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What’s Been Keeping Us Busy

December 23rd, 2008

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This was a mad, mad Autumn for Sachi and me, but particularly for me in terms of business and projects. First there were the two weddings, and if you have ever been through this before, then you know how hard just one wedding can be; two is impossible, or it would have been if my sister had not taken on the lion’s share of the burden for us for the U.S. wedding. But right after the wedding, my college had an accreditation review, which occupied me full-time and then some for the three to four weeks following the wedding. After that, I had to focus on the Arts Day Festival at my school, as I was in charge of leading the video presentation team, and had to edit the video. After that, we had course registration, which meant a lot of database entry, student counseling, schedule construction, and so forth for me. This was closely followed by a hiring process which has quite a bit of work to it, and after that came preparation for graduation, which coincided with giving and then grading final exams, after which I had to lead up the discipline meetings for students.

In short, it was only this week that I finally had some free time to myself. Part of that time I spent researching HDTV’s and deciding which one to buy. The other part, especially after the purchase was made, was dedicated to getting our wedding stuff made.

This is the kind of thing that most normal people get done soon after the wedding, but my schedule at work pretty much precluded that, especially since we wanted to do more than just send thank-you notes to everyone. First, I designed and printed out two versions of New Year’s cards (nengajo in Japanese) to send out to people in Japan who had been on the periphery of the wedding activity but had not attended; Sachi took care of note-writing and addressing. The same design we used for printing out about 50 or so photo versions which we used to add the thank-you note (written on the back), added to other photos we would send (printed with our nice new Pixus 360 mini photo printer). We also printed out some photos from the weddings, especially for those who were less able to use and print on their own from digital versions.

But the core of the preparation was a two-disc set that had taken most of the time preparing. The first is a video DVD with about a half-hour of material. Part was the two videos I prepared for the Japan wedding, one which was a video and photo montage of the U.S. wedding, prepared in the week between the two events; the other video was the photo slideshow/montage showing images of Sachi and myself from birth to the present day, a standard at Japanese weddings. It also contains a video version of the “Luis & Sachi Quiz” we had at the Tokyo reception. Added to that was video from the Japan wedding and another photo montage. Sachi and I added a brief intro video in English and Japanese. The other disc is a CD with the best images from the weddings, every one resized down to manageable resolution (some of the originals were huge). Hopefully, most people’s DVD players should be able to handle this disc also, and display the photos on TVs.

After preparing the discs, I had to burn them–a job still about 30% not done. We have 60 or so sets to make, 120 discs in all. Not an easy process. Then I have to print labels for every one of them, then write notes on all the cards we include, then pack them up with appropriate labeling and ship them off. The first set of 19 were shipped out last night, and Sachi and I spent all day, from about 9 am to 8 pm, getting this much done. The set we sent out last night was for overseas recipients, and that tab was the biggest–$45 to ship them all. Materials weren’t so bad–a DVD-R and CD-R cost about fifty cents, the labels added another few cents, and printed photos another few cents per image. So three bucks a pop isn’t killing us or anything. It’s just the work involved in the volume….

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I already discovered my first flub in the project: I forgot to send one of my aunts and her son in Spain the PAL version of the DVD. They won’t be able to play the NTSC versions… so two more packages will have to be sent out! Hopefully that’ll be the worst of it.

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