dianaschnuth

I don’t do these massive update posts much anymore — I prefer to keep my blog entries on one topic at a time — but I figured I’d do one catch-up post, then maybe expound on parts of it later. So, working backwards from today…

Weighed in today at 196.5 lbs on my home scale — that’s one and a half pounds away from my recent all-time low of 195 from May 2007. (Yep, I gained 15 pounds in six months, and it took me longer than that to lose it again.) It was a bit of a disappointment, then, to weigh in at my Weight Watchers meeting at 200.4 lbs, even after I had an ultra-light breakfast and didn’t drink much water before the weigh-in. My mini-goal had been to weigh in under 200 pounds at the meeting. Oh, well — I guess I’ll wait until next weigh-in to hit my mini-goal, and to reward myself with some shorts and dress pants and blouses that fit.

My supervisor asked me this morning if I’d like to attend a User Group meeting in Lansing (two hours away) this Thursday. Then she asked me if I could drive, since her car doesn’t have air conditioning. D’oh! So, I’ll be getting up at the buttcrack of dawn on Thursday, driving with my supervisor for two hours, attending four hours of Business Intelligence lectures and panels, then having lunch and driving two hours back. At least we don’t have to work for the last couple hours of the day; basically, my day gets shifted forward by two hours.

I landed a freelance web design gig yesterday. Actually, I pretty much “landed” it last Wednesday, when he asked me if I do web design, but yesterday’s client meeting was the first official sealing of our new business relationship. He’s the resident conductor of a local orchestra, so I’m basically making him a PR tool, which is perfect work for me. I underpriced myself, as per usual, but I made sure to leave myself an out: a flat fee for the first 20 hours, then an hourly fee for the next 20, topping out at 40 hours. So, I won’t have totally hosed myself.

This past weekend, Aaron and I went up to the Ann Arbor Art Fairs. Great time, as always. I took a few pictures (with the Holga, too, although I’ll have to wait until those are developed to post them), and I bought one expensive thing and one not-so-expensive thing.

Oh, and I still need to get this blog moved to its new home on another web host, and not just because something’s borked with my MT installation/upgrade (as you will have noticed if you tried to comment on a post lately — your comments ARE going through, I promise). I have until the end of August to get my stuff moved — which, incidentally, is also the deadline for getting my freelance site done. I’m going to be looking at some mighty busy evenings here. I’ll need to carefully ration out my time.

And now I should get to bed, because I need to ready myself for my epic early-morning wakey-wakey in another day or so. I haven’t gotten up at 5:30am since… um… well, it’s been a while. Not counting jet lag in another timezone, of course.

I finally did it.

After turning the thought over in my head for months now, I finally submitted my resignation as LSM webmaster.

It’s nothing against them. It’s just a reorganization of priorities for me. I can only handle so many projects at a time, and can only keep focused on so much. I’m sure that there is someone actively participating in the corps who has HTML skills and can do just as good a job as I did. Or better, probably.

I just haven’t been devoting the amount of time to the website that the corps deserves, and it’s been like that for quite a while now. LSM deserves more than I’m currently giving them. And I deserve to be cut free of the guilt I’ve been giving myself over that very issue.

The announcement feels like a weight lifted from my mind.

Some of you may remember the drum corps website I worked on back in ’05. Well, it seems that the corps is “streamlining” their communications, and they’d like to retool the site. That’s fine. I can dig that. I can even use the design they’d like me to use, although I insist on trying a few different variations on it first.

The only thing that really makes me sad is that I worked SO HARD on getting the content management system to be robust enough to serve their needs, and now the site is pretty much going to be a static electronic brochure. No individual member logins, no real need for members-only news items… they’ll keep the news feed around, and they’ll keep the schedule up-to-date, and I think they’ll keep the file upload feature for staff, but it’s not the same. The site will mainly be used as a recruiting tool, rather than the multifaceted communications tool I’d wanted it to be.

Maybe I wasn’t proactive enough. Maybe I didn’t keep up with it as well as I should have. But I did what I was told, when I was told, and I was so proud of what I’d achieved. I learned so much by programming all that, and I was actually pretty proud of my design. (I went through lots of thumbnails and comps to get to that final.)

Maybe this is my chance to make something that really pops, though. I can take the site and streamline it all to hell. I won’t be depressed about this — I’ll be grateful for the chance to update this two-year-old design.

Really, I will.