12 July 2007
Mess & cleaning
My gosh, what a messed-up year it's been. Since I last posted, I've spent two months in Australia (we had to extend by a week cos the wisdom teeth to ages to get over and we just ran out of time to do everything) had about a month in which I just started to recuperate when my parents arrived in Europe, so then there was a week in Paris, which was fun and I finally got to go to the Centre Pompidou, 9 years after I first attempted to go, and we went out to Monet's garden in Giverny, which was beautiful. Then the parents came over here, and that was where things really went pear-shaped - it poured with rain pretty much the whole month they were here, not to mention my having caught a horrible bug on the Eurostar and inadvertently giving it to them. Ugh. But we still got to Cornwall (St Ives, Penzance for Mazey Day and the Eden Project all extremely cool), and did manage to get some fun stuff done too.
So now it's back to life as usual and facing the financial fallout of overseas travel, vastly expensive dental work and the associated costs of trying to show visitors a Good Time without bankrupting them.
Unfortunately I haven't achieved as much as I'd have liked while I've been off work - mostly because of the Australian hiatus and then guests and the month in between really wasn't long enough to build up any momentum. But this week I managed to send off a first draft of the Satie arrangement to its commissioner in America, so I hope he's not horrendously disappointed. It'll be good to get some feedback anyway - I think I've lived with it too long, got too close, and now I really don't know whether it's any good or not. It's certainly been challenging and interesting and way out of my comfort zone, but we'll see...
My next task is writing for choir - there've been a lot of choral opportunities floating about and I really want to take advantage of them. Most significantly is a commission from a friend in Sydney who conducts an amateur choir, for a carol for their Christmas concert. So I've got my father hard at work writing some words and then I'll need to pull the music together fairly quickly so they have time to rehearse. Looking forward to it though. I'm such a sucker for Christmas carols.
And now the time has come too for me to pull my CV together and start looking for a dayjob again. *sigh*. Sad, but necessary, and there sound like some fun jobs around at the moment to be applied for. I've been working hard on the redesign of minim-media.com/caitlinrowley.com (must buy that domain name) and am hoping for them to go live sometime in the next couple of weeks. caitlinrowley.com may be in a draft format because there's a lot to be done to get the content properly sorted and the architecture worked out to present all the info to best effect, but minim should be essentially sorted. I've been having a bunch of fun playing round with DOM-based DHTML in particular. I'd forgotten how much fun messing about with code is. I really missed it at PwC - didn't get nearly enough of it. The Notes dev stuff was cool, but not nearly so much as fiddling with a website front end and making it work in a bunch of different browsers. Loving my MacBook Pro more than ever, now I have websites to test - my testing suite is getting bigger every week. At the moment I'm testing in Windows using IE 6, Firefox 2, Opera 9.21 and the Safari for Windows Beta. I need to dig out my old-versions-of-IE link and sort out a Netscape version or two. Macside I'm testing with Safari 2 and Firefox 2 - need to do a bit more research about what other browsers are likely to be used on Macs that I should be testing for. So much fun! Having a little trouble using the FTP function of Dreamweaver via Parallels (cos I've got DW MX for Windows, so need to run it on Bootcamp and going via Parallels is definitely simpler than restarting the whole thing) but apart from that the whole setup is running bee-ootifully. Love it. Would recommend it to pretty much anyone. Go Mac!
