Perhaps it's appropriate to break a month-long blog silence with a post that I've been failing to get around to for several months. Way back in March, I completed a major personal project that deserves crowing about. I made myself a Mission Book.

I don't really recall where or when I decided that this is something I wanted to do. It might have been as far back as 2007. But as soon as I latched on to the idea of collecting the records of my mission into one place, it got a little more and more elaborate. The finished product took me over a year of working on it during nearly every moment I could spare (and some that I couldn't), and it's quite an elaborate thing. But it's going to be a priceless record for me and for my family.

My Mission Book is a compilation of everything I could find that documents my mission to Brazil from 1995 through 1997. The first (and most tedious) step in the process was to transcribe all of my mission journals. Having mostly kept my mission goal of writing in my journal at least every other day, that's a lot of text.

Then I transcribed all of the letters that I wrote to my parents. My saintly mother had saved them all in a nice three-ring binder - she even had transcribed some of the mini-tapes I had recorded (which have since been lost). With both the journals and the letters, I added commentary, translating the random Portuguese words I used, and explaining to a reader who didn't know me in 1995 about the identities of people I talked about and events from my personal history that were alluded to but never explained. I also wrote a three-page introduction.

As if that textual work weren't enough, I then scanned all of the over 300 photographs I took as a missionary.

Of course, these prints have been sitting in a binder for years, and thanks to less-than-stellar Brazilian developing shops, they weren't brilliant and vibrant to begin with, so the next step was to Photoshop every one of those pictures, removing the scratches and discolorations, and tweaking the color levels so the people didn't look like yellow aliens.

Along the way I digitized a few other things - I scanned my missionary nametags, my transfer cards, my visas, my Brazilian driver's license, the newsletters I had written while in the mission office, my release letter from my mission president, and my notes for my homecoming talk. I even scanned a bumper sticker I got at Sin City Cycles in Lynn, Massachusetts while I was waiting for my visa to get into Brazil. I also created a few maps of my areas from Google Maps, and photographed my beat-up White Bible.

A year or so later, after I had all of my content assembled, I started the project of designing the book. I first tried Scribus, an open-source desktop publishing program, but it proved a bit cumbersome to use for a neophyte like me, so I opted instead for Adobe InDesign, one of the industry standard programs. The problem was that InDesign costs several hundred dollars, and I didn't want to spend that much money. But no worries - you can download a 30-day free trial. So all I had to do was to put all of this into a beautiful graphic design. This was the hardest part - working against the clock to pull it all together. I think I did a decent job - I used a different color theme for each of my areas, which nicely divided the 300-plus pages into chapters.

Then all I had to do was take the resulting PDF and upload it to Lulu.com, where I fought the file-format demons for a week before going ahead and ordering a single copy of print-on-demand goodness. The price was a bit steep (they charge by the page), but it was definitely worth it. I still have the electronic copy up there, so I can print other copies for my kids later on. The printing quality was awesome - the book looks great, and I couldn't be happier (unless it had cost less).

This was a very difficult and time-consuming task, but it was one of the most fulfilling personal projects I've done in a long time. Yeah, this blog is cool, but that mission book is a hefty reminder of one of the most important - and certainly the most unique - times of my life.

Here are some pictures of the covers, a chapter title page, a representative page, and a view of the Appendix, where I stuffed all the miscellaneous stuff (this is a couple of the mission newsletters).