A Day Spent Learning the Hard Way

I thought I was retired.

Today I spent working on the week-at-a-glance style calendar I want to have available for next month some time. Fever Dreams cartoon calendar. Fever Dreams runs in the Piker Press each week, and I've finally got enough art for a year's calendar. Great! Wonderful! Should be easy enough to format...

I showed the right-hand page template to the Editor, just to see what she thought. "Bells and whistles!" she exclaimed (more or less). "Can you like, put a nifty little sidebar right here so I can take notes in the margin?? I take notes everywhere!! And on the other page, can you put a little graph with a place for checkmarks???? I CAN HARDLY WAIT TO GET THIS!!!!"

Slinking away, trying to think of things I can feed her so that she outgrows her pants this winter, (thanks, Lydia -- great idea there) I returned to the studio to tackle Word's miserable excuse for graphics. Hours later I discovered that once you have inserted a "table" (which is nothing more than a box with lines) you cannot copy it to another location for use, nor can you insert a page before it or after it without getting lines and dismembered boxes all over the &%##!**! place. After losing most of my hair to aggravation and stress, I decided to try to make a grid in Photoshop Elements -- then I could insert it as a picture and copy it as need be. My picture was a bit lame, but I thought it would do, and went on to format the odd-numbered pages with the inserted picture graphic. For the whole year. That's 108 pages, BTW.

And then, after it was done, and my eyeballs were fried from looking at the screen and my blood pressure was ungodly high, I realized that there was an easier way to do it that would look better, too. Crap.

I thought maybe I could delete the graphic and insert one that was sized exactly the same, but nooooooooo, Word won't do that. Nothing I could do would change it, either. Scuh-rood. I deleted the whole damn thing and started over.

This is what I have so far: January, 2006.