All Out
Since the New Year started, I make it a point not to touch our combined salaries for things other than household bills. This is the only way that I think we can save. All additional expenses, hobbies, etc will be paid by my sideline earnings. It was working the first few weeks but lately, I’m so confused where my earnings are going. It seems that the more money I get from sidelines, the more we spend on junk food, gadgets, weekend outings, etc. Now, I have so many additional expenses that my list of things-to-buy is now about five inches long, single spaces. My laptop battery won’t last for more than one hour anymore, memory and hardisk needs to be upgraded and my wireless Internet is fluctuating so badly. The most important thing is my wi-fi so I’ll check out some used cisco routers online to save some money. As for the hardisk and memory, I think I can afford another month before I replace them.
Difficult Clients
I’ve been working on a health insurance website re-design for more than two months now. The client is so fickle minded and kept on changing stuff at the last minute. The way his online forms were coded was so bad that it took me three days to re-do his individual health insurance form. And we’re talking about 20 online forms here, coded the same way. I’m a bit frustrated about this project and can’t stop thinking if the total cost is worth all the trouble. I don’t want to stop working on it though because it was my friend who referred me to this client. Plus I’ve already done so much that I deserve to receive the final payment.
Choosing a Job
A friend of mine who’s in commercial real estate told me how much she’s earning on commission. I was so shocked because the number is about three times of what I’m getting monthly. Of course, it all depends on the number of properties that you can sell but still, it’s enough to send your kid to College and have enough to spend on a 7-day island getaway in Thailand. Now I know why she can afford all those out of the country trips and expensive bags. I should’ve joined the real estate biz instead of designing LOL. But I know I don’t have the talent to sell plus I’ll never be happy not being able to do what I love.
New Project
I’m so excited about my new project. I only learned about it this morning but my ideas are all over the place already. The project is a website design for a golf community website and will feature some of the most popular brands like Mizuno golf, Callaway and Nike. I think this one’s going to be pretty exciting, not to mention easy. I’m thinking of re-using the mockup that I entered for a contest before for a golf website redesign and just update the elements. I loved that mockup so much and felt bad that it wasn’t chosen. But now, I think it has a better chance of being used because I will manage everything from concept to coding.
My Own Space
One of the reasons why I want to move houses is because I want to have my own office. Working from home is already hard enough even without a toddler who wants to sit on your lap while you’re working. I’ll have my own office hours wherein no one can enter my room unless instructed to do so. I’m not really the contemporary office furniture type but I’d love to design my office so it will look chic but comfortable. I’ll probably copy the workspaces that I’ve been seeing online. Most of them have been designed by work from home moms as well. I guess having a fabulous work area when working at home is crucial if you want to be inspired and keep your focus. There are so many distractions at home and you need all the help you can get, even if you have to pay more just to have that extra room.
Slow
Things have been really slow since Christmas. There’s not enough work to get busy with and I’m usually lazing away with the little girl, playing with her new toys. My assignments have expired over the last three days so I’m now trying to grab some. Sandy is asleep, thank God after an hour of nursing / carrying. It’s so hard to put her down once she’s asleep. It’s like watching a funny movie where the character moves so slow in order not to wake up the other person. And just when I thought that it’s okay to remove my arm from her head, she will open her eyes and we’ll start all over again. We’re meeting my friend from Singapore in two hours and it could be a long night, for her at least.
Kudos
Every company needs business performance management software. Just last week, a client of ours earned a whopping $50M and wrote an article on how to be a successful company. One of the tips that they mentioned is to invest in business process management tools to streamline and optimize the whole system. I’m very happy for them because they used to be one of the underdogs. Plus, the people / employees that I work with from that company are also genuinely good people. They always ask about the little girl and thank me for every little thing that I do for them. So I guess having the right people skills also helped a lot.
Mushroom Sites
I didn’t have a lot of tasks at work for the last couple of months. Now they wanted me to design three huge sites and if I didn’t know any better, they’d want to see them up before the end of the month. I can do this, except that the owners of these sites are fickle minded. They are the types of clients that I’m wary of. They have so many ideas that they can’t wait to squeeze it all in one page. The result? A website that has so many elements and styles you’d have no idea what’s the site really about. Or one minute they like a simple and clean website, the next day, a flashy and graphics-heavy site, complete with scripts that will surely cause IE to stop running because of script errors.
Good thing I have the patience of a saint. And I do love what I’m doing - making people happy about their web sites so they can properly sell their services.
Ms. Tamad
I just don’t have the strength to work this afternoon. I’m done with paid blogging (unless a $10 opp will appear) and soooo tired and lazy to do anything else.
My boss asked me this afternoon just when I’m about to rest if I can design some cool looking wallpapers using the logo of our new product. Yaiiks! I’m so uninspired and can’t think of any design right now especially for something as vague as this. Gawd. The problem is that they’re so used to me delivering in a couple of hours that I have a feeling they’ll expect something tonight.
What I’m doing right now is think of a reason why I wasn’t able to design some. Heh. I guess I can blame it on my lack of creative juice.
Half Day
Half of my day is almost finish. I shouldn’t be working but my boss seems to have forgotten that today is a Holiday just because I’m online. He has been sending me screenshots of WebPages that look weird on his Mac so I can fix them. Like I want to see CSS codes today ha! But since I love him because he’s so good to me, I took a quick peek and made the necessary changes. Plus, I can’t let our clients see that their websites have browser issues right? I mean, as a dedicated web designer, (which I am, most of the time when I’m not doing paid blogging haha) I can’t let it rest until I find the cause of any layout problem.
You can never be too relaxed
Well, things are not doing great at work. The boss talked to me this morning wondering what’s going on with our product support. All I can say is it’s baaaadddd. Payment servers crashing, credit card processing not working, it’s a nightmare! I hope we can get through this soon. I know we can. Still, thinking positively will not help me fall asleep at night. Need to see results, to see that our clients are happy. Sigh. The title is what exactly my boss told me before he signed off.
Kinda stressful, huh? Makes me want to leave everything and have a quick getaway with the family, perhaps to some fairly new Bed and Breakfast that are sprouting like mushrooms.
Photo Op
I’ve spent my entire afternoon browsing for royalty free photos for a client of mine. This is the part that I hate because I tend to waste hours looking for the perfect photo. A photo can make or break a website’s design so it’s very important for me. I wish I had an account at Gettyimages so I can download to my heart’s content. My photos.com membership is alright, but when I looked for steel buildings at Getty, the selections are just incredible. I can’t just download them though because of copyright laws. So I guess I’ll have to make do with what I have. Such a waste of time.
Tables to CSS
I’ve been studying CSS for four hours and thought I’d just rest my brain a bit. There’s so much stuff to learn that I’m finding it hard to keep up. CSS is such a better world though, design-wise. I’ve even managed to convince my friend Teresa to say goodbye to her nested tables and welcome the not-so-new div layering. Our latest “past time” is to check how many errors we can eliminate using the w3c compliant checker. We’re soo geeky (just in this area) but I get so high whenever my codes pass the validation.
What’s the purpose of this post? Well, every web designer needs to take this design journey and I’m just so glad I’m halfway there!
Another day
Tons of stuff to do today!
Need to wake up. I spotted three opps for me this morning and I can’t wait to grab them. I am allowing myself 2 hours only to blog and spend the remaining hours to concentrate on my work deliverables. Plus, I need to hunt for new sidelines (design) so we can go to Bohol on Sandy’s birthday. We promised not to touch our savings anymore in time for our move next year.
OSX
I need to design a web site and a logo for our new hosting web site.
This is the theme.
Sweet!
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About Joy
I am Dzoi, a 28 year old Filipina who currently works as a web designer. I am a loving wife to my equally loving husband Sherwin and a mommy cow to my 2-year-old daughter, Sandy.
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