12 March 2016

12 March 2016

This has been an incredibly busy week! The 4-5-hour base leadership transition meetings on Monday’s & Thursday’s have put me quite far behind with my accounting job---NOT GOOD!   The pressure has been on to do all communication from the base office, rather than at our home offices so I took the initiative to gather all of the various odds and ends of computer pieces we have around the base and hired a technician to come and evaluate what could be repaired and what needed to be scrapped.

He reported that both laptops needed maintenance and new screens but are working and one of the desktops just needed maintenance and a new battery for the Tech-com UPS. That’s the GOOD NEWS (we could actually have 3 computers that work!) and BAD NEWS? He suggested that as the laptops are both so old, an external monitor might be a cost effective alternative to the $112 per new screen (but it turned out that the cost of an external monitor was the same as for a new screen)   MORE GOOD NEWS (Karen said she and Masai have 1 or 2 external monitors from the several times their computers have died. She is bringing them on Monday and the tech is coming back on Tuesday.) Progress--maybe?!     Erick is pushing to leave the old computers and buy a new laptop and a wi-fi transmitter; but I keep saying “please, can we just focus on the essential things for the next few weeks?”

Then on Tuesday this week Fridah asked me to update the DTS student Manuel that Vero did for the 2014 DTS. Last month we were not sure if we would have even 3 students because we were so late deciding to run the school and start advertising BUT as of this morning, we have 17 students accepted and more are phoning to ask for applications.  

Anyway, I thought updating the manual would just be a matter of changing a few dates and names and re-printing the first class job Vero did in 2014 , and I said “sure, I can do that”   So I gave up my Wednesday “Senior Day” to sit in the office at the computer. Not so simple after all. Vero had done the whole manual as a PDF file and so I couldn’t edit it.   BUMMER!!!!! Well, that’s not exactly what I said.   I tried several things that didn’t work so finally I just selected and coped the whole 42-page PDF file and saved it as a Word document and then spent the umpteen hours going through it, paragraph by paragraph changing font style & size and updating text changes.   I also sent Karen some of the pages not needing text changes/inserts and she re-did them and e-mailed them back.

Yesterday I spent the whole morning in town doing banking and both base & personal shopping. By the time I got back to the base I was exhausted. I went home to take a “little” nap and get re-hydrated and then worked again on the manual from 6-9:30pm. " All done I said, with a big sigh" and planned to go to the base this morning at 9 to get it printed out so Steve could come by at noon, after his college exam and take the packet for printing & binding.   I was just getting out of the shower at 10:30 last night when Steve called to say he would come by at 7:30 this morning on his way to school to pick up the new manual. Can we all say #@*^!! ???

This long story just a little bit shorter, I went into the base this morning at 6:30 to do the final edit and print out the master copy. I got it done by 8 when Steve arrived to collect it and just as I handed it to him the power went off.   Thank You God for keeping it on just long enough!!

It is now 10:30 Saturday morning and I am having my 2nd cup of coffee and trying to energize myself to get up and go wash the mountain of dishes and unpack yesterday’s shopping.

9 weeks to go until furlough! I can hardly wait to see everyone!