Just some little tid-bits for you

Did you realize that when you get done with Challenge Six this week, you'll be halfway done with the race! Now that this steamroller got moving, it's going by pretty quickly, isn't it?

I often have things rattling around inside my head, and occasionally they just seem to fall out. (Sometimes they get stuck, which can really be painful...) But here are some of the things that fell out, so I thought that I'd pass them along.

Not all of you frequent the NDISB Forums to just hang out. (Shame on you!) If you do, you may have seen a reference to this already. Each month, NDISB puts together a huge mega-kit that most of our designers contribute to - typically a pretty good sized package that has some pretty cool stuff in it. A couple of days ago the January Customer Appreciation Kit was placed in the store. A $10.99 value, this mega-kit is available free to you with any $8.00 purchase. That's the equivalent of something better than 50% off! (I was never very good at math...)

And for those of you that said "Man... I wish I'd known about that before I went shopping yesterday", I've got something for you too!

If you go here, you will see all of the free products that are currently available from NDISB! Several designers are currently represented, with a variety of scrapping styles. I daresay, you might have been able to use some of them on some of the challenges that have been issued so far (and perhaps some still to come!). You might wish to bookmark that page of the store as these products will change and you might get to try out some of our other designers' products as well - you know - kind of like taking them for a test drive?

Oh... and one other thing that I was thinking about. We really need to do a better job next year of letting people know what the ADSR is not. Although it is called a Race, it is not a competition! It is a series of challenges, offered up by various digital scrapbooking sites that you may or may not be familiar with, hosted by Natural Designs in Scrapbooking (which you have already come to know and love!). And although we've talked about the Grand Prize, that conjures up the idea that it is a competition with a winner. That's not precisely correct.

What is correct, is that each team that completes all of the challenges by the proper deadlines, then has their name put into a hat. (Or more likely, one of our kids' sand buckets!). And we have a drawing for the Grand Prize. So I guess you could say that the "cost" of the entry into the Grand Prize drawing, is the completion of all of the challenges. No judging. No winners. No Losers. So whether you are a first time digi-scrapper (and we have at least one racer this year whose first layout ever published online was for Challenge One. So for Challenge Three, she had to re-do her Challenge One layout!) or whether you have been at it for years, we hope that you find something fun and inspiring about our little race. And even if your teams' name isn't pulled out of the hat at the end of the race, you will have received lots of scrapping experience, made some new friends, and collected some really cool gifts along the way (which many of you have taken advantage of already!).

So with that, good luck as we roll toward the second half of ADSR Season 4!