Category Archives: Busyness

Blogging, Busyness

Blogging from Work

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I’m two days into my new job as an IT Specialist II at the Instructional Technology Center at UTM and I’m already out of things to do.

Well, sort of…

I’m lacking some of the key software I need to get started on Web developing, but I thought I’d blog since it’s been at least a blue moon since my last post.

Since then I’ve:

Successfully defended my Scholars Project.
Finished finals.
Graduated.
Moved out of university housing and back into my parentals’ house for three weeks. This includes moving plenty of furniture, and lots of Karen’s stuff.
Joined the church league softball team…and subsequently only made it to one game of four. (Is it sad that I’m too busy to play softball during the summer?)
Drowned in insurance options from the university as a full-time staff person.
Set up my new cubicle and Mac Pro.
Received free swag for being a new employee (including scissors, tape dispenser and stapler!)
Drunk lots of coffee to stay awake after getting up at 7 since I have to be at work at 8ish.

And there’s more…but enough for now.

Busyness

Visualizing the Weekend Ahead

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I know I often post tweets or blogs about how busy I am, but since I made a to-do list today on a digital sticky note (gotta love Macs) I thought I would post it for everyone to see what I’m doing between the time this is written and Sunday night. The good news is that not all of this has to be done by Monday, but most of it is due by Tuesday or Wednesday.

I have a feeling this won’t make sense to a lot of you, considering this is a mixture of putting together a rough draft of my senior communications portfolio, a Communications law test, Photojournalism assignment, Comm and the World Wide Web project, and Scholars project writing. Whew.

To Do:
Finish Berlin’s 4-5 lives
Photo Essay Topic Brainstorm
Examine Comm Law Study Guide – Determine what to study/read
Gather 20 oldest portfolio clips and put in template with art.
Study Session I – Comm Law
Finish personal Web page template
Write Berlin’s 6-7 lives
Make Divider Pages and Executive Summaries in Indesign
Study Session II – Comm Law
Finish Berlin’s 8-9 lives
Gather 20 more clips and put in template with art.
Finish personal Web page content
Write Berlin’s 10th life
Gather remaining clips (20-30 stories + editorials)
Copy Edit
Gather published photos and any other docs needed for portfolio
Print portfolio
Study Session III – Comm Law

At some point: Make sure The Pacer is ok, go to church, sleep.

In other news, Karen and I signed for an apartment today and got a lot of wedding planning stuff done this week, so that’s a little less stress on our plates now.

Peace.

Busyness, UTM

More Scholars Project Thoughts

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I had a scary realization today.

I have approximately five more meetings (going by the current schedule) with Dr. Rogers until I defend my University Scholars project. This means that insanity might be setting in a little more often in the next month and a half. I work well under deadlines; everybody knows that… but this is one heck of a deadline.

So the moral of the story is that I’m almost to the point where I have to drop everything but the essentials. Sorry if I seem unavailable until May 9 (graduation). That’s just how it has to be. Life after I defend my project (don’t have an exact date yet — I’m shooting for as late in April as possible) will be miserable if I don’t shoot for as high as standard as I want to because so many other things got in the way. That’s my spiel and I’m sticking to it.

Busyness

Half a Month Later…

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How can it possibly be August 9 already?

Things have been really, really busy since coming back from Berlin. Catching up on sleep. Catching up on work. Catching up on Karen-time. You get the idea.

Work has been insanely busy. I have updated a ton of Web sites in the last two weeks: Psychology, ECCE, ITC, Financial Aid, Honors Program, Visual and Theatre Arts, etc. The last two weeks have been the final weeks of my co-student worker, Hannah Burcham, who is going to Mississippi State University with the National Student Exchange program. In the mean time, we’ve been training her highly capable replacement, Jen DeYeso in all of the wonderful jobs (and the tedious ones, too) we take care of on a daily basis at the ITC. Mix into this helping the occasional professor who wanders over for help, working on the registrations for three different training topics coming up in August and September, and planning for the training session I am doing this coming Tuesday — you get the idea of how busy it’s been.

I’ve also spent some time working on the TNGIC summer newsletter, getting together the stories we will be covering for the end-of-August publication. Now I need to start laying it out in InDesign this week before things get even more hectic with The Pacer and that little thing called school.

Speaking of my favorite newspaper, I worked the last few days of this week with The Pacer’s adviser, Tomi Parrish, on buying the remaining iMacs we need to fully handle our computing needs for the coming years. The good thing about these Macs is that we should be able to get a lot more use out of them than we’ve been getting out of the PCs we’ve used for years. Now they just have to be shipped and have software ghosted onto them by the Technical Services folks and brought over to our office. I’m looking forward to kicking off the new year with lunch and training on August 18. Then we start working on our First Flight edition for the incoming freshmen…and then off we go!

In other news, Karen and I have discovered the addicting Web site Nutrimirror — an online food journal that can really help ANYONE trying to eat healthier. As Karen saw on a newscast on her Destin vacation, keeping a food journal is one of the best ways to eat healthier and get/stay in shape. Nutrimirror is doing just that, and with time it should be a big help.

Finally, with all this going on a few of my other projects are still hounding me to start/finish them, including: more research and reading on my Scholars project, a photo-video for a wedding at the end of August, posting more photos from Berlin, and buying my books from Amazon/Half.com. Anything else…? This is more than I can keep up with in my head. Good thing I have to-do lists!

Busyness, Photography

My Weekend

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And then came the rains...
The past few days have been interesting. With Karen gone over the weekend, I found myself at times bored out of my mind, and at others occupied in some of the strangest ways…

Take for instance Thursday night. While a lot of my friends were hanging out at D201 (University Village apartment of Rhett, Zach, Dennis and Chris) apparently giving Zach a mullet I was uninformed, sitting in my room playing Super Smash Bros. Melee. (Note that the link is to a Facebook photo; those of you without a Facebook account won’t be able to see it.)

But then on Friday I went to lunch at La Canasta with Joe Caldwell, something we haven’t done since our first summer on campus (I think.) I spent a good part of the afternoon working on a Powersearch It! widget for one of the Weldon Library’s Web pages. It was the most complicated coding I’ve had to do in a while. Nothing at UTM requires that much work.

Friday night I successfully made plans to head to D201 to hang out and play video games with the guys (at which point I saw Zach’s mullet in person…) We got in some good Super Smash Bros. Brawl before watching Battlestar Gallactica (I was completely lost.)

Then things got more interesting on Saturday. Blair and I helped Dad put up a new set of attic stairs to the attic in my parents’ house. We all almost died at one point or another. In case you didn’t know – attic stair units are basically all one piece and very heavy. When we got the old one out (hard enough) we then had to lift the new one through the hole in the ceiling vertically and then angle it around to fit in the hole correctly. While doing this we found out that 1) the hole wasn’t cut perfectly by whomever back when the house was built, so the hole was slightly snug, and 2) Blair’s head and my right hand are really strong.

Because the hole wasn’t exactly perfect, one end of the stairs’ frame wouldn’t fit into the hole. This caused it to fall on Blair’s head at one point (he was standing on some makeshift scaffolding directly underneath the opening.) While Blair was readjusting the scaffolding a few minutes after that, Dad decided to hammer at the snug end and that was all it took to loosen the entire opening. Since it was staying so perfectly, nobody was keeping the stairs in place and I barely caught the falling attic door/stairs with my right hand. Guess my fingers are stronger than I thought. Must be from all the video game playing.

So there’s a public service announcement for all of you: Play video games. It might just save your life.