Selenay's Ramblings

I enjoy looking after the website that I run for the Quakers. I'm proud of the work I do on it, I earn a little bit of extra cash in my English bank account and it keeps my skills in practise.

The thing that I do not enjoy is receiving urgent "please put this up!" notices about events happening tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

Quite aside from the time difference, there is the issue that very few people will see the notice on the website in the few hours that it is up before the event and actually have time to rearrange their schedules if they wanted to go. Also, it is inconsiderate. I've just been out for the evening. It was something that I planned to do for days. Spending half an hour updating the website wasn't in my plan for this evening and I'm now doing it when I'm tired and cranky.

What would have been much more considerate is to send me the stuff a week or more ago with a note to say "when you're ready, but we'd love it within the next couple of days". Then if I was busy that evening nothing would be lost but I'd definitely make the time to ensure it went up as soon as it could.

This last minute stuff? Sucks. It's stupid. I make the time to do it because it actually can't wait (the lecture is tomorrow evening) but the next time this happens I'm not doing it. She's already had a couple of letters explaining why it's not good to do it. I know that by doing it ASAP I'm letting her get away with it and she assumes that I always monitor and jump on stuff immediately. So next time, I'll be unavoidably unable to do it that evening.

Actually I won't, because I can't. But she's definitely getting a more strongly worded letter pointing out that I cannot always be guaranteed to be available to do this work at the drop of a hat. She has to stop making these assumptions.

And thus my quiet time with Holby City and some knitting after an evening out is destroyed because it is now much too late to be considering starting to watch everything. I think that I'll go to bed with my book and try to de-stress a little.

This weekend I have been remarkably productive:

- Put in a huge update for the Quakers website.
- Finished another two blanket patches, bringing my total tally up to 4 of 63.
- Wrote a big chunk of Sensible Man
- Walked into town and explored the new shopping centre.
- Replaced the work shirt that the washing machine ate this week. I am a girl with literally enough work shirts to get through the working week and no more. Losing one was a tragedy.
- Checked out food arrangements and printed out the final programme for Orital.

That's pretty good for a girl who is completely exhausted as well! I have some deep thoughts on the nature of fantasy and its relationship with the world inspired by the last episode of the Worlds of Fantasy documentary series. Except I have no brain left so I will have to write those thoughts tomorrow.

And now I am going to watch TV and eat something, because that also needs doing.

The art website that I have been working on since September (ack!) finally went live today! I got the 'You have a go' email this morning (after letting them know that it was ready to go live around two and a half months ago...), checked that everything was ready and hit the button. The site is now running, everything works and I'm hoping that my clients are very pleased. I'm certainly very pleased with how it's turned out, despite the headaches and delays. It looks really good, it runs very quickly, it doesn't seem to break in any set-ups that I could find and even my father thinks that it's a good piece of work :-)

Plus, this can now go on my CV. Yay!

And now I must make myself pretty and presentable for when terrylbirch, yragg, and sazzle_02 pick me up in a few minutes. We are going for lunch at the noodle place in town followed by a tour of a model village. Woo!

Hopefully I'll be back here with enough time for a lie-down before new Doctor Who starts. Only seven hours to go!

I booked the hotel room for Pegasus One. Woo!

I finally got access to the Quaker website so I can now update for my client. Woo!

My car started so I didn't have to beg a jump from anyone at work. Woo!

I didn't get any French homework done tonight because I was working on the Quaker thing. Um.

Woo?

French assignment completed - check.
Morning out with terrylbirch - check.
Never Ending Website work - check (but *flail* because my eyes are now hurting like a bugger. Stupid graphics that I'm only half way through fixing).
Quaker website - kinda check, kinda not. Update work is done. Can't log into the host to upload via FTP or via the control panel.
Angry email to Quaker website hosts - check.

See? I can be productive and useful when I choose to be. I just have to be firm with myself and make sure that I dedicate one day in the weekend to actual work rather than goofing off for fun stuff.

Not in the office for the next three days - I am on a VBA course. Should be...um...fun? They're determined to turn me into a Microcrap slave *sigh*

I've been thinking heavily about Mage Murders and why it's stuck. I'm starting to think that the main problem is that I'm attempting to tell the wrong story. I'm trying to write the prequel before I've written the important story stuff and while it's good to have that early stuff in my mind, it's not as interesting a story as I thought it would be. Time to take a step back, look at the short story that triggered the idea last year and possibly think about diving into the book that that short story was the first chapter for. I think that I intimidated myself out of writing that because it would require more work. I'll see how it goes when I've got some things roughed out on paper.

I really need to work on Under Green Hills because the ideas are buzzing around my head but I've been too tired over the last couple of weeks to write them. Huh.

Remind me why I thought full-time employment was so important again? Right, money.

Darn, I was so busy complaining about bad coffee yesterday that I completely forgot to note Doctor Who's 42nd birthday! So, Happy Birthday to the Doctor and may there be many more adventures with you to enjoy :-)

As a nice little connection, Little Sis had a day's work on the reception of a conference for learning disabilities yesterday and guess who was there?

Yup, Christopher Eccleston.

Apparently there's some kind of family connection there. He was signing autographs, but Little Sis didn't get a break until just before he left, so she didn't manage to meet him. Aw. But hey, she saw Christopher Eccleston and he exists outside the TV box, so that's cool.

Slightly irritating news yesterday was an email from my Quaker client asking where the website has gone. Um.

( Hosting rant )

So yesterday was a mixture of the cool and the stupid. Ah, life, I love thee.

...at the worst moments. Damn you, CSS floats. My client's gallery was going to look so gorgeous until you stuck your oars in.

It still does look lovely...unless I increase the text size. Then it all goes icky. Can I really get away with an accessible website with a gallery that breaks when you change the text size? Or is it back to the drawing board for this one? Damn me for trying to do liquid layouts.

In other news, 59 fic reviews loaded and counting...and I've still not finished the Buffy section. But nearly.

And I know that Buffy is one of the smaller sections. Eep!

How hard can it possibly be to set up one silly little interview?

So far, the agency has called me four times today about this second interview thing. The last two times were from someone other than my usual guy, who had obviously never received the message about me saying yes to Thursday and therefore was making an urgent call to see whether she could slot me in tomorrow or possibly Thursday. As the agency guy hadn't even mentioned tomorrow when he first called and I'd spoken to him to say yes to Thursday, I felt that this was getting silly.

Upshot is that...I still don't know. They're gonna call me tomorrow.

And why would I agree to an interview at 10am tomorrow when it's already 6.15pm today and I would have to literally leave my workplace in the lurch because I'd be on the motorway at the time when I needed to call and let them know what was going on? Particularly when this agency knows that I'm working and trying not to wind up with a bad reputation for swanning off at the drop of a hat?

Grrr.

It's definitely Monday today.

In good news, I've got the XHTML version of one of the art website mock-ups finished. Go me :-)

So, I gave in and emailed that place I interviewed with three weeks ago that I really liked. They said that they'd be back to me in around two weeks, so I feel that I gave them extra time (so don't sound desperate) but hopefully reminded them that they've got an eager candidate who is actually more competent than she sounded in the interview. This undoubtedly means that the rejection will arrive tomorrow. Ho, hum.

On the up side, had a meeting with a potential client for a website and am now committed to drawing up a proposal by next Monday. Will even have to set a realistic price. Woo! It should be a fun project - not quite as small as I'd initially envisioned, but not as scarily big as I was led to believe. Definitely an interesting one and, in the absence of employment with regular wage cheques, freelance work is not to be sniffed at. Particularly as it's in the right kind of field and therefore will make my CV look a little less IT-deficient.

Part of me is a little concerned that this isn't where I'd seen myself being at this stage. I'd assumed that I would be permanently employed - should it really take this long? And I hadn't even considered freelance work at the beginning of the year. Yet that side is going better than the regular employment thing.

I'd also assumed that I'd be nearing the end of writing Mage Murders with a heafty start on Under Green Hills. But no. What I really need is some time where I'm not thinking about job applications or websites and can just let myself be absorbed the writing again. My agency owes me some paid leave - maybe I'll take it next month while the parents are away. The idea of a few days of just me, a notebook, a pen and my computer (with my work email accounts ignored) sounds rather heavenly right now.