The Weekly Wrap-Up: October 23-27, 2017

Greetings, loyal subjects!

This has been quite the week. If you like variety, you would have loved this week, because I don't think any one day was like any other.

First, I'm still working on Portuguese. I don't think I really impressed upon you what I mean when I say I have four groups to finish. I mean I have 24 booklets of between 10 and 52 pages to format, find mistakes in, and make ready for publishing. We're close to putting these to bed, but these booklets, especially those in group 1, have to be perfect, because they set the tone for the rest of them. We're a third of the way to being done when these published, which is awesome. But I'm nowhere close to being done with all of these groups. Because reasons.

On Tuesday, we had our annual Fall Work Day. On this day, all of us office peons get to do work we're not qualified for either inside or out in the great wide world. This year, some poor people got stuck changing most of the lighting in the building. Are they electricians? No. Am I worried about one of these lights blowing up someday? Sure. But I wasn't on the lighting crew, so it's not my fault. No, I spent my morning outside weeding the front landscaping and pruning rose bushes. And by pruning, I mean chopping those babies to pieces. I was ruthless. And I was repaid with more than a few thorns jabbing into various body parts. In the afternoon, I moved rocks from one location to another. Now, I'm all about being a team player (I am contractually obligated to say that), but my body really did not appreciate the change from sitting in front of a computer all day. I'm still feeling pain in muscles I didn't even know existed.

Unfortunately, I have no pictures of this glorious event, because I'm not the type of person who stops working in order to take pictures that prove I was actually working.

Right.

I had a lot of side projects come up this week. Certain people ask me to do certain things because I usually say yes or they know I'm good at the thing or they know I'll do it quickly. There seemed to be many of these things this week. I don't mind. I like being needed. And if it's a larger project or not something I'm really qualified to do, I can usually say no or not right now.

Finally, the biggest reason I didn't get much Portuguese done this week, and also coincidentally the reason I'm still writing this at 5:10, I spent the day participating in a simulcast on EntreLeadership. This is a Dave Ramsey thing that OMS hooked up with, and about 15 of us spent most of the day watching a series of speakers talk about how to be good leaders. It was actually quite interesting, and I thought many of the principles could apply to other areas of life. Plus, I got Qdoba out of the deal. Remember in college when you went to events for the t-shirts? In the work world, it's lunch. You can get me to do a lot of things for free lunch.

Next week should be less crazy. I'm going to hit Portuguese hard. I'd like to have most if not all of it done by next Friday. You should hold me to that.

Now, the big news I hinted at last week. Prayer letters are in the mail, so it should be safe to announce.

I'm going to the Philippines!

It's a short trip at the beginning of February. I know very few details other than there's a T&M event. I'm not sure what my role will be yet. But I get to leave the country!

This makes me happy.

Now go forth and do good things for thy land.

The Weekly Wrap-Up: October 16-20, 2017

Well, everyone deserted me again. Such is my lot in life.

Seriously, though. It's more weird for me when people are in my hallway than when they're not.

It's been a pretty standard week. I finished Estonian early on and took advantage of the break in projects to work on my next prayer letter. I think I'll be mailing it out next week, and there is exciting news inside! You'll have to wait for a bit until I post the news here. (Incidentally, if you don't get my letter, send me a message and I'll get you on my list.)

Alas, breaks are few and far between. I now have four groups of Portuguese to process. This should take a good chunk of time to complete. So it's not like no one being here matters at all, really.

We just keep going and going and going and going and going and going and...

The Weekly Wrap-Up: October 9-13, 2017

"It was a week like any other week."

That's Foster's contribution to my blog. He's loitering in my office because it's 4:00 on Friday, we're two of about 12 in the building, it's a beautiful day outside, but we both feel like we can't just leave.

Why do we have to be so responsible?

Anyway.

I finished up Tagalog and sent it off Wednesday morning. It had more than a few issues, but I was able to resolve most of them. I was going to start on groups 2 and 3 of Estonian, then, but I had to republish one of the group 1 Estonian booklets because it had a pretty glaring error. My fault, unfortunately. How will I ever live with myself?

I'll manage. My bigger problem might be that all the languages are starting to blur together. Most of the ones I do are Latin-based, so they all start to look the same.

They are not the same.

When your cheat sheet for a language starts to look like a textbook, you might as well just go ahead and learn the language.

I actually spent a good portion of my time putting the following together. Hopefully, it was worth the effort.



Thanks, everyone.

The Weekly Wrap-Up: October 3-6, 2017

Pennsylvania was great, thanks.

Moving on.

I hate trying to get back into the swing of things. There's always a ridiculous number of things that only seem to happen when you're away. I could be here for months on end, day in and day out, with nothing noteworthy happening, and then leave for three days and come back to complete anarchy.

So there's that.

Lots of meetings this week. This was a prayer rally week, put on by the finance department. It was nice. Money isn't anyone's favorite thing, but it's the thing that makes a lot of what we do possible. So it was good to pray for some people that we don't normally hear about. (By the way, if you're looking to help out somewhere, we need field treasurers. You don't have to know a lot about finance. We have morticians, dairy farmers, and teachers as field treasurers right now. You'd fit right in whatever you do normally.)

I also started Tagalog group 2. There have been some consistent issues with this group's templates, and I'm hoping we actually got them fixed this time.

I threw a party for myself when I was doing booklet 14. It was well deserved. I deleted four extra pages that were not needed at all. And now everything matches the English version. You know how some people can just pack really well so that all space is utilized in an efficient manner? Consider me that person, but with InDesign. I made it fit, and I made it pretty.

Go me.

Other than that, I really don't have much to say. I'll be playing catch up next week as well (seriously, how does that even happen?), but we're making progress!

Adios.