Finished!

Yesterday morning, with Katy's help, I finished the index for the 5th edition of Interiors an Introduction. It has taken the better part of the summer: the total hour count is 120 hours. The irony is that in all the years this book in its various editions has been in existence, I have never looked at the index. It has always been done by a professional indexer before, but the cost was deducted from our royalties. So since I had the time, I decided I would do it. It wasn't difficult, just tedious and time-consuming and I am very pleased to be done.

I have also been creating PowerPoint presentations from all my old teaching slides (now scanned) for use in the classroom. I always resisted because I thought the resolution on scanned slides was lousy (which it is), but what I failed to realize is that there are millions of high-resolution images available online at Google Images. So while I waited for galleys of the chapters and revised chapters to dribble in so I could index them, I made PowerPoints and actually enjoyed it. Gavin and Phillip were great tutors and really helped me learn my way around. I have given the new presentations a trial run during summer term. With all the additional photos from cyberspace, they are so much richer and more interesting than my old slide shows.

Katy took this photo of me working on a PowerPoint

120 hours of fun indexing at the computer

I want to offer huge thanks to Katy who spent about 8 hours at my side entering new page numbers into the index as I dictated. Her help was invaluable because once the final revised pages arrived, I only had the weekend to finish what would have taken me at least 30 hours on my own.

That's all for now.

OXO

D.