DONE!!!!

When I took over the FACS class in January, you may remember I also had to be the yearbook advisor. We were 7 weeks away from due date and there was a lot of work still to be done. I started hustling the students to work faster and I gave them a date they had to have their pages finished by.

...then we had our first fiasco. The school district IT department deleted the previous teacher's account and we lost the entire book and all of the pictures that were on the computer. Somehow they didn't see the urgency in the situation and it took 10 days (2 weeks) for them to recover it for us. When we finally got it back, they students really kicked into gear and worked harder because now the deadline was looming even closer. All of the pages were finally finished--three days ahead of schedule

...and then we had the second fiasco. We were working with an old, slow laptop that wasn't capable of merging the student's pages on to the main book. (Example...one page took 45 minutes to upload. We had 75 pages).

So by now Spring Break comes along and guess who had to work this week to finish up the yearbook and get it off to the publisher? I went in on Monday--along with three students who wanted to be a part of it-- and had a representative from the yearbook company work with us. She worked and re-worked it and finally came up with a faster way for it to upload and after 3 hours, the book was merged. I brought the computer home to spell-check everything one more time. (I had three students spell check and sign off on each page and I still found as many as 5 errors on one page.)

So it should have been easy to finish up from there...print out a paper copy, copy to a disc, and send it off. But of course it wasn't that simple. The computer wouldn't read a disc and wouldn't upload to the printer. After spending another 8 hours on it, I was ready to refund the money to the students and forget about a yearbook. In desperation, I took the laptop to the yearbook company, which thankfully is about 1/2 mile from my house. They took pity on me and printed it for me, sent me home with a paper copy for one last review, and told me to bring it back Monday and they would burn the disc and send it to the publisher. (After he spent 15 minutes in front of my computer, he realized what I was dealing with and that his computer would make this job much easier.)

This was WAY more stressful than I ever imagined. I don't want to be responsible for a yearbook again...ever!!!

At least I finished up during my first week of spring break and now I can enjoy my second week off with my grandchildren.

Meridee, if you read this, this yearbook won't be anything like what Liza used to put together. I'm just happy to have something between the front and back cover.