One week later

I haven't felt much like writing lately, although I really should have pushed myself to. There was the craziness that was Christmas, with friends in town, exchanging gifts, etc., then I got sick and basically spent last weekend in my pajamas either sitting in my chair reading under the afghan or lying on the couch watching television under the afghan . . .

And I've been working on this horrendous project at work that was really getting me down. As may be apparent, I'm not a "real" programmer in any sense. I can do HTML with the best of them, and I'm a CSS goddess (well, sort of), but any real programming language is a mystery to me.

I can copy and paste and modify scripts, but that's about it. And I really don't want to, that's not where my interests lie. But in a small company, you often have to do things you don't really want to do, or that you're not really all that good at, and, of course, it's always good to learn new things. Or so I try to tell myself.

I can't remember if I mentioned the last project of this sort that I worked on, which was to create a Yahoo! store for a client. Yahoo! has created what is basically a proprietary language which is used by no one else in the world for anything else, i.e., you have to learn it to customize a Yahoo! store, but beyond that, you'll never use it again.

So I learned it, and spent a few weeks pulling my hair out over it, posting questions in message boards, reading reams of user documentation, etc., then once we had it working, the client eventually scrapped it because it was so hard to update, and we wrote them a custom application. Such is life.

Then we had a project for another client who was using message board software that, guess what, uses a completely different proprietary language, and the client wanted it customized, and the "real" programmers were busy and I wasn't, so it fell to me to try to make some sense out of it. I worked on it for about a week, driving myself absolutely nuts, and figured out a lot of it, but some of it was so far over my head that I was waking up in a cold sweat at night at the thought of going back to work the next day and being faced with it.

I finally gave up/gave in and told my boss that I needed help, and yesterday and today one of the programmers put his own project on hold and sat down with me and worked out some of the problems, and it was a huge relief.

I could go home at noon today with a clear conscience, and I'm not afraid to go back to work on Thursday . . .

Bob and I had a really nice day today. I got off at noon, stopped and ran a couple of errands on then way home, then we went to see a mid-afternoon showing of The Two Towers, which, in spite of the rather high violence level, I loved. I couldn't tell you what movies the previews were for, but they were all--every one of them--extremely violent to the point that I had to close my eyes during one of them, and as the movie started I leaned over and said to Bob, "I'm really glad that none of the upcoming movies have much violence in them." He laughed, and said, "Just wait. This whole movie is just one big battle."

And it was, mostly, but it was pretty amazing, and I loved it. Of course, watching Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom isn't exactly torture. I probably liked the first movie better, but this one was pretty intense. It will be cool when the third one is finished to be able to watch them together.

Then we came home and made Caesar salad and spaghetti, and we're having a quiet evening at home, just us and the cats.

I don't suppose it's necessary to go into the whole vacation picture saga, but it still hasn't been resolved to my satisfaction. To make a long story short: I took film in to Target to be processed and to get digital prints on CD. I picked them up, and they were CRAP--the prints were muddy and stained, and the digital prints were covered with hairs and dust and, in some cases, moisture (not the actual hairs and dust, of course, but their images were in the pictures).

So I took them back, they said they would do them over, and then their machinery broke.

I stopped by and/or called several times, and after about two weeks, they finally said that although the machinery was still broken, they were going to take film to another store to process it, and it would be ready this weekend.

I picked it up on Saturday, and the prints are fine, but the digital prints are still crap. One of the disks is okay quality wise, but the other one is absolutely horrendous. All the prints are dark and in a completely different color range than the prints are, and there are streaks and, yes, hairs and fibers and dust on most of the pictures. And, unlike every other photo CD I've ever gotten, the digital prints are about the size of a regular print. In every other case, the digital prints are HUGE, both file-size-wise and in pixel size, so you can actually do something with them.

I get digital pictures for the convenience of not having to scan them, but also because you can do so much more with a large image. If I'm getting tiny pictures, I might as well scan them.

So I'm going to have to go back, and this time I'm going to see if I can just get a refund of the portion of the processing cost that applies to the CD. Money isn't exactly growing on trees at the moment, and I paid about $35.00 for two rolls of film, and it's taken me almost three weeks to get them back.

But with that build-up, here are a few of them. Hanging out with the White Rabbit at the Magic Kingdom:

Bob and his dad getting a closer look at the new (not yet open) Mission to Mars attraction at Epcot:

Roy Disney, Minnie Mouse, and me:

And a gorgeous sunset in Sarasota: