So that means I have to get up, and get back into gear. Or at least, literally “off my ass.”

I’m also looking at 4, count them 4 email reminders from Curves that they’ve missed me in the circuit, which means a whole month gone to the wind while my ass expands. I think it’s time to cancel, because I’m clearly not going to keep going and go climbing, too. And I’d rather be climbing. I dread that phone call, though.

Work just blew-up last week, and I’m still so far behind. I’ve gotten so much done this week, I should be overjoyed, but I can’t stop looking at what’s still outstanding, and then those email and phone call inquiries about “When can I expect this?” just keep coming. No time for a pat on the back, just get up and keep moving.

So, hey, it’s 2010 and stuff. Welcome. Yeah. Most of you knew that already. So far I’ve had more work to do for less pay than I can remember in a long time, put our household on a strict budget, and resolved to take the need for some personal changes more seriously than ever before. As for how all that’s working out for me, well, tonight it took two Tylenol and a Lynchburg lemonade to make the pain go away from hunching over the desk all day, so I could go hunch over a table with some friends and play Cthulhu for hours.

So yeah, there’s that. I’m gaming again, but I’m still off the electronic stuff, I swear. It’s only the good clean paper and dice gaming for me, man. It occurs to me it was only Tuesday I heard Ben was still playing WoW like an addict, and I actually kinda felt sorry for him. After tonight’s few minutes of gaming interlaced with hours of bad puns and tangents, I’m actually thinking the computer games might be a little more immediately satisfying. I forgot how much I dislike “cliffhanger” gaming sessions, unless I’m running them, of course. Let’s just say tonight’s session was a real train wreck and leave it at that. *wink*

A new year always seems like a good excuse for attempting some changes, so why not follow that crowd. The job scare didn’t hurt either. So, I’ve recently brushed up on some PHP basics with the notion of looking into Facebook app programing, and then gotten merrily sidetracked with the phenomenon of social media’s influence on modern advertising, and sort of haphazardly found myself reading up on SEO instead. Heck, today — I wish I could say for fun — I made some photo slideshows with flash, another set of skills I probably ought to have and really just don’t. Essentially so far 2010′s been all about “back to school” for me. Apparently after you go to your 20 year high school reunion you start to wonder if all your knowledge is really 20 years old, and start to seek out new skills. Or it could be just me.

Haven’t forgotten how to write, though. Well, not literally at least, see I’m doing it right now! Grammar is a little out of left-field these days, but I do like to capture what I’m thinking and worry less about what grade I might get. Felt good to stretch the mental muscle a bit to write up the first in my SEO tutorial series, where I’m essentially taking the general concepts I’ve picked up, focusing them for real estate agents, and even further focusing them based on what can actually be done with our websites. I’m actually looking forward to writing up hopefully the next two lessons over this weekend, so I can get ahead in case things get insanely busy again.

I meant when. I’ve put in more hours for work this month than in ages, and it’s nuts when I’m supposed to be cut back to a 24-hour work week. There have been some interesting challenges for sure, and honestly it’s been coming at me from so many sides it’s been hard to decide where to focus. Just when I get the plan in place to use all my idle time to study, somebody goes and takes away my idle time. I guess that’s why I have to resort to making time to journal again at 1AM, when I’m supposed to be on a 10PM bedtime schedule. Shyeah.

So, before the uber-budget hit, I plopped down the dough to sign on for another 6-months of ass-kicking bootcamp, this time at an indoor location. I got three days in, then the snow-ice hit. Then I got kinda sickly. Then I just got really off my schedule, which brings us to now. Tomorrow… er… later today is the last day of January and I’ve been to bootcamp three times! Woohoo! Month one down, right!?

It’s the timeslot. I cannot do getting up at 4:30 daily, fancy new-fangled light-therapy alarm clock aside, I have not been able to do it. Just knowing I’m going to TRY to get up the next morning causes me to have the worse time getting to sleep that when the light wakes me up, I just want to smash the light. I’m seriously considering swapping to the evening class back at Stone Mountain Park, which would be outdoors, but at least would be 6:30 in the evening instead. I have decided to decide this weekend, and make a fresh go at whatever come Monday. Of course, I could just go to the Saturday bootcamp at Stone Mountain park and tell them in person, but that’d mean I’m running come Saturday and I can already feel the notion-of-exercise-induced-insomnia coming on.

In what seems like an unrelated note to the reader, yet is clearly only a tangent in my brain, I’ve also decided to actually do the little photography project I’d considered doing a couple years ago, wherein I take goofy pictures of my favorite things and try to capture their story. Figure out, essentially, what makes them my favorite. Stupid, likely, but either all this crap sitting around on shelves are just toys and junk I’m hoarding, or they actually are “special” and deserve a little consideration.

Alright. I think I can walk away and consider that a big meaty journal entry for 2010 to sink it’s teeth into. Take that 2009! 2010 journal entries are going to kick your ass, and this is just the first one!

JamesT was gone fishing for a week with his dad and the gang, which gave me the opportunity to drive up to Bristol for mom’s birthday.  I know I meant to post about that, but the I fought the initial urge because it was just too soon. Suffice it to say it was a miserable trip overall from a combination of my own neck pain allowing me no sleep and making me edgy and mom in a particularly hermit yet needy mood. Sometimes we have those phone calls where I realize she’s in that mode, and I regret having called… knowing that the next call will be a difference like night and day where we can just pretend the previous call didn’t happen. Unfortunately this was an in-person trip that I just couldn’t hang up from, and as such, she didn’t ever really seem to break out of that mode. I couldn’t have been more conflicted leaving Sunday, as I’d been DYING to escape since about 20 minutes after I’d gotten there Friday, yet I knew it had been a miserable experience for mom’s birthday, too. Since then, of course, it has been business as usual, with some good phone calls that just pretend that whole weekend didn’t happen.

JamesT made it home earlier than expected, though, which even though it meant they’d had some misery and drama at the end for the fishing gang, still meant he got some days off at home with me that were appreciated. Five minutes after we walked in the door from picking him up from the gang passing through town on the way home, he realized he’d left a present he’d gotten for me in the truck. He confessed it was a combo trip and Valentines present, and was sort of upset though just tired. It was no worry, though, since I’d gotten so caught up with the bad mom visit and then work that I’d neglected to place the order for my gift for him until late, and it wouldn’t be here by Valentine’s day either. Thus, we just said “screw Valentines Day” if it is just going to stress us both out trying to do something special because of the day. We had thought about going out or making something special, but on the day… Saturday as it was… it just seemed like the best thing was a zero stress day, where we sleep in, stay in our pajamas all day, hang out, play video games, and order pizza delivered. That worked out just fine, too.

This weekend we’ll be heading to Alabama to help as we can with their continued “yard work” .. aka turning their house into a site for an outdoor wedding in June. It should be “brisk” to say the least, but it’s a good weekend for us to visit, and we’re up for whatever we can help with. Just in case, we’ll have some Netflix movies in tow in case of a yard-work rainout, but likely we’ll also have some yard-work rain gear, too. =)

Work is… work, and I am thankful every day to still have anything to do that is providing a paycheck in these times. The frustrations are typical, and have been vented about before… things not working as expected, tasks taking longer for me to figure out than expected, a billion other little things coming up that keep me from devoting wrapping my head around big problems and just solving them. Thankfully I have a very nice customer who is being very accomodating with me providing some updates to his site, because I have had stupid hassle after hassle at trying to get it done, all based right here on my stupid computer.

Something is going on with my permissions, where I can work on a file for hours, saving it every so often, but if I close it for the day… or the computer reboots or anything that causes the file to close, then it will only open as read only. I can save it as a new version and work on that, but the same thing will happen again the next time. Additionally I can’t seem to get the older versions to delete. But, even dealing with multiple copies of things, I have added fun when I try to cut my images and put them in the proper directory tree so I can zip them and upload them to the site. Some items will save as read only and won’t let me rename the file or copy or move it to the new location. 

 Anyway, it’s just making me nuts… which of course is only enhanced with random insanity from Mac thrown in. In theory he’s on vacation now, though I’m sure he’s probably still so mad at me he could just spit.

I guess it’s been a while, but want to hear a funny life in Mac’s world story? If you’re not James, then sure you do…

Mac calls customer he is hoping to meet with next week on a visit, leaves her a message. Customer responds to his voicemail with an email saying she is looking forward to it, and mentions that she had previously emailed me about customizing her site (something which he is talking to people about on this visit). Mac forwards customers email to me and simply asks “Is this familiar to you?” I read the exchange, don’t recall customer’s name, search my emails, find an email from customer from December asking me a question about customization, find my reply to customer with answer and instructing her how we should proceed if she wants to do it. Finding nothing else, I send her email and my reply to Mac, with the message, “This is all I found. Never heard anything else back from her. If she wants to talk to you about customization while you’re there, I guess that will work!” Mac replies to me angrily about “did I call her today?” and “why would I waste time replying to him when she is waiting for my reply”. I am confused by his response, considering I had replied to her and he had never asked me to call her. I reply that “I replied to him because he asked me a question, and in case he didn’t read down, I also included to him where I had replied to her, so as far as I knew she wasn’t waiting on any reply from me.” He replies again, angrier, about how “he isn’t interested in walking down this same path with me again” and “if I’d only called her instead of being so rude with him when he was just asking for some help”. Apparently, he also called Mary to complain about my not being a team player and not responding to customers who “are older and don’t expect emails. They expect phone calls and barely even use their email, and when was I going to learn that.”  To make his point here, he copies a section of her original message to me out, blows it up to a big blue font, underlines it and sends it back to me. The section from the customer says “I look forward to your response by phone or email.” I am baffled how this might make his point, since she EMAILED me, she says I can respond by EMAIL or phone, thus if I do choose to email her, how am I non-responsive? Moreover, this poor older agent who barely uses her email in fact started this whole mess by responding to a voicemail from Mac with an email of her own. Clearly, she is accustomed to the practice of replies by emails, even replies to phone calls by email, which our exchange had not been.

Bottomline here, whatever else he’ll come back later and try to point out, that is ALL that was in our email exchange. If he meant to say more, he didn’t actually say it. Isn’t it just like a man to expect you to read his mind.  All he had to say was, “Apparently she didn’t get your reply before, would you please call her?” Instead… lectures, anger, acusations and the tri-fecta of poor emailing etiquette in pasting select portions back to me in large fonts, strange colors and underlined for my attention, since as you all know, I never learned how to read and reading BIG BLUE UNDERLINED words is easier than normal words. OH! I get it NOW! Gah, my bad! When you just said call her, I couldn’t read that, but when you said CALL HER, then it made sense. Got it.