Calendar

I've been kicking the idea around for awhile. Maybe a couple of years in its primitive form, but for at least a year in terms of really wanting to do it right.



And working for a small commercial printer, I'm in a better-than-average position to do a family calendar that looks relatively professional without spending a fortune. Not for free, but doing something like this at cost is a pretty sweet deal.



But I procrastinated until it was almost too late. Almost, mind you. One of my tasks was to get as many family birthdays and anniversaries as possible, to include them as holidays on the calendar. Since I hadn't the foggiest notion when most of these events happened, I had to start gathering this information. And then there was the matter of the photos.



I bought my first digital camera not long after my ex and I separated. When it got broken last June, I felt like I was drowning without it and bought a replacement a few days later. Storage is cheap, so I tend not to delete pictures even when they're lame. I've always been this way, really. As a kid on a family vacation to Yellowstone, I took literally hundreds of pictures with my little 110. I remember all my paper-route (or lawn-mowing or whatever I did for the money) went for film and developing that summer. Somewhere in my house, I still have a four or five inch thick stack of pictures of mountains and trees that don't make me feel anything like the actual mountains and trees did.



The contemporary equivalent of that big stack of 4x6 prints is an external hard drive that has 28,502 pictures on it. That's an exact number, by the way, I'm not exaggerating for effect. And out of that stack, I needed to find twelve awesome shots of my daughters. One to put above each month.

Of course, if this isn't your first visit to Lobster Land, you already know that I could probably come up with twelve awesome shots from a single day. Not every single day, but there are days that would put a good run at it. So I launched Adobe Bridge and started combing through all these folders. When I found a shot I knew I'd want to consider, I copied it to a folder of prospective photos. These were then opened in Photoshop for a closer inspection. A few were culled at this point, but at the end of the search, I had 144 pics that were definite keepers.



What to do? Make a twelve year calendar?



I took a collage approach, and tried to keep pics with their respective months. Not always, but in general, if it's over October, it's a picture that was taken in October. This helped cull the list a bit, actually, because it made me chose between hero shots. I tended to prefer the newer photo if I was eliminating one, but not always. The 'grass angels' pic on the cover is one is from May of 2006.

In terms of holidays, I started with wanting to make sure I didn't miss any legit holidays. After I added Kwanzaa and Hanukkah, I started wondering about Muslim holidays and the next thing I know, I found a couple of web sites that list every holiday ever imagined by a fringe group or trade organization. So I included them. Well, not all of them, but National Goof Off Day (March 22) and Dance Like a Chicken Day (May 14), Repeat Day (June 3) and Repeat Day (June 3) all made the cut. As did Presidential Joke Day (August 11), Race Your Mouse Day (August 28) and National Beheading Day (September 2).



I didn't make up a single holiday. Why would I? January 10 was already Peculiar People Day, so even if I wanted to make things up, the work was done for me.

By now I'm cutting things close. Burning the midnight oil trying to get everything just so. And I knew I needed to go back through and proofread myself for txpos.



I'm not sure how many hours I have in this little project. Easily twenty or more. And I could have done more. As I printed it (on Christmas Eve), I noticed some photos that needed serious color correction. But fixing them would mean going back two steps to before things were flattened out for printing (transparency effects like drop shadows wreak havoc if you don't flatten them, which is sometimes a time consuming effort itself).

Then I had to cut them down and bind them. I'd made the calendar 15" wide and 11" tall, not realizing our spiral bind punch only goes to 14". Ooops. It was too late to change the size of the calendar, so I centered it up as best I could and let the spirals end about a quarter inch before each end. It still works, it's just not as elegant as I would have had it.



Oh, and drill a hole to hang it by, and finally wrap it in plastic because the handling I had to do to finish it was bad enough and I didn't want it getting scuffed any more before it gets to the grandparents and aunt and uncle it's headed to. And to my Ex: I didn't think until I realized she'd sent presents with the girls for me from them that I should have done the same thing, gotten them presents for their mother. If I'd realized I was going to make one of these calendars for her as well, I'd have included her birthday and the birthdays/anniversaries for her side of the family. Still, it's a scad of pictures of her two favorite people on earth.

And really, I take all these pictures and I blog them, but it's good to have another way to share them. Like with my Mom who has never seen this blog because she doesn't own a computer; doesn't even understand why someone would want to.



I might do this again next year, but I'm not going to wait so long to do it. I'm just like the panic-stricken customers we get in the shop wanting to turn their holiday cards in an hour because they didn't realize Christmas was coming again this year. So, I'll make sure and note exactly when this Christmas thing is happening in 2008. I'll just consult my handy Honyock Calendar. Let's see, Christmas...December 28. Damn, I knew I needed to proofread this thing.