I should-a had a V8!

Today was a day of minor achievements.  Way too hot for major ones, but I did get my organization fix.

Achievement #1

Regarding Pinterest: What the heck is Pinterest for?  Ask someone half my age and I'm sure you'll get a very different answer.  Young professionals seem to be scrolling and saving images and whatnot to "build their brand" in case anyone is looking.  

For me, Pinterest is bathroom browsing.  Millions and millions of seductive images populate this very screen in a nano-second.  The algorithm tells Pinterest what I like.  With a click, I can save my stuff to several filing cabinets, called Boards.  I don't pay attention to what board it's going in, I just save it--for future reference.  Maybe a color or a vibe appeals to me and I save it, but I rarely go back and look at what I've saved.  

Pinterest is an overload of eye candy, kind of depressing really.  Everything, it seems, has already been done.  Every possible paint color combination known to man or woman is there.  Recipes I have never once made.  Smoothies and salads.  What keeps me going back are books, not the ones a person might actually read, but how to make blank ones.

Today I spent two hours deleting pins one by one until I realized it was going to take months. Then it occurred to me to check You Tube for a faster way to delete, and sure enough the Nice People over there had made videos that saved me hours. It was very satisfying to delete 10 whole filing cabinets in less than a minute, like sweeping a floor that had never been swept.  A decade of dust bunnies is gone. 

I still don't know why anyone would want to browse the boards of other people--unless those people are posting original art work or ideas.  Why would we want to poke around the boards of strangers?  Can somebody explain that to me?

Achievement #2:

To make a book, you cut or tear down very large pieces of paper.  Each of these pages is called a folio. When you have the desired number of folios, you fold them all at once, not one by one, and that chunk of folios is called a signature. 

Then you stitch those signatures together (a book block) with a cover and a spine and you have a book.

This whole process requires some basic math, a sharp-bladed Kraft knife, rulers and a self-healing cutting mat. 

After doing that for as long as I could stand over my table today, I had a little epiphany that will save me so much time that I literally pounced my hand on my forehead thinking, "I should have had a V8!" What took me so long to figure this out?

1. Since most books are around 4 x 6, all you really need to know is that one 9 x 12 sheet of drawing paper can easily be cut into four folios, then folded into signatures.  Simple math!  No need to buy a whole roll of paper and tear numerous times if you can get the same result from one 9 x 12 drawing pad.

2. If you want to reduce the size by a few inches, all you have to do is make the signatures and trim them down later.

3. If you want to add a few inches, well that's another math equation; we may get to that later, or not. 

4. A guillotine paper cutter saves weeks of hours!

Maybe the teacher started us on the long way to teach us some finer points we might have missed if she had just shown us the easy way up front?  But since I'm not inclined to do things mathematically, it took me a few months to get the obvious.