And it started off swimmingly on Friday night with an impromptu family & friends get together at my sister in law's home for an evening of wine, music and song. My husband's family is very musical - they either all play something or sing well and I play a bit of guitar and sing as well so we all do the family song circle kind of thing. It's a blast and always a great time.

*** Saturday July 29 ***

The following evening we had a wine tasting seminar hosted by my brother in law who is down visiting from Ontario. In addition to being very accomplished on the guitar, he's currently studying to be a master sommalier (which will make him one of three in Canada). It was very interesting and informative. There were 5 whites and 4 reds, and in learning how to properly appreciate the wine I realized it was something I'd never done before - breathe in the bouquet and try to identify all the various scents. Some were earthy, some were fruity, one was even mouldy smelling - clearly a bad bottle which he said had oxidized - another first, I don't think I'd ever really smelled a bad wine before (but I've probably drank one thinking hmm... I don't like the taste of this one).

*** Monday July 31 ***

Today, we (D, myself, Aliya and her friend) spent the afternoon in St. Andrews by the Sea. A delightful seaside resort town with pretty much only a main drag of touristic boutiques and fine arts and crafts shops. The eating is awesome - if you're partial to seafood. We had supper at The Gables and it was awesome. D had the seafood platter and I had the fried whole clams, huge juicy clams maybe as big as the end of a man's thumb (not like the scrawny bits you normally get at a Deluxe or something). Aliya and her friend had a chicken caesar salad and seafood chowder respectively. All had either big pieces of chicken, or chunks of fish or assorted sea treats like shrimp and scallops - all was deeeelicious. Photos posted on my flicker site.

Today's your day all you sysadmins out there. Hope it's a good one!

Tomorrow is the last day of work before I go out on vacation for the next two weeks so the post "Back to GTD: Do a fast “mind-sweep”" from Merlin Mann's blog 43 folders was more than timely. A mind sweep (or I call it a data dump) is a wonderful thing where you can remove all the nagging "oh..this needs to be done" kind of thoughts from your mind and put them down on paper as actionable items. I think it's essential before leaving the office for an extended absence simply so you can get the real r&r that you deserve and return to work refreshed, energized and ready to plough through the list. I'm so on this!

This week just past and next week looming may actually set a record for me in terms of meetings. Out of the 10 work days I think there may be about 3.5 days where I can work on projects or support tickets - craaazy. Summer is always our busy time since the students are few and there's more time for departments to focus on their website needs. So how does one manage productivity when time is at a premium and resources are scarce? It does seem to defy possibility but strangely enough it feels as though I have been getting stuff done. It helps to follow one of the GTD tricks - the inbox tray with sheets of paper each containing a specific task. I use that for the support tickets that have been queued seemingly forever and needing more in-depth analysis to solve the issue. Those I keep with me since I'm travelling a lot back and forth to Fredericton so I can work on them in between meetings. As well, I queued up larger project tasks on my whiteboard back in the office to work on when I'm not in a meeting day and am happy to report that most are now crossed off - ready to be erased and replaced. I have not, however, been able to start any new projects yet - and I don't anticipate that I'll be able to until after my vacation and hopefully by that time I'll be able to secure some contract help to assist with the overflow work.

And, of course, for whatever reason, it always seems busiest right before you go out on vacation (only 1 more week till vacation!). At this point I'm so looking forward to the break, but I think there will be a bit of a working component to it. I wish someday I'll be able to take a month off in the summer with no worries, but for now just two weeks will do.

As a side note, even though it's been crazy busy at work, I did get through the CSS Mastery book and it was a really good read. I learned some stuff and will be implementing some stuff in future design work so it was well worth the purchase price for me. I'd definitely recommend it.

Well I'm not dead but I have been freaking buried at work lately and this has been the first chance I've had in a bit to actually come up for air and post a little something on my blog. Suffice it to say that I'm extremely hopeful I'll be getting some extra hands to help out with the work here soon.

Yesterday the CSS Mastery book arrived from Amazon and it looks like I'll be doing some reading over the weekend, maybe - they're forecasting hot, sunny weather all weekend so I might geek out and bring it with me to the beach :-) The book Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way We Live With Technology is on backorder so it should ship out sometime in August. That one looks really interesting. Eventually I will have all the books on my "to buy" list :-)

Now that I finished off the project that's been consuming me for the past couple of weeks (I'm becoming quite the expert in re-templating Moveable Type to integrate with existing websites) , today I plan on getting my inbox back into some semblance of sanity (300 emails is 280 too many in the inbox), taking care of some support tickets that have been languishing in the queue and some other admin stuff that has been neglected. I'm also going to be setting up a wiki for our team at work to use as a procedures manual/patterns library kind of thing. I need to plan that out a bit before getting started on it. Lots to do - I better get started.