Work Whining and Book Ranting

This is a stressful week or two, workwise. I manage our website and big changes are afoot. We're having to change the site over to a new web-design software in preparation for a switch to a new server and it's been a very steep learning curve for me.

Expectations have been radically lowered: the original plan was to roll out a fabulous, completely new website. Now I would be thrilled to just get the old site to work in the new set-up. Supposedly this is all supposed to be ready to go by July 1. But folks, it's not happening, at least not yet.

Did I mention that we've known that this change was coming for nearly two years? Sigh.

My problem is time and the wearing of many hats at my job. It's hard to concentrate on something like CSS and html when my desk is a cubicle with an INFORMATION sign hanging above it. Kids are coming up to me asking what the next Spiderwick Chronicles book is or do we have Skippyjon Jones? And then there are the newbie internet users who ask, "It says I need an email address. How do I get one?" And, "Do you have tax forms?"

And then there are the summer events, when we can host up to 150 kids and their parents and everyone has to help with crowd control. Not much CSS gets done on days like that.

But I'm plugging along and will keep you posted on victories and defeats in my sad little world of--cough, cough--website development.

OK, reading... For summer escape, I tried a couple family saga-type novels. Library patrons were talking about Penny Vincenzi and her trio of Spoils of Time novels, so I grabbed No Angel, the first of the series. It was a page turner, but it wasn't my cup of tea. After all those pages, I never could visualize any of the characters. But even more than that--the typos! Spelling errors and sentence fragments--where was the editor?

And you have to remember I was once a clothing design student. I couldn't figure out why the novel covered the first decades of the twentieth century but the cover depicts a woman in high style 1950s attire. This is the sort of thing that bothers me about a book.

Next, I tried Colony by Anne Rivers Siddons. I had seen an article in Salon praising this book, but again--meh. If the main character was meant to be the sympathetic anchor of a big dysfunctional family, she came across every bit as dysfunctional as any of the rest of them, and pretty smug about it too. And though I don't claim to be a faithful Catholic these days, I still have a thin skin when it comes to anti-Catholic rhetoric. The main character describes someone as having "a novena-thickened accent." What is that supposed to mean?

So I think that's it for me and the big, sprawling saga novels for awhile.