Night of the Living Dead

Darlings of the Internet,

I know you don't want to hear tales of woe. I know you come here for the funny and the foibles and the flat-out crazy that I have to offer. Oh yeah, and the shoes. But today, the only thing on the menu is woe.

Y'all, this campaign is EATING ME ALIVE. It's like a barnacle that has attached itself to me and is slowly sucking my brains out, day after day, night after night, turning me into a zombie. I have SO MUCH work to do for it, I need a day off from my real job to get it done. (What? Oh, yes, of course I'm still volunteering. You think I can leave a project unfinished? Oh no, my friends, not me.)

I know. A week to go before the election and I KNEW there would be a lot of campaign events and I KNEW that would mean a lot of pictures to edit and website stuff to update. And yet, I still had NO I-DE-A how much it would be. Holy cripes, I got home from dinner last night to TWELVE e-mails full of pictures from yesterday's events. (Today's events yielded six more e-mails.)

It's no exaggeration to say I eat, sleep and breathe this stuff. I finally sent myself to bed at midnight last night, only to DREAM ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN, causing much tossing and turning and WAKING UP AT 4:30 THIS MORNING. Which is sick and wrong, even in my book. (And, apparently, cause for a lot of capital letters.)

On top of the mountains of pictures waiting for my attention, there is something completely totally annoying going on with the server on which the site lives, such that it routinely kicks me out of the admin/content-editing portion of the site. And by routinely, I mean I'm lucky to go five minutes without having to log in again. And of course, any work done in the past five minutes that wasn't saved? Gone. Sucks to be you. I hate hate hate it with a passion I thought was reserved only for Blogger. Uh, no. Compared to this thing, Blogger looks like it was painstakingly developed for use by NASA.

I've been putting up with it for a few weeks, thinking that it was a limited thing, that it would blow over, that I should be patient. It's a constant struggle for me -- the hope that things will magically fix themselves, if maybe I give them two seconds to do so, so just CHILL OUT, KATE vs. the gut reaction that says I should just cut my losses and end things once and for all, and, yeah, maybe we're not talking about websites anymore.

So, tonight I finally called the web peeps because I COULD NOT TAKE IT ANYMORE. It was nearly 11 o'clock on the East Coast (where this company is located), so when no one answered I just convinced myself to plow ahead and call them tomorrow, because, my god, even the IT people probably aren't at the office THIS late.

God bless Jonathan, who returned my call 15 minutes later, without my leaving a message. (I'm guessing the number showed up on caller ID.) No fixes yet, but he promised to run some diagnostic tests on it first thing tomorrow. And to call and yell at the hosting company. So I've got that going for me.

I'm headed back to Indiana for the final push before Election Day and I promised myself that tonight would be the night that I pack my suitcase. I avoided social commitments. I cleaned the house and made sure all the laundry was done in time.* I went to Target to pick up a few vital items (sleeping mask, Airborne tablets, half-price Halloween candy, etc).

It's 11:30. Any guesses as to what hasn't been accomplished yet?

Yeah. Because despite my best efforts to plan ahead and manage my paid-work workload and get my home life in order, what happens? Oh yes, one of my work projects blows the hell up. At 3 p.m. this afternoon. And needs to be remedied by 9 a.m. tomorrow, after which I will be in a meeting all day. Why, god, why???

I desperately need to go for a run, but unless I can figure out a way to simultaneously be updating the website while I tear through the neighborhood, I just don't think there's room in the schedule for that.

To re-cap: Last night was my night to get all rested-up before diving headfirst into the last seven days of the campaign. Um, no. Tonight was my night to get organized and pack and I don't know, get caught up on the web stuff? Definitely not. I can't wait to see what doesn't get accomplished tomorrow.


*Well, all the laundry that's safe to toss in the machine. Haven't touched the pile of hand-wash only items, which I'm now remembering means I have no clean nylons so I guess I'll be stopping at Target tomorrow. Again.