Warning: Rant Ahead!

I don't want to let this blog turn into a mammoth grouching session, but the goal of being more positive will have to wait for another day (yes, this is going to mess up my goal of not procrastinating, but just ignore that for a moment).

This last week was seriously insane. Granted, a great deal of that was self-imposed (as usual, I know) but that doesn't change the fact that it was really stressful. On Tuesday night, we had rehearsal for the choir that I co-direct. At the end of the rehearsal, one of the board members brought up that she really thought we should change our name. She had a couple of decent reasons for this, but I personally like our name, had already finished designing our publicity materials a couple of weeks before, and didn't really relish the idea of redoing everything- especially because our first performance of the season was going to be on Friday night (yes, three days later).

Too make a long story short, after a day and half of intense negotiation I was overruled. Our name changed. Which was fine... the new name isn't bad- I actually like it, except that it basically blew my entire week. The new name for our group had an entirely different length and fit on the page. After all of the time spent in intense negotiations, I had exactly 24 hours in which to redesign and print our publicity materials so they would be ready to hand out at our first performance. I know I'm ranting here, but people who haven't done graphic design don't realize exactly how time-intensive it is. Even after I finished redesigning it, it took an additional 2-3 hours just to adjust technical things so it would print correctly (adjusting the margins, resizing for the smaller flier, saving in different formats, test printing, etc.).

When I finally finished it I got a "Hey, that looks really good." Which would be lovely... except that I just wasted my entire week (the week that Dave had off, no less!) on this stupid name/flier/printing drama which could have been entirely avoided if we had stuck with the old name. Doesn't that merit a little bit above and beyond your normal validation for good work?

I suppose a fair amount of my irritation might actually be due to the fact that while Dave "had the week off" with forced a shutdown, he basically worked from home 6 hours a day. Between the two, we didn't get any big projects done, we didn't go anywhere exciting... we just saw a little bit more of Dave than usual. (I know, I shouldn't complain-- that in itself is a good thing. Besides, these days, the fact that he has a job at all is a thing to be grateful for, right?) But it's hard not to lament the uneventful passing of a full week of "paid time off"...

So, here is the famous flier which ate a week of my time. Now would be a good time for validation. Feel free to insert comments about how amazing, beautiful and professional-looking it is and how great I am for saving the group so much money by doing it myself. Any comments about how I really just made it harder for myself by being a control freak about it and not delegating you can just keep to yourself. ;) If you really want brownie points, tell me that you are definitely going to come and see the concert and you've got to have tickets, based solely, of course, on how fabulous our flier looks.