Calendar craze

My husband once observed, “Joan, when you do something, you really do it.”
I stood there with my mouth open – all I had done that day was throw together a couple meals and half listen to be sure no child was in major trouble while I spent hours reading a very absorbing book.
“All I did today was read,” I mumbled.
“But you really did it,” he countered, refusing to be wrong.
I recalled that conversation in the wee hours of the morning last week as I printed out the last pages of a personalized calendar – my gift for my sister’s 50th birthday.
I thought I would whip out a family calendar with copies for her and her two sons before supper on New Year’s Day.
I thought wrong.
At 6:30 a.m. I began pulling pertinent pictures from my albums to scan into the computer.
Mid-morning I called and asked her for a list of everyone’s birthday. I didn’t bother to explain why I needed them, that would spoil the surprise.
I can make our computer create a month – with special days added – in a couple minutes. I could, but that’s without time spent finding a romantic icon for Valentine’s Day, a daffodil for the first day of spring or adding a watermark on the January page with the birthday girl’s name in my choice of color, tint and word density. With 12 months and 50 pictures to choose from, the hours ticked by unnoticed as I hunched over the computer screen.
Several businesses do personalized calendars for not too much money and a lot less stress and one picture per month. I had to have more, much more. I averaged six pictures per month, January had all 16 of my sister’s baby and school pictures.
By midnight Saturday I placed the last picture for December and collapsed into bed promising to tweak the details before my Sunday afternoon nap
Sunday afternoon, I tweaked and counted pictures. I did not have enough pictures of a grandniece and her mother. They promised to e-mail me some.
I began printing out triplicate pages of the six or seven months I considered complete.
The computer ran out of ink.
Monday, they e-mailed 14 pictures and told me to, “choose the ones you like.”
I liked all of them. I found more pictures of the other family members on a family website.
Tuesday evening I began reworking eight of the months’ pictures. At 11:30 p.m. I finished. My husband said he would print the pages out the next day.
The printer slowed way down to produce the quality we asked of it. The printer head added streaks of blue to the pages. I went to bed while he fixed it and finished up. He crawled into bed around midnight. We had five calendars – a couple extra for me and my dad.
As soon as I was sure he was vibrating with sleep, I slipped out to the computer to create and add cover sheets and end pages with addresses and phone numbers. I figured that if I only used black ink, it would not take long.
By 3 a.m. I had finished five, 14-page calendars with 80 different shots: We had a computerized scrapbook and called it a calendar.
I dragged myself off to work the next day while my long suffering husband had the pages bound with a spiral holder, packaged and overnighted to my nephew.
Okay, I didn’t get it done in a day. But – having done one now, I am sure we could do one for our family in no time at all.