Jackhammers

It's construction season again. I know this because my head is pounding and the desk is shaking from the jackhammers (or whatever) tearing out E Mifflin Street. I only hope--perhaps naively--that this building is structurally sound. Realizing my complaints about road construction/repair work are pointless, I thought I'd write a little bit about stress. So the month of June has been exceptionally busy for me at work. In the last 17 days, I've published 7 magazines and 32 pages of 4-color ads. That leaves only 4 more magazines and 16 pages of 4-color ads left to do before the 1st of July. Oh, and redesigning startrenting.com. The website deadline is my own fault. I told them that Jeff and I could get it done in just over a month. I should've said 2 months. Jeff's doing the bulk of the coding, while I do things like making maps, converting static pages, writing progress reports, communicating with vendors and the like. Right now, I'm particularly frustrated by the fact that IE is a non-standards-compliant hunk of shit. Do me a favor, load up firefox (which you should be using anyway) and look at the work-in-progress. It's about 75% done and working. If you view the same thing in IE, well... let's just say that IE is the opposite of beer-goggles. Also, how can you windows users stand to have non-antialiased fonts? That just gives me a greater headache than I'm getting from the stupid jackhammers. Lastly, el donk has a gig at Mr. Roberts this Saturday and Falcon called me on Wednesday (big mistake) to tell me that he and Woobie wouldn't be able to make it until showtime. Meaning that Fastlane and I would have to do all the equipment moving and setup. Now, the last time we played Mr. Roberts, Woobie couldn't make it until showtime, and Falcon and Fastlane disappeared into the basement to watch someone else's... ahem, Hired Entertainment. Leaving me to carry in all the equipment. That made me happy. On New Year's Eve, we played Mr. Roberts and I told them under no uncertain terms that I would only play the show if I could exit the establishment immediately after playing our set so that I could be home with Kim for the actual New Year's Observation. Care to guess if I got home on time? Suffice to say, I'm feeling a little taken-for-granted, and it's starting to piss me off.