Lows And Highs

Today has been... geez, I just don't know where to start. "Start at the begining." Yeah, but I gotta decide where the beginning is. I guess the beginning is two weeks ago... maybe it was... oh, hell, it was a Wednesday (December 23, to be exact).

I had been given a couple of projects from my boss just before we left for our break. One project was to move the web site from a Windows-based server running Joomla 1.0 to a Linux server running Joomla 1.5. Apparently he had already tried to migrate the site automatically and it didn't go well. Project two was to get a new issue tracking system up and running.

I actually welcomed project #1. Our web site had grown through multiple masters and was, frankly, a mess on the back end. We had sections that should have been categories and categories that should have been articles and just a massive jumble of crap. This would be my chance to redefine how the categories would be laid out and how items would fit into those categories.

Boss wanted project 1 done by Feb first. It wouldn't be so bad but they made a change between 1.0 and 1.5 on how they handle images and, well, it's a lot of work for me.

Project #2 is fairly easy to get in place but it requires different thought processes than our current system. The boss asked me where we were on it just before the break and I said 2 weeks to answer some questions, 1 week to show it to the troops and then we go online.

I think I gave project #2 an unrealistic timeline... but it's not my fault.

We came back from our break on Monday. I tried to concentrate on my special projects, I really did. I had to deal with a network outage, a corruption of the new issue tracking system that caused us to start over with it (not a huge deal but still a setback), a couple of viruses (I really HATE HATE HATE scareware!), a security/privacy issue that required me to re-image all of our lab computers (pretty much an all-day event), and all of your basic day-to-day "my computer is broken" and "my printer won't work" issues. And the students aren't even back yet.

I got blocked by something every day this week. I barely had time to think about the projects. Needless to say, I was a little stressed by quitting time.

Now for the high.

I have a friend I knew in high school that I haven't talked to or heard from in twenty years. A mutual friend convinced her to come back to Oklahoma and visit for a few days. I have been looking forward to seeing her and we agreed to call each other tonight to figure out where we were going to meet.

I ended up calling our mutual friend and she put my lost friend on the phone. M said one word. Just one word. And all of my stress just melted away. I can't wait to actually see her tomorrow.