Yesterday evening, just after the time at which my friendly neighbourhood GP closes up for the weekend, I started getting an occasional pain in my kidney, a pain which became progressively more sharp as time went on. You don’t have to be Marie Curie to know that this is either a kidney infection or a kidney stone, and you don’t have to be Albert Einstein to begin fervently praying for Door A: Infection.

Since “screaming in agony at 3 am” seemed like a sucktastic differential diagnosis method, I took myself off to SouthDoc. Last time I did this, they left me on the floor of their waiting room while my appendix ruptured and I departed in an ambulance; this time, I came home an hour and a half later with a barrel full of antibiotics and painkillers. Comparatively speaking, I think we can chalk that one up as a win.

24 hours later, I am delighted that this appears to definitively be an infection, because while I feel like complete shit, I am not screaming in agony whilst trying to piss an object just slightly wider than your average ureter. And for that I am very, very grateful.

I am also very, very weirded out. Most of my marriage is a battleground for possession of the thermostat; I run around barely clad in monkey pants and a vest, screaming like a menopausal hotflash harridan for my husband to turn the bloody heat down while he sits there fully dressed complaining that he’s cold.

At the moment, however, I am huddled in a miserable heap on the sofa, wearing a long sleeved shirt, a sweatshirt, a bathrobe and a sleeping bag, and I cannot get warm. Meanwhile my poor husband is sitting next to me in a t-shirt, basking in sub-Saharan heat and sweltering to death.

But he looks damn cute in the monkey pants.

Despite the fact that I am the antithesis of a brazen careerist - I don’t do corporate hierarchy, and I am goal, not money, motivated - I am a long time reader of Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist. There’s something refreshing about reading someone who is even bitchier and more acerbic than I am, and while I don’t always agree with her, I appreciate her willingness to continually put well-supported but unpopular views out there. Unpalatable doesn’t always mean wrong.

Often, she writes about women and work, a topic near and dear to my heart. Today she’s revealed that in the aftermath of her divorce, she’s hired a household manager to the tune of $50,000 a year. And before you start laughing, let me tell you: if I had it, I’d do it. And I don’t even have kids.

Of all of the sage advice my mother has ever given me, some of the smartest is “Every working woman needs a wife.” I hired a housekeeper about 10 years ago when I lived in a flat that was, quite literally, a shoebox. The loo was smaller than an airplane bathroom and the shower was in the kitchen. And despite the fact that I married a kick ass guy who does both all the grocery shopping and all the ironing, we still have a housekeeper.

There is a reason these wonderful women are referred to as “household help.” They help keep the household up and running, and more importantly (for me at least) they provide the reassurance of there being a human being out there who’s actual job it is to help you.

That’s worth a tremendous amount to me. When we have eaten out of the freezer because we’ve been utterly broke, we have paid the housekeeper. When we have not bought each other holiday gifts, we have paid the housekeeper. When we have not been able to pay the light bill, we have paid the housekeeper.

There’s a lot of talk about outsourcing these days, and a lot of people who do what I do who outsource pieces of work to other people and even other countries. I’m fine with that in theory, but I’m way too attached to what I produce to do that. So while I can’t outsource graphic design or HTML, I can outsource fridge cleaning and carpet hoovering.

To be honest, I’m jealous as hell of Penelope Trunk. Because I’ve got a housekeeper, but I really need a wife.

So as the weather turns a bit warmer and plans for summer firm up, it appears my husband is leaving me, again. This time it will be a week for the Glastonbury Festival and four weeks for the Edinburgh Festival. He booked his ticket for Glastonbury last night, at which point I told him to hand over his credit card because fair is fair and I too am getting the hell out of Dodge.

I have said this in advance of every summer for five years in a row. The mistake I have made up until now is trying to book a July holiday between his June and August commitments at a time we can both go away and to a destination we can both agree on. Every summer, we have completely failed to tick these boxes, and I have found myself facing a chilly September with not nearly enough air miles behind me.

This year I said “sod that for a game of soldiers” and let Aer Lingus have its pilfering way with me. Direct flights are a bit limited, but considering that I live in Cork, I’m delighted to have an airport at all and am not really going to start bitching that I can’t jet into Cannes on a whim. Of the available options, I have no interest in going to Berlin, I’ve already spent a lot of time in Rome, and I’d be happy to go to Spain again except the rest of you will already be there. So five minutes after demanding my husband hand over plastic liberty, I picked a destination very nearly at random and booked tickets to Prague.

I know absolutely nothing about Prague except that I’m staying at the Pension Museum. I assume this means there is a museum nearby, and that sounds nice because I enjoy museums, particularly when I have no idea what’s in them. I imagine there will also be coffee, books and whatever incarnation of Czech pastry passes for breakfast at noon.

I both love and like my other half but I have a deeply ingrained habit of traveling on my own. We are not the same person and we don’t have perfectly aligned tastes, and I have this suspicion that nothing will exhaust a marriage as much as 40 years of constant compromise. That just sounds hideously frustrating. So for five days in July, there will be museums, graveyards, bookstores, fabric and bead stores.

There will not, however, be tents, mud or any kind of portaloos.

My dad used to tell this joke. When you’d complain about one of those days when everything had gone wrong - you woke up, slipped on dog puke, fell down the stairs, broke your ankle, hopped to the kitchen, realised your phone has been cut off of and you couldn’t call an ambulance, tried to administer first aid in the bathroom, and then noticed you’d somehow managed to lock yourself in there, he’d say “Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the theatre?”

While that is an old and very nearly completely true story, it is also pretty much what the last two weeks have been like. In other words, two weeks of miserable, epic Fail.

In all the incarnations of my blog I have been pretty much transparent. Were my archives online, which one day they will be, you could read about everything from heart break to politics to writing a sex advice column for a top shelf men’s mag to the fun ride that was a temporary psychotic break complete with my dead grandfather dropping in for a chat in my kitchen. You could, in short, read about the experiences of a woman in her mid-20s, which somehow fit into a different box of reality than a woman in her mid-30s.

Things are different now, and I’m not so transparent these days. Especially these days. Something happened, it was outside my control, I took the ride and I’m here to not tell the story. Sometimes, that’s just how it rolls, and I’ve decided today that that’s okay when it has to be.

I’m in the middle of returning all outstanding emails, and completed sites will begin to appear very shortly. I have a delightful pile of Xanax at my side, and frankly that and PhotoShop are enough to get me through the day and pending projects out the door.

Posts may be a bit light as I catch up, but we now return you to your regularly scheduled broadcast. Thank you for standing by.

I’m aware of the fact that this is an ironic weekend for this to have happened, but my work computer has officially keeled over and died. This is doubly ironic given that I was vaguely aware all was not well in Computerville, and just yesterday procured an enormous USB stick so I could back up my current projects folder.

Sticking the USB key into the computer? Is what finally killed it.

This is apparently a malady stemming from peripherals. It started with an increadibly troublesome printer that would freeze my entire system with each communication attempt to or from the PC, and finally ended in a blaze of absolute nothingness with the aforementioned USB issue.

There is a long day of mountaineering level rescue attempts ahead of my husband, but I am not terribly hopeful that this is going to end well. And on the off chance that this story does have some kind of happy ending, it is unlikely to be a quick one.

The real issue, however, is that all of my current projects in progress for all pending clients are locked on that dead hard drive. Even if this all gets sorted by the end of the long bank holiday weekend, a forced vacation during repairs is going to mean an enormously crunched work load, even if this event doesn’t mean starting completely from scratch for every single project.

Fortunately, I thrive on disasters, so it will all come good one way or another.

Unfortunately, if I promised you something this weekend, it is unlikely to appear. I will look at everyone’s deadlines, reshuffle in order of deadline priority, and get everything out early next week. When I know what the production schedule looks like, everyone will get an email from me so we can be sure nobody is being pushed to a new deadline that isn’t going to work for them.

I am, of course, very sorry this has happened and will do everything possible to make all of the pain mine and virtually none of it anyone else’s.

The last irony is that of course, I do have a back-up system in place. I back up all accepted layouts, all production designs and code, and every iteration in between. What I don’t back up is the 32 versions I go through before I send someone a suggested design. It just happened to work out that right now, I have about six clients in this awkward pre-production phase.

And yes, you can bet that the new computer system, in whatever incarnation, will involve a nightly, if not hourly, new back-up routine.

Here at chez moi we’re off to CreativeCamp a day early as we have plans for Friday night that will put us in Kilkenny on Saturday around noon. Given that little scheduling hitch, I have to say that Keith and Ken and the whole Kilkenny mafia have been 32 flavours of lovely dealing with me, because I have been a perpetual pain in the arse about this:

Is there public transport? Are there projectors and screens? How long do I have? Can you save slots for me? Which slots? What’s for lunch? When is lunch? Do I need a dongle? Can I have a pony?

And not a single one of them gave up and just shot me.

But that is not the end of Irish excellence today. I had two more stellar experiences today that really demand blog love.

First of all, the people at Blacknight got a name registered, DNS sorted and free sponsored hosting in place less then three hours after we faxed in a rush request for a .ie domain name. It’s for a super top secret, soon to be revealed web project Elly Parker and I are kicking off at Creative Camp. We’ve been working on it for a while, we just didn’t realise that this weekend was, uh, this weekend. Anyway: Blacknight. Awesome service.

Second of all, a couple of people have emailed me to say they can’t make CreativeCamp but are interested in my presentation on How to Blog Like a Boy. Since I refuse to read off my (very minimalist) slides, my presentation notes are the bulk of my gig and the slides are just summary backdrops. This means I can’t just make a PowerPoint download; it would leave all the context behind.

Marcus Mac Innes at Pix.ie to the rescue. I uploaded all of my slides as JPG images into an album and he entered all of my notes by hand in the first comment of each slide, one by one. Pix.ie users can’t use HTML like paragraph and break tags yet, and some of these slides have four or five paragraphs of notes and citations, so he saved my stressed out bacon. (Slides go live after Camp.)

Flicker, who wanted me to upload three test images and then wait more than a week until they’re reviewed so I can prove I’m not no longer a pornographer, can kiss my booty. Or just, you know, hire more staff.

Anyway, CreativeCamp, Blacknight, and Pix.ie all get 10 out of 10 for being outstanding, home grown examples of utterly fabulous people.

Give them your money and your love.

PS:

Well, I’m off to the Irish Blog Awards, where I’ve made the short list for Best Design. Having spent the last day cleaning the house for the dog sitter, I now need to clean myself and my laundry and hop on the 12:30 train to Dub.

I’m very excited for the Tea Party and to meet 400 of my cohorts at the Alexander. I have vowed:

• Not to get drunk. That didn’t work out so well last time.
• Not to cry if I win. The competition is stiff and I’d link to everyone else on the list but I’ve been too scared to look.
• Not to cry if I don’t win. It is, as they say, an honour to be nominated but I LIKE WINNING.

Whatever the outcome, I just want to thank Damien Mulley (must remember to bring bribe present) for the huge amount of work organising a night like this entails. He gets special kudos for persevering when his health hasn’t been great and the diagnosis isn’t spectacular. He is a champion.

So best of luck to all the nominees, I’ll see you in the big smoke, and I’ll be back on Sunday!

Awhile back, a client I gig for on an hourly rate asked me to send in not only my total number of hours, but some basic record of what I’d spent those hours on when submitting invoices. This seemed reasonable enough to me, so I spent a few hours one weekend trying out various online tools and applications for time tracking.

I probably cruised through five or six, rejecting them for various reasons, before I found the perfect time tracking website for my specific needs. It was free (for one client, anyway, and I only have one client who needs this), it had excellent categorisation, and it was really easy to use. It was so great that I actually meant to blog it, but I never got around to it.

I kept it open in a browser tab for an entire week, logging minutes and hours as I expended them, totally happy with my new system and sure that my client would be, too, when it came time to invoice. Then the work cycled down, only to cycle back up again recently. And what with it being the end of the month and all, I’m really looking forward to sending off my February invoice.

Except I cannot remember the name of the frigging site.

And I am not even making that up.

Update: Found it! Thanks for all the suggestions. Turned out to be TickSpot. Great service, but… that’s a brand? It sounds like a flea collar! 

Does anyone know of someone who might be available to dog sit / house sit this weekend in Cork City in exchange for cold hard cash?

We are going to the Irish Blog Awards in Dublin on Saturday and need someone to look after our shy, sweet, un-slobbery 45lb boxer while we are away, from Saturday afternoon to Sunday afternoon.

Ideally this would be in our house in Cork City, which is very central and has laptops, WiFi, Sky and TiVo. You just need to walk the dog three times and feed her. She will ignore you completely, and you get to watch loads of telly or do lots of studying, writing, programming or whatever and sleep in our very comfy guestroom.

In a pinch, we would board her with someone at their home as long as there are no other dogs - not because she’s aggressive, but because she’s scared of other dogs. She likes kids, however!

If you or anyone you know would be interested in this gig, please email me at never mind.

Update: Thanks to the power of the interpipes, we are all sorted for dog sitting. Bernie Goldbach hooked me up with the lovely, local Tara and  she’s agreed to be ignored by the hound in exchange for euros. Hurrah!

Douglas Adams famously said “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” While I am a huge DNA fan, I am also a sincere fan of the deadline. I usually work well under pressure, and there’s a kind of runner’s high you can replicate only at 3 AM after 27 cups of coffee and 300 fags and four hours of sleep.

Plus, let me tell you how much I’d rather get that buzz sitting on my arse than running it off.

For the past five days, I’ve been working on the kind of project that has a tendency to blow up in your face, and perversely, is the kind of project I really like. It was supposed to be a fairly benign but urgent redesign for a new client. The goal was to roll out something that looked better than the existing site as a stop-gap measure until everyone could get their heads around the forward planning required for a new content management system (CMS) implementation.

You know the kind of thing: Design new site. Create new template. Copy old text. Publish. Yawn.

But this was one of those projects where budgets, specs and limitations just went out the window, and everyone was happy to see them go because we were so excited by what we were producing. I got to do the things I’m actually really good, like overhauling copy, re-branding products, and saying things like

Having to type out web-enabled enterprise convergence solution is making me vomit.

The client got to exercise his sartorial aesthetic, and - oh the unmitigated joy! - kept asking me to take things out rather than put things in. You have no idea how rare that is - a ton of projects are characterised by well-meaning but misguided people saying things like “Can you make that bigger? And can you make that flash? And can we have menus that drop down and change color and maybe make sounds?” while I rock back and forth in a corner, trying to explain that 1998 has rung and wants its website back.

This was so much better than my worst nightmare, even if I did have to cram twice as many hours into the same number of days. It’s done, anyway, and should be out this week.

I can haz sleep, plz?

PS: You can totally tell my brain is fried when I make with the kitteh talk for two posts in a row. SRSLY.