What a day. To start with, bits of kisses, bits of fighting, as per usual during these Nelken days. Since G is working afternoons our morning sex is slightly less nuts and we get to cuddle afterwards, which is when we usually start talking e.i., that’s when we usually start fighting. I get freaky nervous about the book as daylight breaks and he gets impatient with me being freaky nervous.

This is literally a ton of book. I’m not kidding. This is 500 kilos times two. It’s cooling off and waiting for transport. Next stop is the bookbinder’s, where it will stay until it looks like a book, dessed and compressed, but that’s in another city. Arrrgg.. Every time I can’t be there, I am worried something will go wrong. Something small and stupid. Something unnecessary. Today I nearly had a heart attack when my mum was checking out the cover and said Gutenberg is written with two Ts… After having spelled Nelken’s name wrong and Jane AustEn’s name wrong, I really really couldn’t deal with another duel with my darling typo ghoul.

 Aligning all the rollers.People who aren't in this craft don't get to see this stuff, but a printer's page is really quite a fascinating piece of codes and tiny pointers.

 ... Because this is what it looks like when the cover first starts coming out. It's practically 3D. 

 Super sticky paint. And I'm guessing not-even-funny-flammable. 

 Getting ready the proper paper. It's silly how much of it goes to waste before all is ready and once it's ready, it's like five minutes to have it done... I suppose that's the system of proportions - you write a book for years and then in days it stops being yours and it becomes other people's.

I can’t begin to describe how much I love prints. The sound, the smell, the thumping... Even when I’m not the customer and people tolerate my hopping around and asking questions, I am mesmerized by the press. I must have been one in the previous life. Or hope to be one someday. Or hope to have one someday :D And the guy handling it was so cool – shy and quiet in the daylight, but while working, he knew every single tiniest thing, turning screws, pushing buttons, applying paint, applying pressure, aligning cylinders, cutting the paper…

That was a good start of the second half of the morning. :))

After we got the sufficient safe number of the last bit – the cover - I would have had to walk to town again, but I checked the map and figured it’s just length to walk by just as nasty piece of road towards the General’s family farm, so I instead turned there and then took a tiny nap on the lawn where he was chopping large piece of wood apart. It was lovely, though I probably got plenty ticks.

Then we had lunch, mostly chicken and dandelion salad, both being on March diet, and drove to my parents’ place, where he went to work and I took the car to get gran from the looney bin. Fun times.

The traffic was a bitch, but that’s nothing compared to my dad’s car. See, the downside of coming from a well situated family (not aristocrats-wise, at least not like that, but more hard working and successful journalists) is that when you’re growing up, everything is as it should be. Lights shine, food feeds, water washes, toys are fun and people are polite. Cars run. As you grow up, the reality that sometimes life isn’t that easy, hits you. The car my dad has now, is battered and old. It’s not that he couldn’t buy a new one; it’s just that he’s so used to this one, another would be problematic to him – as this one is to the rest of us. Buffers are shot all to hell, pedals are odd, the engine makes a sound like a 5o year old race car long left in the rain and every few hundred meters, the power gives. You push the gas pedal and nothing happens. You have to turn the engine entirely off and restart in mid drive. We are all so used to this by now, it’s not even noticed. Though, if you’re the one driving it in rush hour, it can get a bit annoying at times.  

Grandma got home safe, shiny and perky and the centre of attention again, which will keep her happy for a day or two, before she decides she’s been dying from tumour or she’s going blind or she hasn’t eaten or slept in years or something. Frankly, she’s running out of terrible things that can go wrong in a human.

Lastly I returned the car and walked off-hill, taking some apples to the General along the way. He finishes around ten, so I usually take Barky to go and meet him, but I think tonight I’ve done my share of walking. I have worn my shoes to ruins. I can’t afford new ones, because I usually buy a lasting, expensive pair, but I then wear it out in two years. What can I say. I tend to walk a lot. 

We were supposed to have a girls’ day out today, but it luckily got moved to another date, because I would have probably keeled over. I’m off to Ljubljana tomorrow morning, meeting the editor for the Carlins.

 And here’s a pickie of a very small cow with very long white eyelashes :D Cushy farm animals FDW!