Projecting
It’s been a week that, were I to let it, would have been overwhelming.
There’s the five-days-work-in-four-days thing, did server upgrades on Sunday, was sick on Monday, so even last weekend was shot. I have a new web design client—one who has been front-page news in town lately. There’s a little pressure there. And this week, Saturday hours resume at the library.
There’s no rest in sight for a month, at least, when I’m planning a trip to Long Island to spend the long weekend with CBC. Interestingly, while the airlines are pleading poverty, airfare to JFK has fallen by nearly 50% since I last visited New York in 2002. Jet Blue is now $20 less each way than the Amtrak train to Penn Station (NYP) in Manhattan. Add to it that CBC can pick me up at JFK rather than me spending another $20 on LIRR fare from NYP to Hicksville, and it looks like I’ll be flying.
My first post 9/11 flight. I’m expecting to be hassled by TSA in both directions. And I’ve never flown without coming down with some respiratory illness the following week, so I have to plan for that too.
See where the failure to stay with one-day-at-a-time leads me? Only four paragraphs into a week-in-review entry and in my mind, it’s mid-October and I’m exhausted and sick and I’ve been shaken-down and strip-searched twice by TSA.
Cunning, baffling, powerful this disease. Okay, rewind.
While it’s nice to have Saturdays off, June, July and August are terrible for me financially. The library budget is stable this year and A/V mending was stacking up in the back room, so towards the end of July my boss gave me a few extra hours a week to go through the stuff. After looking at 93 DVDs since then, (Yes, I have to keep records.) I’m nearly caught up with my bills and still can’t figure out why Hollywood won’t make a decent movie. I doubt the answer lies in the nearly 100 VHS tapes I have to go through next.
I’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out where in a film a scratch in a DVD lies. And pretty good at predicting which ones will cause problems. Nearly done with the DVDs and yesterday on three of them I looked at the disk and the chapter listing and nailed it in one.
And I’m getting good at cleaning goo off of them. It’s not just the kids’ stuff that comes back coated in peanut butter and jelly, ice cream or substances I don’t even want to think about.
I’m also grateful that so many people don’t understand the technology. I was surprised at how many disks have been returned with complaints of no audio. Even that fellow staff members just added them to the stack. Duh, wha’? I get paid to go through the process anyway, so I’m not complaining. Just baffled.
I think I was given the job precisely because in the best of cases, I could give two shits about the content. Although I admit that I was more thorough in checking a couple of Johnny Depp movies. Could he be any cuter than in that pirate film? Swoon.
Last Sunday night I chaired the meeting. Fourth time at that one. Mainly, it involves telling one’s story. I tell it differently each time in both style and content. I did something that night where I couldn’t tell if I’d bored them into la-la land or they were completely enraptured.
Turns out, it was the latter. The treasurer even forgot to pass the basket. Discussion, once it began, was deep and philosophical and outside afterwards, nearly half the guys came up to thank me. Who knew I was so interesting and had so much to offer? Even last night a couple of people referred to things I’d said on Sunday. Very weird feeling, that.
Also very weird, was that this new client, focus of an ongoing series in the paper, was utterly convinced that I’m the one to redesign their web site even before I set foot in the door. I’m still not so sure. It’s a Charter School and not an educator, parent or child, so I’m having difficulty latching on to how to organize everything. I have a handle on how I want it to look—in broad strokes—and on the back end. It’s content that’s giving me trouble. There’s too much stuff for too many audiences. This one’s going to be a real challenge.
Plus, they’re on a tight timeline. I’m developing a love/hate thing for grant-funded web sites. Quote and initial design this coming week, project completion by the end of the month. Which can slip a bit, as long as the thing bills-out completely by then—including a year’s maintenance.
Which has me concerned. That could be quite a chunk of change, in advance, all at once, for work over the next 12 months. I fear underestimating and becoming resentful. (CBC shares this concern, BTW.) I fear being able to keep focus on it for a year without being able to bill it during the period. Will I let it slide since I’ve already gotten the check?
What I don’t fear is a sudden injection of commas into my accounts. It will be nice to be able to get all the bill collectors satisfied, stock the larder with a few months of food and have some pants and shoes with only the originally manufactured number of holes (especially with winter coming). For the ongoing maintenance, I’m considering using an escrow account to help even-out the cash flow to cover slow times ahead.
But see? With all that, I’ve lost the one-day-at-a-time thing again.
