2007-01-24

Snow was on the ground when we arose and Jim high-tailed it to St. Luke’s to check on the condition of the walkways, but all was clear there. The snow was decorative but light and by noon it had all melted. Still, it was beautiful and I know Romi was happy!

After Morning Offering Gary and I had a planning meeting. It ended up taking the morning as we chewed through some decisions. Firstly, the matter of the remastering had gotten a bit tricky. Gary had listened to the remastering done so far and did not feel there was any change for the better. He suggested retrieving the original tape masters and sending them to two other volunteers interested in having a go at them. We have two voice audios and three music and voice audios which we sell and we are trying to get them into CD form, as most people no longer use the audiocassette medium. I wrote to Rick C and asked him to send the tapes back to us.

Gary and I also talked through some issues regarding the longer-range project of making audio downloads of our work available on our web site. We decided to target these tapes we are now remastering as our first generation of on-site audios, then the original Ra session audios and then, at length, audios of our large archive of sessions. Much still has to be discussed as to factors like the cost per download, protocol for making the audios available and so forth.

Then there was the POD investigation. That stands for “print on demand” and is a way of printing books for which you need only minimum money up front, as you can order as few as 26 books at a time. Ian can go no further with his finalization of A Book of Days until he knows which publisher we have chosen to print it.

On the other hand, we had been waiting for Ian to come to conclusions on the better of the POD printers, as he had said he would do that. It was a bit of a mix-up. I suggested to Gary that we choose our favorites among the American POD companies before we got back to Ian. We selected lulu.com after a thorough discussion.

When I found that lulu.com had quoted us a base price of close to $13.00 as our cost for the book, plus whatever profit we chose to make, of which they would then add 20% to their base price, plus shipping, I realized we could not deliver a book to the reader for under about $22.00. The Canadian POD printer Ian has used before, blitzprint.com, has a much lower price to us per book, but all the shipping costs are higher from Canada by quite a bit, so that option looks expensive to the reader as well, though better for us.

So I suggested we ask Ian to send Brad S at Beechmont Press the present PDF version of the manuscript and get a quote from him for printing 1,000 copies in the old-fashioned way. When we published A Wanderer’s Handbook with them in 2001, they brought the product home for about $11.00 per copy, and that was a much larger book. Of course in the five years since we did that book, prices have gone up, but we shall see just how much.

Lastly, Gary and I discussed adding a “free subscription” button to the llresearch site, so people could subscribe to the UPI article sends, the sends of our Light/Lines newsletter or the Gatherings Newsletter with a click of their mouse. I think it is a good idea. So I wrote descriptions of those three things and sent all that off to Ian with strict instructions not to work on this until it was a convenient time for him. I sometimes overload our faithful WebGuy!

Jim came back from St. Luke’s where he continued to work on cutting up their huge fallen tree, for lunch and we enjoyed stretching together before he took off for Avalon to dump the small branches from it which we cannot use for firewood.

I decided that with everything coming to a head on the finalization of A Book of Days, I had better get some text rewritten as promised, so I spent the afternoon pulling the old Introduction out of the manuscript and reworking it so that it is now an Appendix. It was too scholarly to make a really appropriate Introduction, I thought. By the end of the day, I had rewritten and, I think, improved the text. It felt very good. I introduced topic headings which seemed to make the whole text easier to read and follow and added information.

I shall need to replace the previous Introduction, now an Appendix, with a new Introduction before my work here is done. Hopefully I shall have the time to tackle that tomorrow morning.

After a bath and a good Democracy Now offering various interviewees’ points of view on the State of the Union I attended choir practice. We practiced much new music and I can see that we will have a tasty Lenten program. It is amazing to see the time pass so quickly that we are already practicing for Ash Wednesday! I should not be surprised, as the crocuses and snow drops are blooming and telling me that spring is coming. However they currently have a very cold environment, as wintry weather has come to Kentucky at last.

Jim and I had a date after our late supper and the Gaia Meditation and snuggled with the cats before an early bedtime.