CD case inserts and stir-fry

You know them?  The nice picture-ish inserts on the front and back of jewel cases that sometimes even tell you which tracks are on the CD inside and in what order?

Well, when you’re transferring music from your Antiquated LPs onto CD, the new CDs don’t have those nice pretty covers.  They don’t have anything at all.  You’re left staring at the CD with your handwritten title and artist note as the only decoration.  Which looks boring, and slightly trashy besides.

So I called a halt on CD burning for a while, and switched over to making jewel case inserts.  I started digging the LPs back out and slapping the covers on my flatbed scanner—which turned out to be more work than it might seem at first, because my scanner will only manage a 9” by 11½” image, and since the normal size of an LP sleeve is something like thirteen inches square, I have to make two scans to get a whole front or a whole back, and sometimes three if I’m unwilling to sacrifice the bottom inch and a half of the album cover.  Then comes the fun of gluing all the scans together with Paint Shop Pro into usable images, which is the slowest part of the whole thing.  You see, my computer is six years old and only has 128MB of RAM in it which, when I’m swapping around these 80MB images, means that I spend a lot of time sitting and waiting for the computer to quit spooling off data to the swap file.  I make one edit, wait two or three minutes, make another edit, wait another three minutes, merge and save and wait another two minutes . . . .  I get to feeling like Arlo Guthrie going through the draft process at Whitehall Street:  “I was there for two hours . . . three hours . . . I was there for a long time going through all kinds of mean nasty ugly things.”

I’ll be the first to admit that these inserts aren’t professional quality.  I have to reduce them from 13 by 13 originals to 4¾ by 4¾, which doesn’t do a thing for helping to read the fine print.  And I can’t afford a color laser printer, so I have to use a color inkjet, and its resolution isn’t nearly up to what I’m asking of it.  Still, the inserts look something like the original cover art, and that’s a devil of a lot better than nothing at all.

But I am making progress; I just counted up and discovered that I’ve done 48 CDs of about a hundred and twenty.  Maybe if I keep after it (and don’t run out of ink for the inkjet printer) I can go back to burning CDs in another few weeks.

We had company for dinner tonight (Terri came over, bringing a bunch of sewing and clothing repair work she’s paying L to do, now that L’s got her sewing business set up), so I ended up doing some actual cooking.  I pitched together a basic stir-fry of chicken, gai choy, Roma tomatoes, green bell peppers, broccoli, and enough onions and garlic to make it interesting.  This is the sort of stir-fry that the late Barbara Tropp called “the basic dance” of a Chinese kitchen, and it contains so much of everything that to serve it with anything more than rice would be completely de trop.  (I should also mention that I learned to cook faultless, never-fail rice from Tropp’s first book, The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking.  It’s a book no one who wants to cook Chinese dishes should be without, which is why it’s still in print after twenty years, and nearly two years after Tropp’s death.  Give her second book, The China Moon Cafe Cookbook, a pass, though.  The recipes in it are far more complex and difficult, and rather beyond all except the professional or the most dedicated of amateurs.)

I made enough dinner that we have leftovers for tomorrow’s lunch, even after everyone had eaten lots.  Even M had some of the chicken, and might have eaten some of the vegetables if we’d given her some of them.  I declare, it is such a strange feeling to have a child who actually wants to eat vegetables.  T still barely has anything to do with them, and L almost never met a cooked vegetable she really liked.  (Her views were warped by a Southern grandmother who, in the way of Southern grandmothers, cooked all vegetables to mush.)  M’s perfectly happy to help L eat her Caesar salad, and will even finish off a small one of her own if we help her a little with the larger leaves.  I’m going to have to start trying her out on other veg.  Maybe I’ll find someone around here to help me eat snow peas and asparagus.  I haven’t managed that so far.

The amoeboid cummerbund wields a dyslexic sword.  Fnord.