a while to get through all the memory cards on the fourth floor, where everyone else was staying. In the meantime we put out the "Do Not Disturb" sign. Whenever anyone knocked to come in, we always looked out the peephole first to be sure it wasn’t Dody. I said if it is Dody, we’d ignore her! LOL We would just tell her later we were all exhausted and were resting. The ladies didn’t believe we’d get by with that. I assured them that Dody already knew that morning that I had gotten no sleep the night before and had a splitting headache, so she might actually believe us! Also we had the cute little 14 month old in our room and he WAS taking a nap!

Then I had a horrific thought! There were pictures of the quilt and scrapbooks on those memory cards that had been taken earlier that morning! When I told everyone, all of our eyes got really big. We found out later, most of the ladies were good at refusing to give Dody their memory cards. Except for one sweetie who made me laugh all weekend. She had been in the room with us that morning, taken pictures of the gifts, had been hanging out with Dody in the Cookie Corner in the afternoon, and did give her her memory card! There were over 800 pictures on it. While Dody was downloading the pictures, this lady had a revelation of what she had just done!!!! So she managed to non-chalantly direct Dody to look at only a certain set of safe pictures of the weekend. So yes, Dody had THE pictures on her laptop the whole time and the ladies managed to divert her attention so that she never saw them! Whew!

Finally the scrapbooks were done! We hid them. Whew! I can breathe again! We prepared to meet the ladies to take the shuttle to the restaurant. This is where we’d meet a lot of other ladies who live in Dallas. As soon as I hopped off the shuttle I saw a lady standing there and she cried, "Laurie!" "Gilda!" She is one of my fellow moderators! We hugged and hugged. We had lots of new friends to meet, Di, Lori, Susan, and Rebecca! I didn’t know them very well, because they don’t post much, but we hit it off instantly and had a wonderful time.

While standing around and waiting, Melanie from Hawaii walked around putting leis around our necks in the traditional Hawaiin style. Here I am getting mine!

She and her family had handmade a vast assortment of these gorgeous leis. She had each one tagged and it was amazing how each one perfectly coordinated with what we wore and who we were.  Mine was my favorite color, pink!

There Melanie goes, handing out more!

We had a marvelous dinner! I got to sit with Wendy, my secret sister. We split a steak and it was perfect! Wendy and I had a terrific time talking just about everything and one of her stories really sent me into stitches at lunch and dinner.

Finally, the lady we had all been praying for, Pam, arrived! She had been on standby all day long. Bad weather had bumped some flights and therefore her position on the stand by list.

Then we went back to the hotel. On the way, Guinever had asked to see the scrapbooks because her sister had done the pages for her and had sent them directly to Marsha. So while Becca and Guinever were hanging out in that room, I was with the others in the lobby. Dody had wanted to do a picture of all the moderators and Becca was missing. So I went up to get her and Becca was already in her pajamas. Becca was laughing at the idea that she would have to dress again when she was ready to be comfortable. I had noticed Guinever still looking at the scrapbook on my bed. Without thinking, I went back to the lobby and told Dody and Dody said, "I’ll go up to get Becca. What’s your room number?" I was in major paralysis. To have come so far. Then Corrine piped up and said she’d go to my room. I liked that idea better so I looked at Corrine and said that sounded great. Then Dody increduously looked at me and said, "I cannot come to your room?" I was speechless. I melted. "Of course you can." What else do I say? They left and I whipped out my cell phone in a major panic and tried calling Becca but the number wouldn’t go through. Corrine told me later that she flat out told Dody she could not walk into that room. Anyway, Guinever and Becca had already made their way downstairs and had joined us in the lobby after they had left. As I’ve been typing this, I realize what a fool I was. Guinever is a moderator too! Duh! She helps me moderate the year 1 list and has been doing that pretty much full time as I’ve handled the receiving of the fabrics, sewing the quilt, etc. All I had to do was go to the room and tell both of them about the photo op for the mods, put the scrapbook away and we could have all walked down with Becca. Sigh. Why did I not think of this? Nerves from keeping secrets, lack of sleep, splitting headaches…can I claim that? I am simply kicking myself now. But it all worked out. Dody never saw anything. I just feel bad because I had offended Dody when she thought I wouldn’t let her go to my room. That bothered me all night long. I just had this pit in my stomach all night. Sigh.

We got the moderator picture!

Then we talked about how special our yahoo group was. Different ladies gave their testimonies of what a difference our support group has made in their lives. Some ladies were new to Tapestry and this geTOGether cemented the deal on continuing on. They knew they had a great support group. Other ladies had been able to meet face to face with users and get practical questions answered on how to implement Tapestry.

Then we talked about the agenda for Sunday. We made sure we had enough cars to drive us to Gilda’s house. We were to have an icebreaker. LOL Then a brunch. Then praise and worship. Then a devotion. After that…games! Dody couldn’t wait! She loves games! And she wanted to win! She couldn’t wait to see what the prizes were! Now for those of you who don’t know, the games were merely a hidden agenda. In reality, that is when we were going to gift Dody. But she didn’t know that and she went on and on, getting excited about playing games. We were all playing along with her, laughing (at our private joke) and encouraging her along! It was a hoot!

She is so much fun! And throughout the day she’d get more socks from new ladies who arrived. She’d make a big deal out of each one, still. (I wonder how many pairs she actually got!) She’d yell out, "Everyone, look, more socks! Imagine that!" Yes, just imagine what would be coming just around the corner! LOL