Droppings: You Can Sleep When Yer Dead

July 26, 2004

You Can Sleep When Yer Dead

The power went out Sunday night. In the deep black, I frankenstein-walked to find the kids before they had a complete nervous breakdown, while Amanda went to the kitchen and Helen Kellered for the flashlights. Once we were all safe in the knowledge that we still wielded portable electricity, I suggested we turn the lights back off, go out front and check out the stars.

Flagstaff is 10 times clearer than Phoenix when it comes to seeing stars, but with the Purina plant and 24-hour cement factory down the road the sky is still flooded with light. But for an hour and a half Sunday night it was salty velvet. The milky way glowed soft and clean right across the sky. We all layed down in the middle of the driveway and just stared at it. We saw a few shooting stars, and then Amanda got to spend minutes explaining to Harrison that people shining flashlights out their windows are not shooting stars. (He's a little green right now.) But Giselle was all over it. "What's this? what's that? Is that a constellation? It looks like an arrow. Tell me more about stars. Is that one a planet? Is a comet a really big meteor?" I pointed out the dark raggedy split down the middle of the milky way, and explained it was clouds of dust blocking our view of the whole thing, and she pipes in, "I knew it! I knew there were space clouds! Jimmy Neutron was talking about space clouds once..." All I could say was, "Well...that's uh...great..." At least she's picking up something off Nickelodean. But we can't have Jimmy Neutron be the only one teaching her how to fly through space clouds without a helmet to get to the astro-rubies. So I went and grabbed some books from the kids section at the library about constellations and galaxies and the solar system. She polished three of them off last night--and came close to embarrassing me with all the thank yous for getting the books for her. She's primed to learn. I need to pick up the pace on keeping her supplied.

Now I want a telescope.

you know...for her

ehh

I never had a decent telescope when I was a kid you see. And now I shall live out the unfinished business of my childhood through my own children. FEAR MY SECOND CHILDHOOD! okay, maybe the first one never ended.

anyway

Boy have I been tired. Tired like the very flusher on my kamode.

I knew that those horrible last couple weeks of July were coming for 6 months. I took on a freelance commitment back in January. The plan was that it would culminate in a week of terror and peril sometime in July prior to the printing deadline. It was a program guide tabloid for a renewable energy expo that came to town this past weekend. The real crux of what makes for a nightmare layout job is soliciting art files from people. Tabloids are mostly ads, right? So that means dozens of random computer users submitting horrible, frightening things that aren't actually supposed to look like the twice-washed grocery lists that they are. It sort of works out like a rule of thirds:

One third of the advertisers actually follow the directions on the spec sheet and supply a clean, error-free file that makes you smile with relief and beaming pride on their behalf.

Then there's another third that screw up some little thing or other, such as color photos instead of grayscale, or the ad isn't quite sized to the right dimensions.

And then there's the third that brings misery upon any soul unfortunate enough to be charged with escorting their dreck to the finish line. After I left the quick-print biz, I hoped to never see a Microsoft Publisher file again. I thought that laughing about print files set up in PowerPoint was a thing of the past. But no. This sort of thing still goes on. In earnest. With the added bonus of the int@rweb as a resource for people to grab hazy, choppy, lo-res pictures to dump into their rat's nest files.

It's been a couple weeks now, so I've regained some sleep, and lost the edge on my disgust. The job printed like a champ, by some miracle, and everybody was happy when the dust and severed limbs settled. So I'm going to end it here. Thanks for stopping by. Sorry for truancy.

Posted by Jeremy at July 26, 2004 4:59 PM