Lost Day

Doncha just HATE IT when interruptions ruin your day?

I had it all planned out:

  1. Shower and dress
  2. Eat a healthy breakfast
  3. Drive Andy to work
  4. Spend half an hour checking out a simple display glitch on a friend’s computer
  5. Get several blog posts started, and finish two, one for today and one for tomorrow
  6. Pick Andy up from work
  7. Fix and eat dinner
  8. Light a fire in the fireplace and settle down with a book for a lazy evening

Yeah. Right.
So, what actually happened? LIFE happened.

  1. The hot water ran out before I finished my shower, so I had to rinse off with icy cold water. Instead of getting dressed right away, I huddled under the electric blanket until I stopped shivering. My wool pants had slipped off the clothes tree overnight, and were hopelessly wrinkled. I had forgotten to pick up the others from the dry cleaner, so I had to iron them. The tip of the iron snagged the hem of one leg and tore out the stitching, so I had to mend it.
  2. That didn’t leave me time to fix cereal or an egg, so I grabbed some bread and jam to eat in the car.
  3. Traffic was awful. Managed to get Andy to work on time, but the car was almost out of gas, so I had to stop at the gas station to fill up.
  4. Was only a half hour late getting to my friend’s house. The simple display glitch wasn’t so simple, after all. Wound up searching the MS knowledge base and a couple of tech support sites to find out what the error codes meant, wrote two pages of notes, updated the video card driver, installed two months worth of Windows updates (which broke the driver again), installed another driver update, deleted 107,734 temporary files, and scheduled another visit to investigate the 253 registry errors when my friend returns from vacation.
  5. When I got home, the phone was ringing. A former client (I completed his site re-design a year ago) needed to be talked through a security update for his WordPress installation. “You said I could call any time, no charge.” What was I thinking?
  6. Oops! No time to write those blog posts. Gotta pick Andy up from work.
  7. Couldn’t fix a real dinner because we didn’t have all the ingredients for what I had planned. PBJ is a balanced meal, isn’t it?
  8. Lit the fire, reluctantly set aside the book I’d been looking forward to reading, and made the mistake of checking email before starting to work on the blog posts. Messages from three web hosts, two professional associations, Land’s End, and my business cell phone company: the credit card I used for automatic payments had expired, and dire things would happen if I didn’t update the account TODAY. I updated the accounts, fighting overloaded sloooow servers and reloading almost every page after browser timeouts.

It’s almost midnight. Can I get at least one blog post finished before I fall asleep on the keyboard?

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30 Day Blogging Challenge? Easy!

NOT.

a perfect emeraldOh, I know I want to do it.

And I know I can do it.

But…but…

But first, I have to decide which blog to use. My business blog? My music blog? My techcomm blog? Maybe I should start a personal blog. Yeah, that’s it. I’ll start a personal blog.

Oh, dear! None of the free themes are quite right. The designs are sooo last decade! Or they have ugly colors. Obviously, I need a new theme! And, since I sell my web/blog design services, the design has to be perfect, right? But…but I don’t have time to design a really good theme right now!

And…oh, my! That topic just won’t do, will it? Nobody will be interested in that! My first post for the challenge must be perfect, right? RIGHT?!?

I wish I could expunge the word “perfect” from my mental vocabulary. It has caused me more grief than any other term in the dictionary. “Perfect” has lost me friends, cost me promotions, irritated my family, and generally kept me imprisoned in a perfectly-constructed cage. If I wait until it’s “perfect,” I will never publish anything.

So, here it is, my first blog post for the 30 Day Blogging Challenge.

It isn’t perfect:

  • I’m using a free theme somebody else designed.
  • I haven’t customized the sidebar widgets (yet).  [UPDATE: Widgets added 2011 Jan 10]
  • I haven’t fiddled and tweaked the layout or the color scheme (yet).  [UPDATE: Now gets fiddled/tweaked (twiddled?) regularly.]
  • I haven’t even changed the freakin’ dummy titles on the header sliders, or replaced the generic images with my own photos (yet).   [UPDATE: Done!]

No, it isn’t perfect. But it’s here. and that’s all yer gonna get, tonight!

UPDATE:

OK, I couldn’t stand it. Changed the background color from depressing black to royal purple, and replaced the dummy page titles with stuff I might actually write about. But that’s it for tonight. The photos will have to wait until tomorrow.  I mean it. Really.

Posted in Life | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Test

Checking the category menu…

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