Spread This

We're about thirty years in, now, on making our own Christmas cards, and by "we," I mean me, with Dave's usual lavish support. Until five years ago, I carved a block and hand-printed over a hundred cards in black ink, and then hand-colored each one, and then wrote inside them and addressed the envelopes, and in the days before email that also entailed a fat recap of our entire year in longhand, because some of those people only heard from us that often. It worked out to about, carry the one, five thousand minutes per card, which means--move the decimal--I should be done with 1994's batch any time now.

Utterly ridiculous amount of time involved. Of course, I worked then, and as everyone knows, retired people are oh so busy. You know why retired people tell you they're busy? They just want to work "retired" into the conversation as often as possible because they enjoy the look on your face.

So, yes, I'm busy, but that's after working in nine or more hours of sleep a night, and a leisurely morning with the newspaper and coffee, and a considerable chunk of time staring into space. I now devote about three days to carving out my card block and getting a decent print and coloring it, and then it's off to the print shop for mass production. One "Murry Christmas" in my illegible hand on the inside, slap on the stamp, and Bob's yer uncle. The only really aggravating part involves Microsoft.

I made a spreadsheet of my Christmas card recipients. It's got three columns. Name, address, city.

I don't even really know what a spreadsheet is, and my Microsoft Excel spreadsheet knows this, and tries to wipe me off on the first low branch it trots under.

Wikipedia: "A spreadsheet is an interactive computer application for organization, analysis, and storage of data in tabular form." Sure it is! And you can manipulate all that data. And by "you" I mean you, not me. I try to alphabetize my list, for instance, and I get a nice column of names in order, which is useful if you don't mind that their addresses didn't tag along with them. Every time I try to do something like this my spreadsheet goes tectonic. The columns shift along predetermined fault lines with the names uplifted and the cities subsiding. Yes, I looked up how to do it right, but my spreadsheet can smell fear, and is in fact quite energized by it. My spreadsheet will stop suddenly just to watch me sail over its head into the bushes.

At one point I thought I couldn't add a new name to my list unless it fit alphabetically where I deleted a dead person.

So after a while I quit trying to manipulate my data and just flang it in. Which is inelegant, but at least it's all there. Until that dark day comes that I need to do a Mail Merge and get all those data on sheets of label paper.

But this is Microsoft. There's going to be a quiz. What is the name of your printer's first pet? Bzzzt, wrong answer, the parakeet totally counts. What kind of label paper are you using? Here's a list of a thousand brands of label paper. It's probably one of those, have a spin. What is the PIN number for your account? Do you want to start an account? Would you like 10% off for doing a survey? What's your maternal grandfather's first name? Are you sure? They changed things when they left the old country. What? Oh, you wanted to print labels? Never mind. What is the name of your printer's first pet?

Every year. Every year I would curse and drink and spend hours and finally my labels blundered into the barn and I slammed the gate behind them, and then I carefully wrote out instructions for the next year for what seemed to work. The next year those instructions did not work. Shit, I bought a Mac ten years ago, but I was afraid to not use Microsoft, so I got Microsoft Office for Mac all saddled up and tied it to my toolbar where it is routinely spooked by just about everything.  So this year I sidled up to my computer and threw a blanket over my spreadsheet's head and went to retrieve last year's instructions. And guess the hell what? I didn't have instructions from last year. What I did have was last year's list ready to print. I apparently saved the successful last step of the Mail Merge as a word document, and I was able to edit it for this year and hit Print and the gol-durned thing sprinted away and came back with my labels. Like that.

Which means I can send the spreadsheet to pasture and just update my word document from now on. I'm sure I didn't think of this wonderful thing. I think one of my young friends came drifting through and pulled a beer out of the fridge and fixed the settings on my computer and evicted the gremlins and reamed out my phone and said BTW (that's the way they talk) you can just use this document from now on, LOL. And I forgot it until now.

And this is why old ladies keep a lot of beer in the fridge.

A Wiz There Was

We have great Christmases now that we don't do any gift exchanges, except for the wee ones, and that's not much of an exchange, just yet. Dave still strings up lights and we get some kind of a tree because Pootie insists. He's sitting on a mountain of truly garish ornaments and if we don't give him an outlet, he might disgrace us in front of the whole neighborhood. We get some kind of meal together that features butter so prominently it might as well be the carveable main course. We're jolly. Dave makes almond roca and distributes it to the masses. I make Christmas cards and send out about a hundred of them.

The only real crappy part left is the traditional holiday Mail Merge Moment, when I attempt to transfer my Christmas card address list to peel-and-stick labels. I warn Dave when I'm about to do it so he can find something to do miles away.

When I finally got a Mac, I panicked that everything I'd ever written would be lost because it was all in Microsoft Word. I thought maybe all my old Word documents would come up to my Mac and be all howdy, howdy and my Mac would sneer and say qu'est-ce que c'est? and go off in a snit and eat cheese.

The guy at the Mac store assured me it wouldn't happen, but he did say if I felt more comfortable with the Word program than whatever Mac has--we may never know--I could have Microsoft Word For Mac installed on my machine. So I did. I do have a technology phobia and would prefer to use what I've already learned even if it's crappier. Everything is working well enough, except for the label issue.

I did successfully get my addresses into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, so it's merely a matter of summoning up the Mail Merge Wizard. "Wizard" should make you feel all confident. Like there might be wands, and everything. This wizard was last seen floating off in a balloon and bellowing "I don't know how this works!"

There is, as it happens, no place on the toolbar into which you can type "I would like you to put these addresses on those labels please." Instead, you select Print Layout in View. Just do it: there's no need to know why, Little Missy. Then, some whole other place, click on Mail Merge Wizard and then click on Yes I Want A New Document You Asshole We Just Did This Last Year, and then you'll need to put in what kind of labels you have, where you bought them, how much you could have saved on line, and the serial number of your printer, which can be found on the box you recycled. Then you click on the pop-up List Frammulator and find an icon that asks you if you're getting your list from an Open Data Source or the CIA or the desk drawer on the left, and you can save yourself about a half hour here because you wrote down the correct answer several years ago and you still have the notes. Click on that, and a new menu pops up that asks you whether you want the name to appear on the label (click "yes jerkwad") and what your first pet's name was, the name of your oldest sibling, and the street where you grew up, and after about a half hour, the wizard has all your passwords and will decide to start working on your labels once he conducts a little personal business.

Now it is time to Edit Labels! Click on a field name under "Insert Merge Field." Yes, those are all verbs and also all nouns, but it is not necessary for you to know what it means, so don't trouble yourself. This will generate a pop-up window. Click inside it and then locate the book nearest you, turn to page 56, and find the sixth sentence. Once you've typed that into the space provided, it will trigger a new pop-up window. Click on "fill in items to complete document." The wizard will do that, only in secret. You

won't see anything on screen. It's time to print.

I need four pages of labels. This year I only went through twenty of them plus some bond paper before I got what I needed. I shaved fifteen minutes off my previous record, too.

I don't know how the Mac would do it, left to its own devices, but I think you just slap the printer and say here boy, here boy and it bounces over to the printer with your address list in its mouth, and then comes back and licks your screen clean.