Ayn's Multiple World

Today is the day we've publishing our first book - and the zoo too!

Hi. This is me. It’s an unusual time for me to be writing so I don’t know how long I will be going on. It’s about 5:30 pm on a Monday night before New Years. I think New Years actually falls on Thursday AND on that Thursday; we are going to be getting together with the boys and theirs. There’s probably a bunch of stuff though between now and then that we should try writing out. We’re at odds tonight, because plans aren’t going well with Rich.

The first thing that happened is that he called an hour before he got home and he was telling me to get ready to go bowling. He’d talked about it maybe being a plan last week, but he didn’t talk about it happening today. I told him that he had to give me more time. I told him we’d just finished our major project and that I could get ready, but I didn’t want him busting in the door and pushing me. I would in a few moments get my shower, but I would need an hour for my hair to dry. I told him that we were going at a different pace.

I did work for a few moments longer and then I took my shower and then I went back to the computer and he came home. BUT, he was like busting down the door saying we had to go right away. He had thought that the leagues started at 7 and it was 4:45 pm, but I told him this is exactly what I didn’t want. I wasn’t going to be pushed past our part’s ability to make the switches necessary to get us out the door. We had to take it slow or it would be a forceful switch which makes us crabby. We don’t like being cranky. He said we had to leave in 10 minutes or we wouldn’t be able to go, so we said fine … we won’t go then. I told you I wasn’t going to be pushed.

I walked out of the room for a little bit and came back in and I asked why he didn’t call in advance. I reminded him that when he left the house today he said he might or might not be with his daughter. I didn’t mind either way, but the thing is that I was unprepared. I really don’t like being jumped. There was some smooch face stuff happening in there too, but in general … that was pretty much it.

Rich asked me if I wanted to eat. Our first response was “No.” Then the next response was like, well “Yes maybe.” And last, “Well yes, we’d like to eat.” By then there was no problems left. I went back to the computer and Rich came out after a bit saying something about drinks. I know that’s my cue to get the glasses filled. I gave in with no trouble. BUT then, Rich came out with the plates and turned the channel to be watching West Wing, but there wasn’t anything there. We had the DVR 51% set, but all the shows he had set-up were gone. Yeeks! That didn’t put him in a good mood. I think he was more mope than cranky though – it just kind of wrecked things up a bit.

He turned on an action adventure move and we didn’t like that cuz it scared our parts, so we came back to the computer and we’re leaving him to find a nicer space.

If he wants us over there … you know wears off his funk, he’ll put on something softer that we both like. But, I’m in no rush. I’d like to write now for a bit because I’ve lost my writing time today to the editing.

To skip that story a bit … About 4 pm, we finished the editing for the first book and we placed our order with FedEx-Kinko’s. It was smooth. We took our time though and did it really slow. I didn’t want us to make mistakes. Plus, we were getting into seeing their copy of our work. We are soooo excited to be having this part done. We can hardly wait to see what it is going to look like. Our special instructions had been to make copies of the cover pages in color and then do the other 322 pages in black and white. There were other instructions too. The cover is going to be in better thicker cardstock paper where the regular part of the book is going to be 30% recycled stock paper. I am having them print 7 copies of the book, because I thought I really would like one more copy to send Dr. Woollcott.

He’s the 7th person. I did send Vickie and Vince a copy through the Internet so they can read it from the computer if they want, but not from hard copy. The copies at a 7 unit discount came to almost $40 a book. I think that Kinko’s keeps the copy for up to a year, so if I want more copies I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask people to pay for them. It might be a little tricky because just one or two copies wouldn’t allow me to get the discount which seemed about 8-9%.

I put the comb-binding on the books and plastic covers. The special instructions were to have the covers both facing out. I also went with tabs, which cost a little more, but I’m looking forward to the effect. It’s a little less straight book like, but we have in our imaginations the feeling of looking through the CARF Standards book. It also has the comb and tabs. We put on each “CHAPTER 1” or whatever and then under that we put like “August 2003.” I like that we can get through the book and know where we are at. I had made sure during all the edits to make sure the chapters started on the odd pages, because we’d figured before that’s the only way you could fix properly the tabs. It seemed to go without a hitch.

It was really easy to make the order. You like go to their site, and then upload the work, and then you go to one of three tabs to figure out the paper, the binding, and the hmm, something, I don’t remember. I don’t think we used the last tab. You are given opportunities to look at what your work was going to look like throughout, and all options remained open until you tapped that final button. Even at that, I had to call in to confirm the order because there had been the special orders. The order goes right to the Kinko’s you pick out. My Kinko’s is about 3 ½ miles away.

The notes on the screen tell you the cost, but my cost wasn’t quite as firm because of the extra instruction, but it should be about $260 for the 7 books.

The guy on the phone was real nice. He said that everything had gone through fine and that he would work on it right away. It sounded like he was going to do the job before he went home tonight. He said they were open until 11 pm. Like Wow! That’s cool. The on-line order told me that it would take only 10 hours, so it would be ready no later than 2 pm tomorrow. I’m so stoked! I gave them the instruction to call me if it got done sooner. You better believe I’ll be dressed by 8 am, just in case it means getting out the door sooner to pick-up the books.

I did feel bad about 1 thing. I had put on the back cover that there were 6 first copies and I’d forgotten to change that when I added Dr. Woollcott’s. I would have liked him to see his name on that first run. But, I didn’t catch that until after the order went in. I remember from Dr. Lutmers my psych professor at St. Mary’s that you don’t have reprints just to correct small errors. Like Whoops!

Now I’m going to need settling my mind down in regard to having printed up the book? I’m really glad we didn’t go bowling tonight. I just couldn’t have stood that option. Rich doesn’t want to talk about the book. He’s like well, you printed it … what else – change over to the next thing. Umm, like OH is only ONE of us obsessive-compulsive? I have the copy up as a two-sided document and periodically I flip through pages and read random paragraphs. It’s like … uh-huh, uh-huh … it still SOUNDS like a book!

Ok, it’s a while later. It’s almost 7 pm. I was over in Rich’s world to see what we could shake through there, but he’s still kinda funky. He’s been finding shows to tape and has watched a little news, but now he’s going through a sports channel.

I asked him if he found something to watch tonight. He takes forever to get an answer from. He finally said he might have something, but then we asked what and that about stretched his mind to the max. Yeeks! We’ll check in there again later. But, for now might as well be back here processing things.

We found a copy of the covers and are mentally checking that out. I don’t think the covers are real fancy, but I enjoy them. I’m not going to know for sure how I feel over them until I see them tomorrow. I’m close to going to be now just so I can wake up and it’s the next day. I think this generically is “My Day before the State Fair” frame of mind. I don’t remember anything I looked more forward to than going to the State Fair with the exception maybe of Christmas.

Let’s see … any other thoughts I should be having about the book? Maybe just that I have to be patient - I figure if we can’t stand it much more that we’ll have to start up with the next one. We’re willing to take a SMALL break on that. I think there was something over the last couple of days where we were thinking that it would be something to have gotten through all the books by the end of 2009. That is a real tall order though. It’s helped a lot that we’ve gotten the holiday to be putting through this much. About here we jump ahead and imagine ourselves wrapping the boys’ gifts. I’m going to want to be there for that first few minutes after they all realize what they have.

It could end up positive or negative. Not sure where that one is heading. I think of Maury mostly. I think he is the one son that realizes that I’m doing something special with the books. Maybe the others do to, but Maury is a collector. I think he will want to have a copy of his inheritance. I figure then if it’s not getting published real proper that everyone is as at fault as the other. I should probably too right before we leave for the dinner on Thursday send them the copy on the Word docs - that way if any of them ever make it to a publisher before me, they will have the up loadable copy. If they don’t keep it … well, then we could guess that they just won’t be the one to do the work. *Sigh* might fall back to me. Shoot, well somebody has to make the first 3 million - Hmm?

I thought about that the other day too. You can really get a nice place to live for a half million dollars. I’d sure feel good if I could give each of our boys that start. But, we still need to be working more on writing things that are important enough for ourselves and others to read. There’s only so much of our monetarism is going to excite a reader. Hmm, but we need to be writing what’s on our minds. That has been the secret all along. I know I know … we can progress ourselves here a little bit, hmm?

Hmm, we are doing a lot of “hmming.” Ok, you let’s not get silly, HMMM???

I think we have some more back-up work to be doing. Things have been happening and I don’t think we’re getting them all down. I’m not sure if we got through the trip to Rich’s parents for Christmas and then last night we did something with Rich. We went to the holiday special at the zoo. Why don’t we look at that first?

Rich was the one to come up with the idea and I’m sure that we gave him some trouble, but maybe not very much. I have to think now how that all happened. What was I doing? Guessing that for the most part, we were working on the book - let me concentrate. I need a marker point.

Ahh, we cheated a little bit. We went back to the blog entry from yesterday. We just looked at a couple of the end paragraphs, but we figured out that we’d just been going through with Rich’s new blog and then we were going to edit for a bit.

It was Saturday. Ahh, I remember that part … Rich was with his kids all day … Saturday? Let’s see he got home Saturday about 9:30 pm. I think we went to bed with him, then the day happened and we know that we left the entry officially by about 2 pm, but now putting it together we had posted on Saturday at 2 pm and I guess we didn’t write anything yesterday.

Ok, if that’s the case … I do want to say that we weren’t real happy with Rich at first. He called about 7:30 pm to let us know that he was on his way home from Jon’s. We asked him some questions, but did not get a lot of information as to how things had gone. I think it must have been ok though because he didn’t seem in a real bad mood. But, then just before hanging-up we told him that we had a surprise for him and that we’d been working on a blog so that he could journal his fishy stuff. But, then before anything else he jumped me saying something like he didn’t want anything to do with blogging. I think it got a little rougher than that, but not so much because Rich isn’t ever terrible. But, it was pretty insulting to think that he wasn’t going to make himself even available to see what I’d been able to do for him.

He must have guessed right away that his response was stunning me because I remember him telling me that if anyone was going to talk to him that we could call back in about a half hour. I don’t think anyone called him before he got home. I don’t remember exactly our position … wait … I think just before he got home, we took our shower and we’d lain down on the couch. When he came in we were hiding under the cover. I think that between the two of us – though I don’t remember who took the lead – we went through that maybe he’d cut me off too abruptly. Within a short amount of time we both got to saying what needed to be said and then he was saying something that he’d like to look at what we’d done. I thought that was the nicest thing for him to have said.

He let me sit down at the computer and we opened up his blog and looked through it one portion at a time. I don’t think he realized in the least what we could be doing for him. I knew that he was accepting it somewhat because he showed interest and curiosity. He was also patient in letting me go over the details slowly. I really appreciated that. Even if he never looked at it again it helped me that he would look at it objectively.

All in all, he said some positive things and gave me the impression that he’d check it out again the next day which he did. One of the things that we’d saved was a link to the product manual for the sonar system he was looking at. We saved a lot of things and I think we really surprised him with it all. We did come to an agreement that I would help him coordinate the entries. It wasn’t important to me who did it, just so that he was going to have a space he could come to that would encourage fishy business. I don’t want to go all through that site again … I should say that improvements were made since we updated in the blog, but the differences aren’t real critical to be going through right now.

If I recall right … someone also might have gotten lucky that night *giggle.*

I think that Sunday was pretty much a slouchy day. We were working primarily on the book. Rich watched TV in the morning and somewhere in there he started laundry and we helped him get through it. I don’t remember when exactly, but I know that groceries have been brought into the house. There’s a lot of space I’m not accounting for, but I’m not going to let that bother me too much. I still am not though placing how it was that we got out to the zoo. Somewhere in there I must have taken a shower. I do remember getting dressed. I had put on my tan pants that were too big, but I knew that they’d keep me warm at the zoo. I was showered and dressed before Rich.

I think we went out to the zoo after dinner. Rich had made a great meal of pork roast, sauerkraut and dumplings. He also let us eat a piece of cheese cake he’s been slowly doling out … I don’t know how he hid it from us. AND, we helped watch him as he made a couple of apple pies for after the walk at the zoo. Life doesn’t get much better than all of this.

I remember talking to him on the way over that we’d a chair at the zoo so we could spend time looking at things without going out of our way to find a bench that wasn’t covered in snow. To that, I will say that there were a lot of thunderstorms for the 24 hours before, so almost all the snow in our area had melted with the exception of some of the places that snow plows had piled it up. There was a little grief, but not much. I didn’t seem to have much problem walking the long distance up and down the hill past the tunnel on the North side of the park, but after standing a while waiting for the assistant to help us with a chair my back had started to ache. We had to watch someone cut in front of us and get the last working electric chair. That was a disappointment and had put us in a little cranky space to need using a regular wheel chair. But, the truth was we were glad to have it.

I remember telling Rich not too much later that we were done being cranky. I’m sure that made HIM happy! I wish we didn’t have to be soooo terrible, but we are. It takes us sometimes a bit to get over things.

We took the path over by the cats and saw one of them out. We stopped when necessary or at one point or another to avoid some noisy crowds. About the worst thing is equally spent on drunken young people or really obnoxious kids. But, I guess that’s the nature of the beach. You run into all kinds at the zoo and it’s especially inviting on such a strange night where people are out after dark. That was all getting use to being outside and trying to get over cranky. It’s just that noise is intimidating to some of us. We walked over by the East side of the zoo and the best part was that we came back around where the polar bears were. We might have spent about 20-30 minutes there.

There was first one polar bear and then another and they were pretty active. After a while, one of the polar bears found what looked like a bone – big one – and he brought it down to the water and then he jumped in. Everyone watching was like OOHHH!!! It was very mesmerizing. The bear was very theatrical. He dove in and swam around and turned somersaults and a hundred other captivating things. He was very entertaining. We watched until he finally climbed out and shook him off. Rich seemed just as excited as we were but after a while he seemed to be getting cold, because he recommended heading over to the enclosed parts to have some hot chocolate. He’d brought a thinner jacket where we were much better off with our long wool coat and scarf. Each of us had gloves, but he was still cold.

We found a place in this round enclosed eating area and began to get warm right away. I held the chairs while Rich got the hot chocolate. I don’t know after he got back how much we talked, but I think both of us were tired but in a good mood.

We were looking forward to hearing some music, but we got that part confused and found ourselves at the wrong end of the zoo to be catching the light show. We had thought it was going to be by Roosevelt Fountain like the year before, but we guessed wrong. So, we left.

There was one other part too. The children’s zoo was open to everyone and it was free, so we went through that. We saw some neat animals like cows, roosters, horses, goats and geese. Oh and we saw a hoot owl. That was cool. We later found the reindeer over by where the hot chocolate was. He was laying in an enclosure for photo ops with the group. I thought it would be nice to get a picture taken with me and Rich and a reindeer, but Rich thought not and then we decided that after all it was a very tired looking reindeer. Rich said he was resting up from Christmas Eve.

We of course could understand that kind of logic.

Hmm, I think this is where the shopping came in. We had had the best spot we had ever gotten while parking at the zoo and Rich was pretty sure I’d stay happy if he got a few things including our fudgsicles. Well, you can’t go real wrong with that logic either! So we drove over to the grocery store. He said that he’d only be 15 minutes and so between us, we decided to stay out in the car. Just as Rich was pulling up we got a call from Joe. How VERY VERY nice!

We waved good-bye to Rich and we talked to Joe the entire time that Rich was in the store. That kid is so special it sends chills up my spine. We talked a bit about his relationship with his girl Carrie and we talked about the holiday in general. I was glad to hear his girl was coming out with us on Thursday. Joe sounded so happy. We weren’t real surprised by all of his news, though we felt it was the end of an era. But, not to be more specific it was a very good conversation.

Did I mention apple pies? That is what was waiting for us when we got home. Rich makes them in double mid-size tins and they are just heavenly - Especially, after having been out in the fresh air.

That was that and today is today. Almost the entire day was spent with the book.

Like we said, we finished it up about 4 pm. and you know all that has happened since. Rich talked to his daughter for a few moments and he’s been talking to his friend Bob. They are playing poker together on-line. Rich still insists that we wouldn’t get along with Bob because Bob is so much more active than we are. I know he is right. I think I could be a little more active, but he’s talking about keeping his time for Bob as special between him and Bob, and he’s talking about the part where he says Bob can be mean if things aren’t going his way. I think he’s trying to protect me from Bob, though I’d like to think that Bob could be nicer than all that.

I think too that we need to still talk about being over at Rich’s mother’s house.

But, we’re going to check on that first. Hold on … gotta go back and read from the journal. Whoops, I guess I’ve already covered all of that so we aren’t going to go back into it – needless to say, we had a very good visit and a very good Christmas!

Ok, if that’s been said, then I have to ask myself if there is anything else worth going back into. I think more than anything we’re still hovering over the excitement of the day’s work with the book.

It’s about 8 pm now and I think we have to figure out where Rich is going to be.

Larry King came on and we’re not too interested in his guest tonight. It is an illusionist - Chris Angel or something like that. Rich is just getting done with his poker game. He’s on the phone with Bob again and telling Bob he’s done for the night. Maybe I should post now then and look toward being with him an hour or so.

Seems good? Tomorrow though – we figure that we’ve got the time so I think we’re going to start up the new book. There is no time like the present and we’ve still got time on our hands. Be taking care!

posted by Ann Marie @ 12/29/2008 08:08:00 PM Comments: 0