Singular Scene

So Singular in Each Particular

Balls… Inspector?

by

Nods to a really old ad for Cheese Balls… It’s a Kiwi thing… deal.

I knew going in it was going to be a target… It’s big, it’s yellow and it looks just like… well. A ball.

That’s actually because it IS a ball. sheesh.

Anyhoo, I finally got my act together and bought a plug for it. Until now it has been a little deflated pile of rubbery plastic with all the other stuff under my bed. But, with the new plug and a lot of hot air it is now a rather large globe like feature underneath my desk.

Yes, my desk… it isn’t here at home, it’s at the office…

After struggling to get it into my car, (a two door compact -) achieved only by letting the air out… I sheepishly hoisted the thing into the office.

The whole point of the exercise is my bad back and an attempt at setting myself a little straighter at the keyboard, a plan to complement my new ergonomic screen height adjuster and the stand for the Dell which keeps it at eye level…

So, here’s Dee sitting at her desk, bouncing occasionaly in time to the toons on the iPod and fielding the comments graciously when people stop to chat about my ball.

Happy and smiling she is… until Fish notices.

The Fish, who knocks on the edge of my desk as he walks past waiting for me to bite at him, has a new game.

It’s called Kick the Ball and Watch Dee Snap…

God Give Me Strength.

Don’t Panic

by

I had a couple of weeks there in my new role as IT girl when the gloss had worn of and the clouds had parted displaying for all and sundry just how steep my current learning curve is. Not pretty people… not pretty at all.

Everest has nothing on this…

Actually, I started to get a bit anxious about it…

Which is separate from the anxiety about being away from my dearests at Christmas.
And the anxiety about being more comfortably upholstered than I was before winter.
And the anxiety about my family and their comings and goings and doings that I have issues with.
And the anxiety about the Count (which is much diminished, by the way).

I have been doing my best to squash all those other anxieties and trying to conquer the learning curve by reading really fat technical tomes. You know, the ones which have cds neatly tucked into their covers (to compound the already vast screeds of information therein) in the hope I could fill my brain with all one needs to be an IT girl.

It wasn’t working so I threw my hands up in the air and actually said

“God… this is ridiculous… I can’t do this”

To which he replied (in his most Australian of accents)

“too bloody right luv… what were you thinking?”

Sigh…

So… I asked him about CSS and ASP and PHP and CGI and Perl and C++ and XHTML etc…

and he said

“one thing at a time ok?”

I replied “Ok… about CSS..”

“Chuck out the books and try making some … You’re one of those learn better by doing type chicks…”

So the fires out front are burning the books and cds and I’m tweaking templates and fiddling with code from here to eternity.

And bingo

I finally get it…

I have made inline and external css that works… (most of the time)

So I say “Thanks God… You must be a bit of an IT guru yourself I suppose…”

And he said “yeah, the world wide web is just my footstool …” (Acts 7:49)

“Makes everything else seem a bit smaller really… thanks, God”

“You’re totally welcome… tis the way it should be.”