What did you do today?
When I was a young man, I could not imagine how it would be to get up in the morning and not go to work anywhere. Now that I am in the elderly bracket, it is hard to remember how it was to get up every morning and go to work somewhere.
My morning routine is to get out of bed when I wake up without an alarm clock. I brush my hair, check my sugar level and then walk down the hill to the mail box and get the morning paper. It might be 7 a. m. or it might be 9 a. m.
When I get back to the top of the hill I gauge my breathing to see if I am okay. If there is no huffing and puffing, I consider myself to be doing all right. I get a cup of coffee and go to my favorite spot which is a bouncing chair on the back porch. I usually look through the paper and then find the puzzles and see if I can work the Sudoku and the Cryptogram to get my brain to operating properly. This is supposed to be a good way to start a day mentally. Before I finish the puzzles, I sometimes ease into a nap and the puzzles and my pin falls to the floor. When the puzzles are finished, I get up and go to the kitchen and fix a light breakfast. My wife, Rachel and I have different routines in the morning and that includes each of us preparing our own breakfast. Breakfast is eaten back in the same chair on the porch. When breakfast is finished there is usually a time of meditation and prayer for my morning devotion. I always thank God for my family and my health and that he continues to supply my needs. I pray specifically for the needs of others that am aware of. I am a very blessed and happy man.
When I leave the back porch, I usually go to my office where I check my daily emails, which includes a lot of blogs that tell me what is going on in the world. I also have a dozen or so people who send me two to six emails a week. I enjoy these even when they are just forwarding something that someone forwarded to them. It makes me feel good that they thought of me. I keep a lot of emails filed on my Gmail page, but I keep current emails to around a dozen. When I forward an email it is rarely more than one each day. I clean up the appearance of the email and update the title and remove all of the previous names that are at the top of the email. After the emails are finished, I open my latest column and read it and make additions or corrections to it. My column is emailed to the Calhoun Times on Friday for the next Wednesday paper. I usually have it written on Tuesday or Wednesday and tune it up until it is time to email it in. After writing 634 columns, it is getting harder to find good subjects to explore. My wife will sometimes tell me that I have written that before and she is often correct. It usually was from a different viewpoint but I am subject to repeat myself.
About nine years ago, I submitted a fiction novel to a professional publisher and they agreed to publish it at no cost to me. I was to get a commission on every book sold. This publisher did not have a good program to promote their books and the commissions never materialized. I purchased and sold about 150 books but the price of the book was too high and having a published book was just a minor ego trip. A lot of time was expended in writing the book and it did not generate any income, but it was valuable experience.
My family ran a printing business in Calhoun for about twelve years and I learned a lot about printing. We printed football programs and other books so I learned about how to layout these books so that the pages will come up in the right order. Since we closed the printing business, the computer programs and the printers have improved substantially. I now print and bind my own books. My printer is set up to print 8 ½ x 11- inch sheets so when you print both sides and fold the pages and trim them you can make a book that is 5- inches wide by 8- inches high. The cover is printed separately on index cover paper. If these are stapled together in the center with a long reach stapler, you can make a book of up to about 72 pages thick. The printer prints on both sides of the paper and prints the pages in order so that it is a Print On Demand system for one complete book at a time. Producing a larger quantity does not save any time per book.
After making books this way for several years, I recently built a padding clamp so that after printing I can cut the pages in half and clamp a group of books so that I can glue the edge. After the binding glue dries, I glue the cover around the book and trim it. This allows me to print books as large as I need and they end up looking like any other paperback book that you might buy at a bookstore. I have written several additional books and I have printed books of my columns that have appeared in the Calhoun Times. Writing and producing these books is how I spend most of my afternoons now. I write and produce my books in my office which is about 120 square feet in size. This is probably the smallest book publishing company in the country.
My wife works part time for the school system and when she comes home her first question is usually, “What did you do today?” Now that I have written this column, I can just show her a copy of it and let her read it for herself. Maybe I won’t have to tell her about the two hour nap that I took on the porch.