I have been trying to get a parcel delivered for a week now. I received one of those annoying cards that said "We stopped by to deliver your parcel" last Thursday and it must have been one of those stealth deliveries, because I was home at the time.
I chucked the card in frustration and forgot all about it. I had a delivery on Saturday and thought that it must be the one I missed on Thursday. So come Tuesday, I nipped out to meet Mel off the bus. Now, she gets off work at 5 o'clock, so I leave the house then and we rendezvous across town. Four minutes later, they tried to deliver the parcel again. I know this because this time I checked and it was tracked. So I know precisely when they turned up. And I missed 'em by four minutes!
So on Wednesday I checked the tracking and it said the parcel was again out for delivery. I checked again at lunch-time and there was no further information. A couple of hours later and the parcel is now expected to be delivered on Thursday.
I also have two other parcels due, so it could be a day full of interruptions, which is why I'm starting this early. (Later: the couriered parcel arrived. Still waiting on others.)
Thankfully I have had a good run at the latest scanning job, despite the long weekend, during which I didn't get a lot done. To make up some time I have been getting up at five in the morning and putting in an hour before Mel gets up. Each page takes an hour or more to clean up and there's a lot of additional work to do thanks to the lousy printing. Well, the lousy paper, actually. Photogravure printing is great on glossy paper, but not the pulp used for some comics. I'm sounding like a stuck record complaining about this, but this is worse still because the latest job is colour and the ink showing through from the reverse of the page changes the colour of the strip I'm working on. You can see the lettering and frames of the strip on the other side in reverse.
I've put an example as our header. Not the worst frame by a long chalk, but an example from the latest page that I was working on. There's a little fun feature on the back of that page entitled 'Build Your Own "Flying Wing"' with an illustration and instructions. It took me a good half hour to sort out that one frame!
A common 'fix' for this kind of thing is to put dark paper behind the scanned page, but that doesn't work on these old comics because the ink has seeped through the page. It makes no difference. There are a few Photoshop tricks I can do to improve things... and that's why I'm having to get up an hour earlier because it all takes time.
While this is a reasonably quick job (only 44 pages), I may be incommunicado over the coming six weeks as I have a lot of work on. Good for the bank balance, but I'll be an even worse correspondent and any questions you have may take longer than usual to get around to.
Back to work...
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