The books go marching one by one, hurrah! Hurrah!

Finally, after far too much time, the books have started marching out to our very patient customers — and a few of the other ones, as well. :-) Thank God for people who keep asking, for lo, they do help us to get things done.

Anything fragile, liquid or perishable? Nope, all books...

Neal the Longsuffering, and Justin the Cheerful hold up one of the new covers. Things had actually been going badly at the moment — the metallic inks weren't getting along with the black ink — but they smiled anyway. And so did I. It came out OK in the end.

We were supposed to have a book collating party tonight at the youth center at our church, but only one person showed up, and it wasn't someone with a key. It was an odd contrast to last time they helped us out, when some 16 or so teenagers helped us assemble 800 books in just a few hours. Maybe we misunderstood when we were supposed to be there... who knows. We haven't figured out yet what happened.

Done! Well, almost.

I handed off the inside pages of You Know You're an MK When... to the printer this morning.

Huzzah!

Now I just need to update the covers.

Oh, that was written for someone else, not me...

Since the first edition of You Know You'r an MK When... people have taken up the book and started reading it, chuckling over items, asking questions, etc. And then they get to number 70.

70. You really do enjoy Oriental folk music.

Every single one of them looks up, and says, "You do?"

I don't, actually. It's one of the items in the book I've never liked, and it's one that I've gotten voted down on for changes in the last five editions. But tonight, Deborah relented, and we can choose a new item to go in it's place. My short list of contenders:

You frequently say, "I don’t know, I was out of the country."

If someone asks what school you went to, you reply, "depends on the year."

You miss people before they're gone.

A more telling question than "Where are you from?" is "What countries are you following in the Olympics?"

When your parents say "home church," you're not sure which one of the dozen or so they're referring to.

Which one would you choose? Any items in your copy that bother you, or that you think are no longer relevant, or dated? Speak now, or hold your peace for another few years!

Editing and Ice Cream

Many years ago, I participated in an editing contest at work. (For those who don't know, I work at a publishing company.) The prize was a Subway gift certificate, and the goal of the contest was to see who could best edit a single sentence and correctly identify all the errors therein. To my surprise, I won. (This probably has something to do with the fact that all the professional editors were barred from the contest.) Aside from pinning down most of the grammatical errors, I was the only participant that actually did any fact-checking — turns out that a major premise presented in the material was false, and my entry was praised above all others for catching that.

Returning to the present day, as I've been working with Deborah to go over the text of YKYAMKW for the next printing, one item caught my eye:

271. You get excited about ice cream, but think that Baskin Robbins might be a legal firm, Häagen Dazs a European conductor, and TCBY a mission organization (Taking Christ’s Blessing to Youth).

Now, aside from some punctuation issues, it's always bothered me that I'd never even heard of TCBY as a missions organization. TCBY frozen yogurt, yes — I'd had it twice, back in California, with the LACC youth group — but missions, no. I always thought it was a weird name, anyway. So, after having this entry in the book for over ten years now, I decided to look it up.

Guess what?

It doesn't exist!

Or, maybe, it did, and it was so obscure that there's no mention of it anywhere on the web outside of YKYAMKW. Have you ever heard of it? Have I been duped for over a decade into thinking this was a real organization? I would dearly like to know.

In the meantime, I wonder what I should do... leave it as it is? Found a missions organization by that same name? Make up an alternate ending involving Ben and Jerry, those obnoxious twins from the other dorm? Go have some ice cream....? Hmm, I answered my own question...

Almost there...

After being sold out for much too long, the seventh edition of You Know You're an MK When... is almost ready to go to press. Deborah and I have to haggle out a few last changes, and then, off to the printers. Again. For the seventh time.

Whee!

At least he's ordering from us...

Consider the following:

1. We don't have a litterbox for our cat. When he wants to go outside, he tells us.
2. We don't have a cat flap in our door.
3. Our bed is set up as a loft, with the computer, desk, and business equipment underneath.
4. The cat usually wants to go out at about 4 a.m.
5. We have a very bright cat...

Now, put that all together.

Have you figured out how the cat gets me up to let him out in the middle of the night? Yep... he jumps up on the desk underneath our bed, and starts pushing buttons on the credit card terminal. Beep! Beepittybeepbeep! Beep! Beep! Beeeeeep!

I can't sleep to it. No one could. I have to get up and let him out. And every time I do, I can't help but admire his ingenuity.