Around New Year, I was pretty despondent about my flat - particularly the painting of the kitchen - and spent far too long lamenting my lack of progress toward moving in. In the last few days, I've managed to buy the paint I need to do all the walls and, with the rollers, etc already at the flat, I feel ready to tackle... even to finish the painting this weekend.
It may not help that I have a friend visiting on Saturday, delivering a belated Christmas gift. It may serve as a distraction (particularly if I feel the need to bring out the Saturn by way of entertainment) or it may serve to ensure I complete the job on Saturday. That remains to be seen.
But overall, apart from some rather angry outbursts at work over the last few days, I've been feeling much better about everything.
There was one situation where I was trying to work on the flatplan for my brainblending 3-edition magazine (split over two sets of entries in the database, so it's never clear where any bookings are meant to go) and our Junior Designer trotted over to ask me about an ad she'd picked up to set. Now, when I'm flatplanning, it's never a good time to ask me anything... but this question was pretty dumb.
OK, she's a Junior, and can't be expected to know everything yet, but she hadn't even thought her question through before posing it.
The client supplied a complete ad last month, but this month needed us to set it. This ad wasn't per their normal template, so Junior Designer wondered what to do. I suggested (possibly a little bit too sternly) she ask the Copy Controller if there was a new template available to follow... My mistake there was that the Copy Controller is (relatively) new as well, and so didn't offer the most sensible answer.
The job ended up getting set in Illustrator (which they all know they're not supposed to do and, in any case, this ad flagged up missing fonts which went unattended by the Junior because she couldn't see anything wrong) using last month's PDF as the basis.
Needless to say, I reset that sucker in Quark and fixed the fonts, so now we have a template we can use in future, if necessary.
Then, yesterday (one of my press days), I had a terse email exchange with one of the Salespeople regarding amendments to a supplied ad that I didn't want to do - because we shouldn't be amending supplied ads, it wasn't necessarily going to work if we did, and because it was almost bloody 6pm when the client noticed they'd made the mistake. By rights, no-one should have been there to take the call/read the email.
I eventually agreed the change with the Commercial Manager (who understands at least some of the potential problems), but the Salesperson who 'requested' the change could have handled it better. When told we couldn't do it, she simply emailed back asking "Why?", copying in the CM. Always guaranteed to rile me.
Still... Today went quite well, but Monday's magazine is in a bit of a state...
Oh, and I still want to look for a new job. That hasn't miraculously changed.
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