good intentions

I had seriously good intentions this weekend.

The first part of the plan was to give my dad a call on Saturday, and I did that. Unfortunately, the call was a really long one - 2 hours, in fact, so it basically ate up my entire Saturday morning, which was a bit inconvenient.

The second part of the plan was to finally finish off watching all of the stuff I've recorded over the last couple of weeks. For example, I recorded both a Midsommer Murders and the last Wallander some time back and I haven't had the chance to watch them.

Mainly this is because my ironing schedule has gone to pot in recent weeks. Normally, I like to watch a good crime mystery while I do my ironing. Midsommer Murders is particularly good ironing viewing.

Well, this weekend I had a huge pile of ironing to do, so I figured I'd take the opportunity to at least watch one of them. If you know Midsommer Murders, then you'll know they're about 2 hours long, as broadcast. Well, when you skip the ads, you find they're actually only about 1.5 hours long.

Also, the Wallenders (these are the BBC ones) are about an hour and a half too. So I figured one of them would get me through the ironing.

I watched both. To be fair, I couldn't iron continuously - my arm starts to ache after a while - but still, even given that, I spent the best part of three hours ironing and watching them.

The final part of my genuine good intentions plan therefore didn't come to proper fruition. This part involved me actually sitting down and doing some scanning.

My plan wasn't to be stupid about it - just do one magazine or something. Make a start - that was the key. Even given the amount of spare time I'd used up with the phone and ironing, I figured I could do one magazine.

However, what I didn't count on was that I've gotten a long way out of touch.

What I'd forgotten or failed to realise was that the unscanned magazines stretched back to September last year. In other words, I had all of the months mags from September 2009 to March 2010 stacked up.

That means I've got 7 issues of Megami, 7 issues of New Type, 7 issues of Animedia and 7 issues of Animage for a starter. I also found 2 issue of Nyan Type (the megami 'bishoujo' rival from New Type) and 3 artbooks in the same pile.

That's a lot of magazines and it meant a lot of sorting out. Before I can scan, I have to take the magazines apart, removing staples, etc. This makes it about 200 times easier to scan them and also means I can chuck away the cheap black and white pages all the mags have in them, but it is a time consuming process. It's also a process that's way better to do in a block, rather than while I'm scanning.

Well, sorting, tidying, taking them apart and all that jazz took me the best part of two hours. And what's more, I didn't have enough time to do the animage's. Unlike the other mags, animage is glue-bound. Taking them apart therefore involves use of an iron to melt the glue. This is a pain in the arse, but it actually makes scanning animage a really simple and easy process, so to be fair it is kinda swings and roundabouts.

So yea - no scanning done, but I've done a big chunk of the prep, so when I do get around to it (and I really am determined to do it now) I'll be pretty much ready to roll straight out of the gate.