This week is the week. Well, I hope it’s the week. We’ve run into a few snags in this moving process. We did find a place that we’re okay with living in for the next year. It’s only a 15 minute commute to school, pretty up-to-date, has a fireplace and a garage.

The only problem is that we are still waiting to hear if the lease has gone through. We are supposed to have the movers here on Tuesday, but without a confirmation from the landlords, we don’t know if there’s a place to have our things delivered to. Hopefully we will hear tomorrow.

I’ve got a few things to take care of beyond the normal changing of address. For one, we’re in a Dish Network contract and I need to know if we’ll be able to have a dish installed at our new place. We’ll have to see what Dish will do for us if we have to terminate early. Hopefully it won’t be too bad.

Sounds like Jessica’s parents may come up on Saturday to help us unpack. I’m thinking IKEA for bookcases and Giordano’s for some pizza (they’ve never experienced Chicago-style stuffed pizza). In any case, there is a lot to do this week with finishing up work, meeting movers, moving, going to an inauguration, and getting all settled. I start my new job at Trinity a week from Monday.

Well, my friends. Something I have vaguely alluded to on several different occasions has finally come to pass. As of yesterday I have accepted a position at Trinity International University starting later this month. The official title is Web Marketing Manager, and the work is much more along the lines of what I want to do than my current job.

Jess and I have been praying hard for things to work out (as many of our friends and family members have been) and it has been pretty incredible to see how God’s timing has played out. In about two weeks we will be moving our things from the St Louis Metro-East to the North Chicago area — assuming everything goes to plan.

As you can imagine there is a lot to be done before that move, so things might be a bit quiet around here, though I am going to try and keep up with the writing so I have a record of this move.

It’s a little bit sad to be leaving so many great people here in Greenville, but Jessica and I have, for a long time actually, felt stagnant here. This move is something that is invigorating and hopeful for us. Expect great things! We both are.

Those of you that knew about this, thank you for your prayers, thoughts and support while we were going through this. It means the world to us.

Man. I’m not sure how today is going to go.

I woke up to a Google Wave invite, but also to a cold room. Jessica had left early for work already and I guess was running late because it was 7min to 7:00 when I heard the front door slam.

Coffee was a disaster this morning. Jess usually makes the coffee because I can’t seem to get it right. With her being rushed this morning, she wasn’t able to get coffee started before she bolted out the door. So I thought I’d give it a try.

Yeah. Messed it up. She had put water in the maker already, just hadn’t ground the beans – but I didn’t realise this. I ended up adding a bit of water to the tank before noticing there was some in there already. The coffee came out weak.

We’re snobs about coffee. It has to hit our minimal strength scale otherwise we chuck it. I should’ve just pulled the french press out and made some more, but to be honest, I just now thought of that. Three hours later, sitting at my desk.

I got to work and the outside door was lock. It’s the only door I don’t have a key to. So I stood out in the rain for a few minutes until someone showed up.

Now I am staring at a long list of work orders and trying to get my dotCMS test server up and running so I can test a few things. And it isn’t working. Hopefully the day will improve.

This week has been absolutely nuts. I’m hoping I’m not heading toward burnout at work. I’m trying not to. It’s become super important for me to protect my time, otherwise I wouldn’t get anything done.

After a long day of talking to people and trying to explain to them what exactly it takes to provide them with the web stuff they are asking for, I come home and work on freelance stuff. The good part about that is that I should have a new project premiering later this week after a a couple months of work (sporadic, of course).

I have another WordPress template coming out in a couple of weeks. In fact, I completely redesigned said template because I wasn’t happy with the previous one.

Also found out at the beginning of the week I’ve got about $1300 worth of car repairs I need to take care of. Great. I need some more freelance jobs to pay for the fixes.

Couple other exciting things coming up including National Novel Writing Month in November. If you’re participating in NaNoWriMO, make sure you add me as a writing buddy!

Tomorrow is my first class period teaching a college-level course. I am excited and maybe a little bit nervous. But I think I’m ready. I’ve got the class pretty much planned out. And tonight I finished my Keynote presentation for the class. Check it out.

Wow. It’s already been a busy week.

We released the new Athletics site at work that I have been developing for the last few months. That was Monday. I have gotten far fewer comments than I expected. And no news is good news as far as I’m concerned. Overall I’m pretty happy with it. Everything at work just seems to overwhelm me right now, so it’s good to have a major project out of the way. Check it out if you want: http://www.gcpanthers.com

I did a project for Randall a couple week ago. I’m only going to say this: I coded the design as a WordPress template in about 2.5 hours.

I’ve got a few projects on deck now (freelance speaking). One of those is a new WP template for a friend from back home. It’s a fun project. And I feel kind of bad because it’s not going to take that long to code, I just haven’t had much time the last few weeks what with work and preparing for my class. But it’s coming in the next couple of weeks. She’s got a really great blog and I’m excited to be a part of getting this design out for her. Check out tea@elevensies »

I start my first bout with teaching college students on Monday evening. I’m really excited about it, but have a bunch of work to do. I need to put together a better keynote presentation and finish up the first assessment for them. I need to get a feel for what they already know about web design. So I’m going to “test” them the first evening. They’ll get points just for taking the assessment, no matter what they know or don’t know. So hopefully the students will forgive me for a test during the first class.

If you’re interested, I could still use help creating questions for that initial test. Check out my previous post and leave the question you think I should ask.

Hey! This is my first attempt at crowdsourcing on my blog, but I need help from you guys and gals. Here’s the skinny:

I’m teaching a basic web design class this fall semester. Supposedly most of the students won’t know anything about XHTML, CSS, divs, javascript, headers… anything. But I know some of them will. I don’t want to start the class out too slowly, so the very first thing I’m having them do is take an assessment for me to gauge what they know and don’t know.

But I need help with questions. Will you help me out? If I can get 10 people to leave a question about web design in the comments, I will be a very happy camper. If more than 10 do this, I’ll be ecstatic.

Questions should be relatively basic (probably not getting too detailed into browser-specific hacks or JS logic), and can concern HTML, XHTML, CSS, tags, elements, floats, images and even go into things like RSS, PHP (well, server-side scripting) and basic JS.

So what do you say? Help!!!

This day has been so tiring. I’m not sure if it was the storm last night waking me up at 3 AM, all the work I’ve had to do at work or what… but my normal (and even abnormal) efforts at coffee intake did not work.

I need to get some new electric guitar strings. I’m think I may just spring for the Thomastik-Infelds… I haven’t played them since college and I love them. And figure I might as well. To order or to drive to Guitar Center? That’s the question. I have no other reason to drive the 45 minutes out to Fairview Heights, and it’s so far when Musician’s Friend is just a few clicks away… probably cheaper to order them online.

Today I trained faculty in using dotCMS again. It went pretty well. A little bit tedious considering I had zero energy. But all in all I think it all worked out. New Student Orientation starts tomorrow and the semester starts next week.

As I continue to read design blogs, more and more I wish I could just quit work and do freelance all the time. But it’s certainly not feasible at this point. I need the steady work, even if I have to put up with things and people.

I’ve got a bunch of projects I need to finish up and barely any drive to do them after everything at the day job. Do I feel a bit overwhelmed? Yes, certainly. But I am holding out for a specific project that I think is going to be awesome…

It’s been one of those weeks. Work’s been a little bit more involved/overwhelming/frustrating since I once again became the sole web manager. It’s a little more stressful. On top of that we feel kind of antsy to get on with life, to do something else. To do something new and exciting. But we’ll have to see what happens.

Jessica hates her new job and  that’s kind of frustrating. There really isn’t anything else that she can do in Greenville because no one is hiring. At the same time, I don’t get paid enough to cover all of our bills and student loan payments. It’s not an ideal situation and beyond that, it’s one that makes us disappointed in our life here just a little bit more than it already was.

I’ve got a couple of new projects I’m working on that I’m excited about. I’ll talk more about them as things take shape.

I need some forward motion though. At least I’ve got this class to teach this semester. I’m excited about that