Tuesday, August 3, 2004

“When we parcel heaven and fence eternity … Lord, don’t let me live to see.” –connie dover, ‘who will comfort me?’
RAY BRADBURY IS OUR HERO! *spent her morning up until mother found out she was awake reading Martian Chronicles*

Know what job Mother gave us when she found out?

Okay, Mother and one aunt of ours, since they grew up on the Ancestral Home, feel it is their duty to run the family reunion each year. Which is silly, because neither lives at the Family Farm, which is where it is held. Then again, the uncle that does live at the Ancestral Home does not have time to do it, since he does have to run the farm as a living.

The aunt feels it is her duty to organize crafts and activities, which is stupid, since the young kids are now entering second grade.

This leaves the owner of the Ancestral Home and Mother to handle the actual important and necessary details, without getting credit because the aunt in question calls herself coordinator.

But everyone kinda knows she does nothing but the piñata.

At any rate, Mother feels it is her duty to make a cookbook. This is because there is a fantastic play-on-words concerning the family name, but due to privacy rights, we won’t share the fun. Like you can’t guess anyway …

The cookbook.

Oh joy of joys. The cookbook was 23 pages in MS Word. When we started by unifying the font and size of fonts, it became 26. When we got through standardizing capitalization, spacing, titles, columns, italicization, and bolded text, it was still about 26 pages.

Of course, this took us from about 10 am to about 1 pm.

But like that’s not enough, after a quick lunch break, we got to sort through a filthy 10 page email from another relative that Mother had not bothered to mush into her document.

The problem was, while his format was nearly identical to ours and he didn’t invent columns without the column button (why does Mother do that?), Mother insisted on having it sorted out into sections: Main Dishes, Breads, Sauces, Desserts, Pies, etc. So, we had to alter his format slightly, locate the section of the document it went in (because Mother also couldn’t manage to use a separate document for anything), and finish fixing the spacing.

Now the book is 35 pages in MS Word, contains lovely anecdotes, is standardized, and has all the discrepancies highlighted for Mother to look over (we function as proofreader in addition to editor).

We finished at 2:25 pm.

In short, we deserved the afternoon of just playing solitaire, screaming at small children, talking on the phone, and writing.

But not enough to do more editing when Mother decided that recipes can't go onto a new page.

Let’s all root for Opie, our poor gourami with a flesh wound behind his gill. We don’t really know what to do; in five years, we’ve never had an injured fish … Any suggestions?
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