Desktop Publishing

It's official. We just had the third warmest January on record. I, for one, am glad for two reasons. The first one having to do with the price of gas to heat my house. There were actually days when the furnace hardly turned on at all. And the second reason was the rain. We got a lot of rain. Thank goodness it wasn't snow! The forecasters had made dire predictions that we were in for a tough winter. Even the oak tree predicted a worse than usual winter. So, unless we have near disastrous weather in February, it looks like everyone was dead wrong.

I would like to apologize to my fellow gardeners for not keeping up with your blogs. I've been working on a couple of projects. The first one started when the very nice lady who is in charge of the volunteer program at Rutgers Gardens who also happens to be on the Steering Committee for the Middlesex County Master Gardeners, mentioned to me one day last November that the committee had been talking about doing a newsletter but the members all lacked computer skills. I'm not a Master Gardener yet, but I offered to help. I actually worked on a newsletter a couple of jobs ago for a financial planner.

She invited me to attend the next meeting of the Steering Committee. Next thing I knew, I was appointed to the Newsletter Committee and sent home with a wishlist for the newsletter! So while I was studying for my midterm, I was also jotting down ideas for a newsletter. As soon as my exam was over, I sat down at my computer. I realized that I hadn't been given any firm guidelines or even a title. So I made one up, used it as a theme throughout the newsletter and just got incredibly creative. So creative that even my garden gnome has his own column.

I wasn't worried about being too creative since I had to present this to the entire Steering Committee and the County Ag Agent for approval and I figured they would tone it down so I just had some fun with it. I presented my ideas at the January meeting and . . . they loved it! Didn't want to change a thing. Instead, they handed out assignments for articles to various people with a deadline of January 31 to get their articles to me to format into a draft for approval next week.

The very nice lady who got me into this (who is also the head of the Newsletter Committee) was so impressed that she asked me if I would be willing to do a newsletter for Rutgers Gardens. It's Rutgers Gardens! How could I say no? So, once more, I am working against a deadline while jotting down ideas for (another) newsletter.

Who knew that my gardening hobby would turn into a "career" in desktop publishing?