rechelle's lifelyrics

In early December, I completed the final proofreading edits on the custom song book that consumed much of my time and energy for over a year and a half. I was so excited, and felt like I needed to have some big celebration, but the day came and went quietly. My husband was also finishing a large (2-year) project at work, and was committed to putting in long hours during the last 2 weeks of November and the first week or two in December. We started a conversation about how we could celebrate for hitting both of our milestones in the same week. But when I was ready to send my precious project out to print the hard-bound books, I quickly lost all excitement about being done with my work. I realized I had a whole new phase to tackle. I forgot to plan for creating pages that would have the appropriate gutter and margins for binding in a smaller scale book! Ray was a big help, because he remembered how he helped me overcome that very hurdle with “Songs We Love” 15 years ago.

After experimenting with several different ideas of how to make it work with the software tools I have now, I decided to create images of all 272 pages from the PDF versions of the sheet music and title/index pages. I had to scale my PDF book from 8 1/2″ x 11″ (standard paper size) to the actual measurements that would fit in the 7.25″ x 9.5″ hard-bound books. My Cute PDF software has a wonderful tool that allows me to save all pages as images, so it was easy to prepare the correctly sized images for my Word document. I added very small page numbers in the footer of the Word document and formatted the margins so it could be uploaded to the MIXAM website. It took a few more days than when I first thought I was finished, but it was so exciting and satisfying to see all of my work perfectly formatted for our new books! The process and customer support at MIXAM was outstanding. I would highly recommend using them if you ever need to produce hardbound books.

I ended up finishing just in time for another opportunity to help a loved one in a time of need. Once again, I feel very grateful to have retired early and that I decided to create my “dream job” at home. It has provided wonderful flexibility for me to navigate this new frontier of my little life.