High/Low Week 4 2010

Low:

This week Dena was hurriedly trying to get some graphic design work done for the Kiwanis Club. One design included a watermark to rest in the background of the relevant words on the page. The problem was that her customer was not getting a transparent image, but a solid one that masked the words. Could it be that the customer was using a PC instead of Mac? She asked if she could send me an e-mail, and for me to open it in a Word document to see how it looked. Being at the end of a long day of work, exercise and coaching, and having just settled in to check fantasy basketball stats at 10:00 at night, I agreed.

Ten minutes later she asked if I'd gotten it yet. And I was in a poor state of mind to be asked to move on something quickly. So following an apology for my slowness, I took the opportunity to go tit-for-tat and ask how much longer it would take for her to deliver me the photos of my studio that I'd asked for a week earlier, sending her scrambling back to her computer to work on it. Mind you, I was in no hurry to get them previously. And she was facing a deadline. In fact, I could've just as easily stepped away from the computer and let her do it. But tiredness sows the seeds of my impatience, and in this case I lost.

High:

Besides the nice date that Dena and I had on Friday night (see Jesse's Grille post), I started to catch up on things at the office. It seems like I've been ten projects behind for the last month, but by the end of day Friday I'd whittled down my e-mail substantially. I use my e-mail inbox as my to-do list, working each to completion and then moving the valuable ones into storage and deleting the rest. So far, it's allowed me to have a nearly paperless office.

Oh, and I got rim again, this time on the main court. So my max reach is officially ten feet. It was nice, at the beginning of the pickup game as the other team figured out their defensive assignments, to hear someone say that I had "hops." Maybe soon that sentence will end in "skill"!

And as a final note, I think I'll be able to help Coach Goldman in the most useful way yet. I offered to manage the playing time rotation of our posts, and he accepted. It's exciting to not only be able to contribute strategy that directly affects the team's success, but to take some weight off Coach's mind following the tough loss this week.