Book Commercials & Misanthropic Observations

Headline: Church Secretary arrested for counterfeiting twenty dollar bills

No kidding!

I am taking photos of things like money going down a drain, or being shredded, for my own stock database and for a (possible – I am hoping and cheering for) sermon series on debt. Why I believe this is SOOO important is a whole other blog. Anyway, my point here is that I have legitimate reasons for printing money: I want to take photos that I would never stage with real money.

Apparently I am really good at it, too good for the Federal Government’s comfort.

When I got my images of the front and back of a twenty dollar bill to my liking I decided to make them the right size- so I measured one dollar bill that was in my wallet. –That’s all that’s in my wallet, by the way. Then I went to my image editing program and typed in the dimensions I wanted.

My image goes black (yes, somehow big brother deleted the image) and I get a pop up that says something about illegal use of currency and an explorer window opens to a government web page about counterfeiting. I am in awe. I bow in utmost respect to the Fed. I have no idea how they did it.

It’s all in how you present it

I decided today to refer to my eyebrows not as bushy and unkempt; rather, I am going to call it “the Brooke Shields look”. There, I look more beautiful, like a movie star, already.

It’s summer, can’t we just enjoy the warmth?

I am really sick of air conditioning. We live in WISCONSIN, not Arizona. Yesterday I left the office and worked from home because I was so cold and had just had enough. Actually, I work better and longer at home, but that’s not the point. I had been plugging away at my desk and got up to get a cup of coffee. I walked into the kitchen (which was normal temperature, no air conditioning) and realized how much I did not want to go back into that cold office. I was done.

Air conditioner air doesn’t even feel good, like a fan, it’s stale and cold, like some fake winter.

Book Collector version 5

Yes, it’s here.
What’s New in Book Collector 5:

Full ISBN-13 support

• Search book info sources using 13-digit ISBNs
• Scan 13-digit ISBNs with your Flic bar code scanner
• ISBN-13 and ISBN-10 numbers are automatically detected and converted as needed, e.g. for info sources that do not support 13 digit ISBNs yet

Improved Loan Management

• Print loan lists
• Use Flic scanner in Loan Management screen to Loan or Return books
• Use the Quick Search box to search your Loan History by Title, ISBN or Loaner name
• New Email and Address fields in the Loaner item

Improved label printing- all the better for organizing those bookshelves.

While this may be as boring to you as sports is to me, I am a happy girl.

Blogtherapy

For the record: after writing my last post, I felt so sane and unfrustrated, able to verbalize my thoughts without overreacting. I am not a fan of journaling. With all due respect to any private journalists: I always considered that the domain of middle class teenage girls.

However, I guess I learned it really helps to clearly lay your thoughts out.

Ok, I do not blog about work, so I am treading lightly here.

I am starting to cringe when I hear any phrase close to this “You know what would be really cool? (Insert nebulous video project here)”

What I mean by nebulous is I get directions like. “Don’t make it cheesy” or “make it powerful” or “just throw together a few images”. Do you have any idea what that really means?

The fact is, whoever is saying this actually has something very specific in mind, and unless I can read their mind- which I CANNOT- I will work for hours, many more hours that they realize, show it to them, and having given it my all because I do not like to half ass anything, I am given more nebulous feedback to “fix” it. Meanwhile I have tons of other work that still needs to get done. But because the person who thinks this would be cool just thinks it entails ‘throwing together something’ and has no idea I spent 5 hours on this I end up looking a little unnecessarily cranky.

Now, to be fair, no on knows what it takes to do anyone’s job. I completely underestimate what a Pastor goes through. And no one wishes to be difficult, and I do not want ever to squash creativity for worship. So I’ve decided on some ground rules that should help us all.

If you want a video from scratch you must provide me with the images.
Saying it would be cool to play this song over images of “whatever” is not enough. First of all, you need variety. 3 minutes of pictures of anything gets a little boring. How do I know where you want to go with variety here? And when I go a completely different direction and you do not like it- well, we are both a little frustrated then.

You need no more than 2 seconds per image on average, or it gets tedious.(it’s all about congregational attention spans) For a 3minute 20 second song that’s 200 seconds. You need to collect a minimum of 100 various images and give them to me in the order you would like them. Also- they cannot be 300 pixel images you got off Google image search. They must be high quality. If you want video footage, you must also provide this yourself.

Now when this begins to seem like so much work, that may help you evaluate its importance. We may decide it is very significant and go ahead and do a great job. But now I won’t be working so long on something that wasn’t vital to the service.

Basically this is my fault. I have not really understood myself how crazy this can get. I should have laid the same ground rule I have for web design and PowerPoint work.

I do not make it - you do. I only make it prettier when you are done.

This rule seems to have been accepted without offense and helps us all to know what is expected.

PS Also trust me when I say that the cool effect you once saw at another church is going to take more time to figure out than 3 days. New effects can take months to master- not just creation, sometimes it means new equipment or software and then training the moppits to run it. For example: it took from Feb to Sept 2006 -8 months- to impliment Easy Worship- after reviewing software for over 2 years before that. AND we are still learning it’s quirks. So that’s almost 3 years to effectively move past just using PowerPoint.

Really I am not say “No”. I am saying “yes, we need to grow and have fresh content.” But please realize that it is not just a matter of “whipping something up”. It’s work. Rewarding-wonderful-thankyou-God-for-my-Job WORK.

Out you go- silly books

9 books were eliminated today. 6 were cookbooks, (the Venison cookbook won’t actually go into the garbage; it’ll go to Dad)

1. The Bible as History by Werner Keller- Don’t let the title fool you like it did me- this one is fluff marketed as “proof of the truth of the Bible”. It’s full of long reaches to “prove” the exodus that actually embarrasses me with its lack of supporting facts.
2. The Frugal Goumet- our immigrant Ancestors- I dropped this one in the tub once- it’s hashed.
3. The Bible Promise Book K.J.V. – where did I get this? I can’t understand anything in K.J.V.
4. Simplify Your Life: 100 Ways to Slow Down and Enjoy the Things That Really Matter- Spending time reading about how to spend less time on trivial things seems trivial to me…
5. Fresh Vegetable and Fruit Juices: What’s Missing in Your Body? – As you can see by the title, this book has a bit more of an agenda than just some good juicing recipes. I’m kinda over the “health nut we must evaluate our poop to see if we are getting enough vitamins” phase.
6. The lifechange Cookbook- Paul got this when he was doing a web job for the author. Never cracked it open.
7. Gifts in a Jar: Soups (Gifts in a Jar, 4) – Charming idea. Always seemed like so much work for gifts.
8. The Yeast Connection Cookbook: A Guide to Good Nutrition and Better Health – We actually went on this diet once. It was great for Paul- he dropped alot of weight. I became ill from not being able to find enough calories in the allowed food for my metabolism. Got REALLY sick.
9. Venison Cookbook (A. D. Livingston Cookbook) – What? Kill our own food? Huh?

Cleaning out the library

Believe it or not, 5 beautiful bookshelves in the living room are not enough to hold our library. I do have a “spare” bookshelf in the sewing room for overflow, but it’s time to winnow the collection.

I think a good blog topic is which books I remove and why. If they are in the house, I must have thought at one time they were worth reading. It should be interesting to note which titles are not “re-readable” in my opinion. (That’s one reason I’ve mentioned before for owning books- I am a re-reader).

First toss: The Worth of a Woman’s Words (1999) by Dianna Booher.

The book jacket says: With heartwarming stories and thought-provoking quotes and Scriptures, Dianna Booher shows 41 ways our words can build, heal and encourage-and 29 ways our words can discourage and destroy-challenging women to think about the power of words and to use them wisely and well.

I found this to be about as challenging as “Chicken soup for the soul”. Mushy fluff marketed to Christian women. Why do some expect so little intellectually from us? This kind of material is one of the things that drive me away from cell groups.

How I spent my Friday night

An essay

When I got home from work I called Martha (see photos above) and asked if she wanted to come over and help me classify my books by the Dewey decimal system. This is a true story.

She kindly obliged and humored me as I scanned books and checked to see if the library of congress had them on file, wishing to defer to the national authority. A few times we begged to differ with the LOC classification; for example, 220: Bible is for bibles- any translation, but NOT for bible studies, at least not in my library. In that case we went with the topic of the particular study as our number.

Once we had to call Tim Porter to ask the definition of eschatology, since I wasn’t sure if The End Times Made Simple by Samuel E. Waldron belonged in that section or the one titled Apocalypse. Porter clarified for us that the eschatology is “the Study of Last Things”, whereas apocalyptic literature tended to focus more specifically on the book of revelation. Since this book encompasses so much more we went with 236: Eschatology.

Other controversies included where to classify books on “Christian” Cults, since there is no number specifically assigned to this. We went with 202: Doctrines reasoning that the major differences were doctrinal.

Oh! And we came up with a brilliant method for Biographies. Martha suggested I use 2 lines on the printed label. The top line says BIO and the bottom line categorizes by topic, keeping all my biographies in one section.

A good time was had by all. It takes a good friend to humor me in this. Thanks Farfy.

Christmas card housekeeping

Every year I keep envelopes and cards from Christmas in a file – those return addresses are valuable- until I have a free day (which was today) to make sure our address book is up to date for the next year’s cards. I also like to scan in the family photos and keep them on file over the years. Just sentimental, I guess. See flash album above. Please to enjoy.