Sometimes we worry about things that eventually work themselves out. Sometimes we just think we’ve got new fangled ways of sending stuff figured out! And sometimes the bizarre becomes the norm. These three sentences sum up this past week.

Here I am on the cover of the NW Boomer & Senior News with the article about the FFOB.

Worry, worry

At the last Florence Festival of Books meeting on August 20, the committee was concerned that only 42 tables had been sold out of the 60 that we try for. Today, less than two weeks later, we have only two slots left and figure there will be more than that many applications on Tuesday, September 3. Several applications came in this week. With the deadline coming up on September 6, it makes sense. Folks tend to wait to the last minute.

We worried that we might not get our FFOB news release in the NW Boomer & Senior News. The news release never made it, but that’s okay. Instead, we got a front-page story. I heard about it from a couple of sources last week, but I didn’t get to see it until today. I was flabbergasted! It’s not just a front-page story, but covers all of pages 1, 2, and half the back page. I felt badly that we couldn’t afford an ad, but with all that coverage, who needs an ad. I was equally flabbergasted to see my photo and my book Crossings covering most of the front page. I picked up a copy at the library today just as a friend was also reaching for one, she looked at it and then looked up and saw me. It was one of the funniest double takes I’ve seen in a long time.

C. Edwin Fender, Sandy Silverthorne, and Joe Blakely are featured on page 2 as participants in the upcoming FFOB.

We did get the news release I sent to the Center Stage publication from the Events Center included as I expected, but the cover was a terrific surprise. It was mostly devoted to the FFOB.

The monthly Center Stage publication put out by the Events Center focused primarily on the FFOB.

And more worry

I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough photos for my Arcadia Press history of Florence book that I’m doing, especially for Chapter 2. I cover three main characters in the early history of Florence and could find no photos of two of them in the museum files or on disks of scanned photos. But I kept looking while I was on duty last week as museum docent, and I found a framed photograph in one exhibit. It was easily removed from the frame and able to be scanned. I came back the next day and dug through some files I had gone through earlier in the research library. At that time, I was looking for a specific file with my guy’s name. When it wasn’t there, I moved on. This time, I looked through all the general photos that fit under the letter ‘M’ that did not go into specific family named files. And, lo and behold, the very photo I had been seeking was there. I had given up on that one. So needless to say, I was thrilled.

I had worried about no one being able to scan the photos. Well, now I’ve got two people scanning for me. Bill who does most of the museum scanning, won’t be gone the entire month of September after all and was able to scan the photos I found this week. And I met with Patrick, my publisher Bob Serra’s assistant at Pacific Publishing, both Tuesday and Thursday. He got all the photos I obtained from Ron Hogeland scanned, and I should be able to return Hogeland’s photos soon. And I gave him the numbered photocopies noting where the actual scan of each photo can be found for chapters 1 and 2. When he finds each scan, he will make them the right size and other parameters that Arcadia wants, number them as I’ve indicated, and send to Arcadia.

Barrett Stage, circa 1915, when the beach was the highway and horses handled it better than gas-powered vehicles. This is one of the historic photos I plan to use in the book.

With all my time spent on obtaining photos, now I’m worried that I haven’t allowed enough time to get all the captions and the intro to Chapter 2 written. I have to send them this coming week. They were actually due last week, but the editor gave me an additional week to get them in.

New fangled ways to send stuff

There’s SkyDrive and Google Drive and Dropbox and possibly more. Two weeks ago, I’d never heard of any of these. The other day, I spent a very frustrating afternoon trying to set up SkyDrive and got nowhere. Then I gave up on it and switched to Google Drive.  I thought I had signed into it and set things up, but I couldn’t get it to work for me either. There’s no trace of either of these programs on my computer, despite all my time and effort.

My Arcadia editor invited me to use her Dropbox account. Miracle of miracles, it was easy to follow the instructions and find it and use it. So since Bill wanted to send photos he had scanned by one of these methods instead of the more time consuming burning to a disk or attaching a few at a time via email, I had him drop them in the Dropbox. But I didn’t remove them soon enough and my editor took them out to look at. So I don’t have them now for Patrick to work with. AARRGGHH!  I have to ask for them back from the Arcadia editor. Bill sent me the latest that he scanned via Dropbox last night and as soon as he let me know, I got right on it and downloaded them. Whew! Becoming familiar with all this new-fangled stuff is like taking one step forward and two steps back.

This large wall-size photo of the Yaquina Bay Bridge is in the Historic Alsea Bay Bridge Interpretive Center.

Bizarre becomes the norm

For the last three Sundays in a row, I‘ve delivered books to the Historic Alsea Bay Bridge Interpretive Center in Waldport, because each week they ran out of copies of Crossings. (They sell more Crossings than The Crossings Guide.) It’s a terrific place; it’s like a museum to the coastal bridges and Conde B. McCullough who designed most of them. (See blog post #95–Celebrating coastal bridges, March 31.)

How bizarre, to run out of books three weeks in a row. This week, Mary Davis, the long-time person in charge there, didn’t call. Darn! I had just gotten used to my weekly trip to Waldport. Apparently, the spell has been broken, and the bizarre is no longer the norm.