The time has come to print out more pictures. A task that I’ve been putting off for a while, but I just feel like now is the time. My office walls are bare and cry out for decoration of the inspirational hiking variety. Pictures that I’ve taken. To remind me that work isn’t all that I do during the dreary, cold months of the off season.
And I think putting out the new editions of the Hike with Me books has definitely contributed to this urge to get more pictures. As I’ve been going over the books to convert a large print version to a standard print version, I have had to move the pictures around so that the text fully surrounds them and doesn’t leave areas of white space. In some cases, I even had to completely redo the plates to turn a pair of half pages photos into a single full page photo plate. As I moved them, I couldn’t help but remember how many really cool pictures I’ve managed to take while backpacking.
Not to mention, it’s been a really long time since we printed out any photos. I mean, the last ones that we printed out were from the first trip to the coast back in 2015, and here we are planning out third trip for this summer. Plus, I haven’t printed out any photos at all from any of my Idaho Centennial Trail trips.
I’m getting closer to finishing the Hike with Me standard print size editions. I’m working on Return to the Wild Coast and after that, there’s just one more, very short, one left. That book is the first one where Ambrose requested/recommended having the pictures be outlined so that the captions were more easily distinguishable from the text. Which is nice, because that means I don’t have to add that. All I need to do to modify the large print edition for this one is to add the Large Print sticker to the cover.
I didn’t get to work on the books as much as I would have preferred last weekend, because my stomach has gone on a painful streak. Monday and Tuesday were mostly liquid diet to try to get my body past this, which usually works. Mostly, in this case, means that I didn’t decide to go liquid until after I ate part of my breakfast (turkey sausage and a flour tortilla). I hated to leave the remainder of my breakfast (a hard boiled egg and a banana), but the pain was significant enough that I knew that was the right decision.
Even without getting as much done as I wanted to, I still got some good work in over the weekend. I don’t feel like I’ve lost momentum on the project. And now I can keep an eye out for some pictures to print out as I go.