Waffle has a kind heart deep inside. Sometimes her excitement can hide that tender side. She has grown-up with another puppy in training, Casey. They snuggle together every night and sometime when they are hanging out at a meeting. Waffle likes to snuggle up beside us when we sit on the floor.
We took her to the State Fair and she was really interested in all the animals. She was very gentle and the animals were very interested in her too.
Waffle is very good at waiting until she is called. Most puppies once they realize you are going to call them to come down the stairs can’t help themselves and they come running before the words are out of your mouth. Not with Waffle. She just sits there. When it is time to go outside for a potty break she will just sit at the top of the stairs and wait until you come get her or open the door. She has great self-restraint in this area.
Waffle can be one wacky pooch. She enjoys life to the fullest in everything she does. When she is sleeping she sleeps with complete relaxation. When she is awake she give it all she’s got. Her under-bite gives her face a unique look. Usually it is a very cute face but sometimes when she is laying on her back it gives her a kind of crazy look.
She loves to run around doing labby loops and it sounds like thunder. She likes to leap down the last four or five stairs. Yet sometimes she doesn’t want to jump out of the car or step off the curb. We love our wacky Waffle.
I got an email this morning that blurb has a 20% discount through November 5th in honor of Halloween. There are no minimum purchases so this is a great opportunity to get a single book printed and a great price. I wish I could get my Waffle Book ready by then but that isn’t very likely. Maybe I’ve got another project that needs printing. I’ll have to give it some thought.
To get the discount just type in SPOOKY at checkout*
While we are on the subject of blurb and Halloween here are some previews of books published on blurb that are in the spirit of the day.
Ghosts of the Faithful Departed
Bodie – A Ghost Town Frozen in Time
Thanks to IndieReader.com for this recommendations.
*Offer valid through November 5, 2012 (11:59 p.m. local time). A 20% discount is applied toward your product total. Maximum discount is USD $150, GBP £95, EUR €115, CAD $150, or AUD $150 off product total. Valid for printed books only. This offer is good for one-time use, and cannot be combined with volume discounts, other promotional codes, gift cards, or used for adjustments on previous orders.
by Aruna Khanzada
Here is some more info on Blurb‘s new enhanced ebooks. I think it sound intriguing add sound and video to a book. I can’t wait to try this out. I wish I could drop all my other projects and play around with this. The video below is about Aruna Khanzada who has made more than 200 Blurb books. She describes what inspired her to write her books. I am inspired by her story.
Europe 1952 Cover
I thought I would make a template of this project available for you to download. I’m using Dropbox and I’m relatively new to it so I hope it works as desired. If you’ve not used an Adobe InDesign template before it is very easy. Just open the template as you would any document and then you can add pages and drag the desired master page for chapter headings and newspaper articles. You can customize it anyway you would like. If you want to edit the original template than you should make sure you open the original file. Think of the template as a starting place. This template is sized for a large landscape book on Blurb.com. To publish your finished book on blurb, download the pdf presets and export. Then upload the pdf to blurb and order you finished book. The cover template is for an image wrap book with 440 pages. So if your book is shorter you will need to make adjustments.
To download the files, click on the links below. One the page loads up it will look like gibberish, but don’t worry. Right click on the page and select “save page as” and save to your computer. Then you will be able to open the document in Adobe InDesign. (Sorry it has taken me all week to get this figured out)
This post concludes my Europe 1952 project. If you have questions that I haven’t covered let me know and I’ll do what I can to answer them, possible with an extra post. It has been a fun journey over the last few months.
One of the great things about doing this project was all the stuff that I had to work with. One of the challenging things about this project was all the stuff I had to work with. My mom is a saver and I think she saved everything she got on this trip. I have no idea how she got it all home. She didn’t have that much luggage. Even though sometimes it was a pain to figure out how to include most of the documents, brochures etc. that she saved, it adds to the flavor and the interest of the book. Some of the things I had to work with were:
How I dealt with the above items I covered in earlier posts. Follow the links above.
Some where scanned and others were transcribed and reformatted to fit the page.
I scanned these and cropped them to size before placing them in the document.
Some of the postcards and tickets stubs had interesting edges that I didn’t want to crop off. So after scanning I opened them in Adobe Photoshop, deleted the background so that it was transparent. Then when placed in the document the deckled or torn edges were preserved.
Since these items were thicker I wanted to keep the dimension. So I also opened these images in Adobe Photoshop and deleted the background to make it transparent. I really like how you can tell they are books and not just a single sheet of paper. It was fun to have the medallion that my mom got from visiting the Pope. This same process works great for objects of any shape.
When placing the memorabilia on the page it is usually good to gather them near each other on the page and not spread them out across the page. Overlapping another piece of memorabilia or a photo can also help. The overlapping visually connects the items together and brings some order to a layout that might otherwise get too busy.
Blurb recently introduced the option to make your traditional book publishing projects and to entice people to try it they are offering the conversion for free for the next three days. Starting October 18, 2012 the charge will be USD $9.99 for each book. Go here to get more information.
I hope I can take a few minutes in the next three days and try this out. Have you used a service like Blurb to do an ebook. The closest I’ve come to doing an ebook is creating a pdf document. I know so little about this that I’m not sure the differences. Blurb’s ebooks are for the iPad.
Indians along the trail
It has been a while since I posted an update on the project to put together and illustrated book about my great-great-grandmother, Mary Taylor’s early life and experience crossing the planes. My niece has done two more illustrations. The image above is illustration #10 and the text will cover Mary walked all day pushing and pulling a handcart with her mother, father, husband and cousin in the Martin Handcart Company. One day, Indians rode by the handcarts. The Indians did not hurt the pioneers.
Six illustrations down and about 18 to go. We are past the 25% mark on the illustrations. Realistically I can’t see getting to the text until December at the earliest. I have too many other things on my plate until then.
Burt Simons with his loaded carriage
This is illustration #16 showing Mary’s rescuer, Burt Simmons, who had a stout carriage full of food. He was ready and left to save the pioneers before the other wagons. It is exciting to see more illustration getting finished for this project.
I love the idea of the ability to embed media like video in the context of a book. Ebooks have that potential. In the next few years I believe that we will see the power of ebooks come into their own. I can’t wait to explore to learn the skill and explore the possibilities of this medium.
image from Robert Leslie’s book Stormbelt
I found an interview with Robert Leslie, a photographer know for his photographic journeys, about a resent project he calls Stormbelt. You can find the interview here on Blurberati Blog. I’m intrigued with the idea of having both a print and digital version of a book. It is an interesting project that I think you will enjoy.
telling family tales 