Found this in a journal from August 14, 2008:

I’ve been sick the last 3 days. I adore people who can suck it up, put on their big girl panties and trudge off through daily life when they are sick; I’ve never been able to do that, not even when I was a kid. My immune system is touchier than most, so if I try to push through it, I am invariably 3/4 dead the next day. Seriously. Literally. Dead. Bad, bad stuff.

I learned this the really hard way back in the winter of 2003 when I contracted pneumonia twice. Not once. Twice. I spent six months in bed. I never, never, ever want to go through that again.

Incidentally, the Pneumonia Winter was also when I discovered the sheer joy of laptop computers. Seeing that I was going to be in bed for a protracted period of time, I bought a used tangerine iBook, so at least I could entertain my brain with the internet. I spent an enormous amount of time on the Country Business forums, which is how I caught the attention of editor Susan Wagner and ended up profiled in the March-April ’03 E-Commerce issue.

And no, they didn’t show pictures of me with my sickly ass in bed, although that would have been the most accurate picture at the time.

Anyway.

Life the last 2+ years has been a river of mental bits and pieces. It is barely contained by its banks, and I float and bob and flail wildly from one bit to the next, trying to hold on for dear life. The result is a thought and work pattern very similar to those with ADD. I bounce and boing from one thing to the next as they occur to me, and they occur to me when I am reminded by some random-ass thing I’m doing in the here & now.

Let’s not go into coping strategies right now — that is fodder for about sixteen blog posts over @ PTSDJourney. :)

The result of this roiling, random mess in my head is that I feel super *awesome* when I actually accomplish something. 99.999% of things I just barely work a little bit on, and then it gets dropped when I bounce to something else. So to actually see a project through start-to-finish, or get a project to the place I want it? is kick-butt.

Tonight I finally got one of my major website projects to where I want it, appearance-wise.

Five stars for me!!

I’ve been running this particular site for about 20 months now. It’s been through 4 templates. FOUR. Not counting the ones that I “tried on for size” for a few minutes and promptly abandoned. And finally, a template, with the colors I wanted — popped up. That, in a nutshell, was what I wanted. It looked and felt right. (Note: I’m not talking about this/The Bailey Daily site, I’m talking about different site that I haven’t discussed or divulged before. And it’s staying secret for awhile. Sorry!)

So I guess the moral of the story is, Persistence Pays! Hang in there!

Sometimes, especially with software and websites, sometimes you have to wait a good long while for the software to catch up to what you see in your mind’s eye. That’s what I was fighting here; it’s a WordPress site and there just weren’t any templates that looked quite right. Then one day I found this one, and tonight I got the bug in my bonnet to install it and fix it up.

I do still have to Widgetize the sidebars, but Automattic assures me that doing so is a fairly easy process.

As I want to relish the feeling of accomplishment for a while, and not erase it by inadvertently breaking the site (because you know if I start monkeying with it and break it, then I’m going to get pissed off and have to nail down where the problem is), I’m going to work on Widgetizing at a later date.

Actually it will be fairly soon, because I need to install Adsense and my Amazon links ASAP. The site has actually earned me about $8 in Adsense over 20 months’ time. (LOL!)

So, there’s hope for us bouncy flounderers. Hang in there. You’re bound to finish something eventually. :) ##

Filed under: Daily Life

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