FINALLY!!!!!

With one big heave of relief....i can finally drop "dead" on my study table, not after gaining bone pain on 2 elbows, neck spasm and stiffness, some mosquito bites or allergy (need to verify these), tired fingers (from typing), sore finger tips (from playing the guitar), swollen right shin (wondering why???) and TOTAL FATIGUE!!!!

YF songbook needs a revamp after it has seen the world for 4 years! Pretty long time tho i could still remember that year we were rushing out the songbook. Back then it was Carol & Sharon doing, and with Rachel helping in the design. I couldnt even remember if i did any editing....neither could i remember who else helped. This is not short term memory loss but a long one. Sigh... And so, it has been decided towards the end of last year that we will reproduce the book coz there are errors in lyrics, chords, etc. All these are not really the pushing factors. The main reason is we are running short of songbooks for use on Saturday!!!! Wondering where did all the backup copies we kept aside. hmmm..... and we dont even have enough to give or sell to YFers.

Background people - Sharon checked the lyrics while Lem did the chords. I did the final editing plus typing 78 new songs, including the insertion of chords. Sharon picked one song from her books to add in and James wrote a new Acknowledgement page.

It was a long tedious job but a needful one. With all the corrections from Sharon & Lem, i started doing last week. My initial aim was to complete over the weekend and hand over to printer early Mon morning but alas....it clearly wasnt happening. The typing of new songs were easy but choosing & finding which songs to go in took time. Adding the chords were a little longer than typing. Editing the lyrics & chords were ok but there were some songs Lem couldnt check coz he didnt know how to sing them. Most of them are from CP songbook and i had no idea too. Carol & Sharon helped in these & Isaac helped me for some of the songs too.

On Saturday, i requested for prayer to finish the song book by Mon. Didnt even stay with Yfers for dinner that night but rushed home to continue editing. Worked till 6am and was really really tired. Tried to sleep but couldnt really and keep having stupid nightmares.....so stupid till i cannot remember when i woke up in the morning. Had very lousy sleep of 2-3 hours and had to prepare for service.

Came back after dinner at Dr Lowly's mom's place and continued where i left. Tho i realised it would be really really impossible to finish by Mon morning, i had to try. Pushed and pushed till 5am and had to give up coz i think i created more errors than those i was trying to edit....argh... how do i know? Opened up the file on monday and saw some deletion of lyrics & some song numbers were missing too.....oh man!!!

Sms to printer on Mon morning to apologize and inform him that i can only email by evening. Had to run off to bring the car for servicing in the morning & then to dentist place to take out stitches....oh boy, that was painful. 3 sharp but short pain...at first i thot she poked my soft flesh with the scissors but soon realised she was pulling out the stitches. Anyhow, thank God for progressive healing,. One more week to go tho for a full heal.

At 9plus last night, i finished...as in checking thro, formatting and all. My nightmare started when i tried to convert to pdf and printed a few pages for sample. They were all A4!!!! This brought an immediate remembrance to what happened 4 years back....oh no... why didnt i remember before i started??? Why oh why???? Back then, the printer (it was Kwan Leng's team) had to shrink our A4 copies to A5 and because of the shrink, some last lines of certain songs disappeared!!! The other thing that i forgotten was to do the songbook with pagenation, as in more distance away from the centre core of the book, be it left or right page. I sms to William last night if his team can work with A4 but he didnt reply.

Alright, dont panic, change page setting to A5 and bookfold and everything should be ok....i was comforting myself, tho in such a lame way. Anyone who had done word or used word doc should know what to expect next. i did but i was honestly hoping for the best. With the change in setting, EVERYTHING, i mean EVERYTHING changed. The lyrics ran out of the page, the time signature had to be realigned. What was clearly the DISASTROUS consequence of all would be the guitar chords. They ran all over the place! Some of the chords didnt run and so since i didnt know which ones did, had to check all of them.

At 10.30pm, i had to redo all over again. Besides formatting, i had to look thro every chord placement and sigh....i could have been smarter lah!!! Bit my lip and told myself to do a proper format and keep this softcopy for years to come. But aiyoh... why did i not remember about page setting??? Could have saved me much much time. But hey, on the positive side, it was a blessing in disguise coz i found some errors and corrected them. Guess if i were to look at the file now and scrutinize, there will still be errors too.....hahahaha....

At 12 plus am, i couldnt take it. Did up to song number 115 and had to retire to bed. Started work again this morning and thank God, by 4.30pm, i finished formatting the entire songbook. WHEW!!!! Emailed to the printer so they could start work on it.

Well actually, i forgot to mention the cover design. With no more softcopy in my data (hard disk crashed), the printer only had a full colour printed out hard cardboard sheet to work on. Kwan leng passed this to me 4 years back and i kept it nicely without bending it tho i didnt know why i didnt throw away. Perhaps i had an intuition that i needed it 4 years later on. Nah...it was so beautiful and too precious for me to throw away. At first we were worried if printer could not scan a good pic out of this and we need to rush out another design cover or try to redo this one. Either way, it was something that we didnt want to see it happening. Thank God they did a decent job out of the hardcopy. And yah, sharon changed the spine thingy too coz the existing design is too squashed. For this, the graphics team started work last week and i confirmed the artwork this morning.

After emailing the songbook proper, i then had to do up the first 3 pages (foreword, acknowledgement, etc) and the contents at the back. Finished the former close to 6pm and the last task on hand would be the contents.....listed alphabetically and topically. The topical assignment also took time and some songs took me a while to decide which category to place them in. Hmmm.....at 11pm......it was finally over. The next task would be to get copyrights for the additional songs and to get ready the piano score book for YF.

Why the rush to give to printer? It is because back in Nov 08, while deciding to reprint the songbook, Tabernacle BPC has indicated interest to buy over our existing copies at $10 per book when we get the new ones printed. Our initial assessment of the quote would be around $18-$20 per book and so it was way out of their budget to get new copies. But with the very good quotes i gotten recently, Eld John now can buy 20 new books from us (or rather tag on with our order) to kickstart his new YF group coming up in Mar 09.

He has basically restructured his YF and all the older ones will be going to YAF. This is a significant moment for them and I know it means a lot to him. Since end of last year, i had been reminding YF exco to get this project done. Jan....busy busy month and erh....i should have received the proofread copies in first week of Feb but i guess with the CNY and lots of things to settle, it was delayed. But we have already promised Tabernacle of the new books and so i was still aiming for completion. It was supposed to be end Feb (as in finish printing) but now it has been extended to 6 Mar. William, the printer, told me if i were to give to him on Monday morning, they can give to us on 6 or 7 Mar (which is the day Eld John require the books). They needed about 2 weeks to do a good job. That is why i needed to rush so badly and had to forego sleep and fight against time. Eld John had told me if we really really cannot make it, he will use either the existing ones or our current copies (on loan to him)... but honestly, it is not nice for me to delay anymore. He has been asking about the progress periodically and i just felt that we could have done a better job. Besides, the printer is very helpful and they literally stand by last evening to wait for my file. They are trying to get at least 20-30 copies for Tabernacle to use on 7 Mar. With all these weighing in the balance, how could i just take my time with no sense of urgency?

I am thankful to God it is finally over and thank those who have helped, prayed for us & me. And i pray & hope all the errors had been spotted and our finished product is "faultless" :) Now, I can sleep peacefully....especially tonight......