revisions, revisions, REVISIONS oh, and more revisions

I'm beginning to understand why Marianne said this would be a 3-5 year endeavor total, yikes! Don't get me wrong, I AM getting SOMETHING accomplished, but I sort of feel like I'm trying to move an ocean with a drinking glass. I'll elaborate-

Last week from Monday to Thursday I buzzed along like a happy little hummingbird fixing the "Country Called Heaven" course Spanish, other than some cantankerous fonts, it's really going quite smoothly. So I said to myself, "this is GREAT I'll get this whole course done by the end of the month!" however a little thing called revisions came creeping over the horizon. The first book took about 3 revisions- which now means we can send it to the Spanish speaking people at our Kansas branch to proof read- hopefully they will like everything and we can go to print (please, oh pretty please!)

I say this because the "Life of Christ" course in Spanish was designed when my parents were graduating from high school with paper and glue- the dreaded "paste-up" my professors all spoke of with a sort of hushed demeanor when chastising us for complaining about some difficulty with our computer programs. Anywho- there are NO digital files of them ANYWHERE, nada- zip. Which brings us to:

Heather's 4 Step Method for Text Extraction:
1. Scan each page of the document (with a really quite noisy scanner, Marianne agrees)
2. Once saved as a .tiff file (which is done in one fell swoop upon scanning) I drag the file over to the Acrobat Reader icon (this is what I love about Macs- instant file opening!)
3. OCR- this stands for Optical Character Recognition- which I believe is an art rather than a science, as artful borders, very large illustrations, small squiggly text, and the assorted é, í, ñ, etc. characters all confuse it.
4. I select the text and paste it into a Word document where I compare the text on my screen to the text in the book and fix the weird hieroglyphics so a normal (Spanish-speaking) person can actually understand them. I can now alt+e, e; alt+e, i, and alt+n, n, with great speed (where was this knowledge when I had Spanish class?!)

Okay, at this point I sit back, take a deep breath and smile- I have all the text necessary for one lesson booklet- Hey, it's a big deal to me! Now I can play :)
The only trouble is, after 2+ days of looking at one booklet in-progress, I can be totally, 100% convinced I have it formated perfectly- only to print it out and have Marianne and myself locate 10-15 rather obvious errors in about 5 minutes *deep sigh* so it's back to the computer. I've been assured this is normal, and it is why it takes so long to get this stuff done, but I'm astounded that I can actually miss that much- I spent this afternoon staring at a booklet I had already been over about twice with eyeball wrenching intensity- and lo and behold! I found about 5 more errors*
*error- in graphics work this can be a weird hyphenation, inconsistent spacing between lines of text, awkward spacing in between words, automatic vs. manual ...'s and in Spanish punctuation rules are just different to begin with, so I have to remind myself that the period goes outside of the quotes.

This is just one course in Spanish mind you, we have at least 3 more really old Spanish courses to do. After that we will update the Portuguese and then I think about 5 other languages after that- though they may not have the scope of lessons the Spanish does.

So to wrap up, my greatest lesson learned thus far is that, much like in my Christian walk, graphic design on this scale is a constant process of incremental improvement. I cannot expect to get it right on the first try, though I should always strive to, and sometimes it just takes the experienced eye of someone other than me to see where I have fallen short and then go back and make it right. Yes, I do believe God is teaching me patience, persistence, and grace via 40- year old Bible lessons in Spanish.

Well lets see now that I'm settled in

Hello to all of you who are probably wondering if I'm ever going to update ANYONE. Don't worry- it's actually been on my mind quite often over the past 12 days! The folks down here are great, so great in fact that they saw fit to play "pass the Heather" my first week down here for dinner so they could get to know me better. It was fun but very busy. That and I was living out of a suitcase for my first week- but I was happy to be with people and not in a new house all by my lonesome trying to guess if the food in the fridge was still good :|
But that is not the case today, last night after work I packed up my bags yet again and plopped myself back down in Dix Lodge in my basement room. Which is actually quite cozy with the little white light on, so I think I'll like spending my evenings here.

The view from 7 days out

So by now I'm not so entirely stressed out as I was last Friday when I first started making a formal list of things to be done. (Yes, I actually typed up a list with check boxes and everything.) A HUGE praise is how my support is coming in! I've been telling people again and again that when the Bible says "Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen." (Ephesians 3:20-21 ) that it feels very real to me right now. At the beginning of this whole thing my prayers were something like "Yes, I know You own the cattle on a thousand hills, yes I believe You want me in Georgia, so yes, I know You can provide the funds, but honestly, Jesus, I really don't expect You to give me $6500 in 4 months- so as long as you can make sure I don't go completely broke down there, we're good to go." But now about 4 months later, just about all the funding I will need for the year has already been given or people have pledged monthly amounts- and I find myself asking: "God, why did you still want to bless me like this even after I didn't expect you to?" And I'm quite humbled.

So on to the actual moving- next Thursday night promises to be an evening of strategic packing and cramming of epic proportions, as I'm allowed to take my art supplies with me as well- and while I've joked that I've carried my studio on my back the last 4 years, the actual set up takes up a bit more space than that. For all of you who know I've shared half of a smallish bedroom my whole life- I'm actually getting a small cluster of rooms more-or-less to myself! Yeah! as in a bedroom and another room and a bathroom... I haven't fully processed that yet...nope, not even close. In fact I get visions of myself crammed into a smallish corner with all my stuff crowded around me simply because I'm used to life that way. Yet I'm blown away by the blessing of having room to really spread out my personal things and my art supplies for the year.

The other new and exciting development is that I will be plunked down in Georgia in a 14-bed house BY MYSELF for the first 10 days- yep, the woman I'm living with goes on vacation the day I get there. So I get visions of myself raiding her cupboards to locate a frying pan and some pepper so I can fry an egg for breakfast. Considering I'm also used to living with three other (delightful!) people in my business 24-7, I'm not quite sure how to process 10 days solo- so I'm happy I'll be at the mission doing graphics work from 8-5 during the week with other mission people a quick shout down the road. Actually, when I think about it, the house may be quite interesting as she has a dog, a cat, and two birds on the premises- oh! and she has a garden! This makes the veggie-monster side of me quite happy. That about wraps it up for now- I'll be sure to give everyone a holler after I get myself at least marginally unpacked.