Thursday, October 09, 2003

I am done crying over spilt milk...

I’m over the urge to put my fist through the computer or just sit in the middle of my office floor and scream... so I can write a semi-coherent blog now.

Tuesday night was a late night getting all the cow files done for Milk Maritime and I made jpgs of the files for the client before shutting down the computer and crawling off to bed. Others who had this flu warned me that there was a backlash a few days after you started feeling better, and yesterday was definitely an off day... and a hectic one with Bethany “helping” do groceries and other errands. Erin had a marvelous run at cross country practice and I had choir practice, so by the time I got home, I went right to bed intending to start fresh this morning.

This morning when I turned on the computer and went to make the three tiny final corrections to the Teacher’s newsletter files, that both the French file and the most recent English version were somehow corrupted and unable to open. Talk about feeling sick to your stomach!! I now know how stitchers who have something spill onto a piece of needlework that they have put countless hours of time into feel when they first see the ruins of their work.

I did get a few graphics friends around town with the same or newer versions of the program to see if they could open the files, but alas... no luck. All my other files are fine and the Parent Newsletter built in a separate program is fine, but the task of recreating and re-typesetting the French version (and bringing the older English version in line with the newer one will have to take up the whole night. Final electronic proofs have to be sent off to Fredericton for government approval tomorrow morning no matter what.

I love the lamentations in the Psalms... because the writer goes ahead and rants to God at the beginning... WHY did this have to happen?? WHY me?? WHY now!! WHAT are the odds and why couldn’t they have been the lottery type instead of the unlucky type.... but like the psalmist by the end of the passage, I can only think of what I DO have...

The files will build faster the second time around....

Nick has been an angel helping with the kids and giving up a night at the gym for his workout so that I have extra time on the computer....

Only the files are toast, not my computer....

Nobody got hurt....

I live in a country of more than plenty....

I can’t wait to teach my classes in Toronto...

“I complained I had no shoes... until I met someone who had no feet....”

Sometimes you just can’t cry over spilled milk. You just do what needs to be done and count the blessings that you do have!

Monday, October 06, 2003

Two steps forward... one step back...

Another nice, quiet Monday morning.. and yet I seem to have so little energy. Perhaps a rebound from the flu that hit our house last week, perhaps a reaction to so much elephant left to eat... but I feel about as sharp as a sack of wet mice!

I slogged away on the corrections to the English Teacher’s newsletter and got all of the French translations in place except one recipe which they forgot to send the French version of... but then the English layout got all moved around about 3 pm this afternoon! I could have just screamed! Now I have to try to compare the French version and figure out which paragraphs to move where... so it is a darned good thing that I can speak both languages to make heads or tails of what I am doing! It would have been SO much easier if they could have gotten the English version to EXACTLY what they wanted and THEN sent if for translation!!!

This morning Bethany asked about next Monday (which is Thanksgiving Monday here in Canada). She knows that she won’t have to go to daycare and that Erin and Nick won’t have to go to school... but then she looks up at me with those big blue eyes and says “can you take a break from your computer too, Mommy?” Ouch! Out of the mouth of babes!

I told her that I would try to have a whole family lazy day... but with leaving for Toronto on the 17th... and all these changes to Milk stuff that should have been wrapped up two weeks ago if the information had been on time may make for some late nights!

This will give me one more twisted grin to make when someone says “Oh... you must love having so much control over your own time working from home!!”