Monday, January 19, 2009

When it rains it pours...

Not an exact match for what's going on, but three weeks ago, I was bored silly. Didn't have much to keep me busy, everyone was absorbed in their preparation or recovery from the holidays.

Now I'm up to my eye balls in things to keep busy with.

I'm judging my writing chapter's annual contest. I normally enjoy judging. But I have a couple of entries I just don't know what to do with. One is pretty--I don't want to say bad, because we all have to start somewhere--but it's rough. And sometimes it's hard to find anything nice to say except, "Congratulations for that taking that step and entering the contest." But I focused on a couple of issues. And someone else can point out the rest.

I'm the new Web mistress for the chapter as well. And what an undertaking that is--I knew it was going to be, and was one of the reasons I actually ran for the position. I'm probably one of the few people in the chapter who has more than a passing knowledge of the back end of a Web site. And so it is now my job to clean it up. The gal who originally designed it--and we love the original design--had some extensive code *on every single page*. So my task is to clean up all the code and clean up the files. Yikes. When I first took over the updates, it was overwhelming--even for me. And all I had to do was one page. A minor change of information. There was sooooooo much extraneous stuff, I just didn't know where to start. Because I play with the code--I don't look at the design view, the what-it'll-look-like view--I saw all that gobbeldy gook and felt like a three year old told to clean her room. There was no way I could deal it. I had to recreate the page from scratch. Actually, create a template to use for all the pages. It took me two days to get all the pieces-parts to fit together properly. And then I began to systematically re-create each and every page with the cleaner, sleeker, slimmer page. Ahhh... it's so much better now. I've been waiting two years to get my hands on it. And now it's mine, all mine...

I'm also supposed performing a final read on a manuscript for an e-publisher. I made the mistake of reading the whole thing first--and know I don't want to go back through and mark all the errors...but I've got to. Argh...

Started watching The West Wing through Netflix. I can spend several hours in front of the tube there...

But I did get my employees W2s all taken care of. Finally. Whew.

Well, back to the NTRWA Web site...

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