In a bit of a tiz

I began this morning in a horizontal position, reading email on my iPod. I thought of the nice long vacation day and the rest of the week stretching out before me as a huge open expanse of Nothing-Planned but reality hit me and within the hour I remembered that I have Responsibilities. Why was I in such a hurry to grow up?

The first thing to hit me was the church newsletter. I'm not sure why I do this to myself, but I have painted myself into a corner for the love of technology and the desire not to go to the office and freeze my fingers off. For the duration of my tenure as the church secretary, the monthly newsletter has been prepared in the form of a Word document and due to its having a mind of its own it has become a difficult and time-consuming chore to keep the document formatted the way it needs to be, while changing the content. I've tried many times to start a new document in the hope of obliterating the gremlins but I only have to copy and paste a single element from the old document to cause all the gremlins to abandon ship and settle into a new home.

Since we work exclusively on Macs, the question arose as to whether it would be a worthwhile investment to purchase iWork 09, for $79. Before asking the church to make this investment, we played around with a thirty-day trial version of '08' to produce last month's newsletter, which, I must say, came out rather well. I used a set template and filled in and replaced the elements with our own information. This month, however, the thirty-day trial period on '08' had expired so another one - this time '09' - had to be opened on a different computer. To cut a long story short, I did manage to do much of the newsletter in under an hour and then sent it off to church for approval. I hope that we'll soon be able to have it on the church computer!

I'm sorting out a movie outing for sunny-boy's birthday this Friday, monitoring the activities of dd1 and bf, cleaning the house, doing the laundry and dealing with the upsets of dd2. I'm not too chuffed at having to listen to Nintendo games in the other room while I'm writing but I have at least had my morning coffee now, so the bear with a sore head has quietened down somewhat.

Next major task on the agenda, aside from house and church work, is continuing the plans for the trip to England in April and apart from that, I'd like a little time to paint.