Uncle Roger's Notebooks of Daily Life

What's My Excuse This Time?

Not that anybody cares, but I actually do have a reason why I haven't posted anything in a while. It's calendar time again.

A couple of years ago, I gave my mother-in-law a custom made calendar featuring pictures of all the grandkids. I also gave my sister-in-law one featuring her two kids and Rachel got one with Jared and Sara. Last year, I put together one with pictures of all the grandkids from the family trip to Calistoga and gave that to Rachel's step-siblings. And, I put together one for Craig and Kari with pictures of the two of them.

Yeah, you're thinking, so what? Kinko's, twenty bucks. Well, yeah, that would be the easy way to do it. I'm not that smart, however. I have a tendency to look for the hard way of doing things. So, no, I didn't just upload some pictures and go pick up the calendars in a few days. I hand built the calendar pages in a desktop publisher, adding birthdays and anniversaries for family members as well as holidays of personal interest (such as gay pride day and holocaust remembrance day). I set up a standard layout for the images including the date of the picture, the image number and set, and a title.

Once I had everything printed, I took it all to OfficeMax to have them bind it, drill a hole for hanging, and add a clear plastic cover and black linen backsheet. At least I didn't buy a spiral binder and do that myself (although I did pick up a very small hole punch). It was a lot of work.

The second year I did it, I at least had all the birthdays set up and the layouts ready, but I still had to put everything on the right days. That includes identifying or verifying the dates for holidays that move around. Some holidays are the same date (July 4), some on the Nth occurrence of a day during the month (Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November), and some just seem to wander around on their own calendar (Rosh Hashana).

Here's a tip: Never do anything, unless you are willing to continue doing that thing for the rest of your life.

Now, everyone expects a calendar. So, I have to come up with The Official 2006 Grandkids Calendar for my mother- and father-in-law, the 2006 Calistoga Kids Calendar for the steps, the 2006 Cassie and Jake Calendar, the 2006 Jared and Sara Calendar, and (in a few weeks) the 2006 whatever-they-name-the-kid Calendar (assuming I can get enough photos of it.) This year, at least, I'm not printing them myself -- my printer died. That means less work for me, but it's also incredibly scary -- I don't trust anyone else to do things the way I want them done.

The hardest part of all this, however, is not getting the dates in the right place or lining up the photos just right or anything like that. It's picking which pictures to use. The Calistoga Kids calendar is the easiest -- we are all together there for four or five days, so there are only a few hundred photos to go through. I do have to make sure each kid is equally represented throughout the calendar, though, so no one gets their nose out of joint. The other ones, however, can have pictures from any time during the past year.

That means going through more than three thousand five hundred photos to pick the right thirteen images for each calendar. Yes, you read that right, 3,500+ photos from the last year alone.

That takes time, believe you me! And so, I've been busy. I dropped off the files (PDF's) for the Calistoga and Grandkids calendars at the printer this afternoon and finished up the one for my sister-in-law tonight. (My mother-in-law's holiday get-together is on New Year's Day, so they need to be finished by then.) Rachel's will take a little longer to put together, but she understands. Now, perhaps, you do as well. You see, I've been a little busy...