/karen/

And we all shine on ...

Wednesday, 22 September, 2004

I've been feeling down lately. The problem with being a girl is that, in a sense, you can never be sure whether you're feeling down because you are or because you're being manipulated by your hormones. There are times when I feel like everything is falling apart around me but then the following day I'm completely fine and I wonder what I was so distressed about. For example, on Sunday night I was ready to throw in the towel. We'd spent the weekend at Club 5 and Ben had been down the whole time. Mind you, it wasn't as bad as last year when both he and I were complete wrecks. But then we got back and I was feeling exhausted, I was one Sunday school teacher down because of miscommunication and disorganisation, we had a shocking Sunday school lesson which went completely over time and I just felt really upset when the assistant minister's daughter refused to take part in writing to the missionaries, plus I still had to do The Page which I finished at 11 o'clock at night after crying my way through dinner.

My husband feels sad for me. I don't know why knowing that makes me feel sadder.

I was down all day Monday and, because of being sick the previous week, Pete and I hadn't met to discuss TEAM. He had given me a CD with some stuff on it that we were going to do during the lesson but I couldn't find it on the CD when I looked. In addition, what I thought was going to be a quiet day turned into a very busy one and I was not able to look at the material at all, except during the lunchbreak when Bec and I looked through the D. Broughton Knox article together. So when I finally got off work and managed to catch Pete before TEAM, I had to tell him that I wasn't up for co-leading for all the bits he'd put me down for except for discussion of the Broughton Knox article and was that all right with him? (Feeling bad about making him do most of the work but then I wasn't really up for doing work that evening either.) Thankfully Pete is a very understanding and accommodating person so I just did the bit on the article and he did the rest and he felt at the end that it had gone particularly badly but I thought it went well because at least the students were really wrestling with the topic of church.

Stacie, Bethany and I had decided to start our spouse's support group since we all have significant others who suffer from depression. So after TEAM Ben dropped me at Stacie's place where I had the pleasure of eating her cooking (eating at Stacie's is like eating at a high-class gourmet restaurant). Beth's husband is on the same medication as Ben so I was able to compare notes with her. I found that comforting. And Stacie, Beth and I talked and prayed for one another and at the end of the evening I was feeling much better.

On Tuesday things were all happening at work and I had stacks to do which was great because it meant the time went quickly. I also had a meeting with the Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research) about the web page and we ended up getting into a really interesting conversation about Bible college and church and all the rest of it. She's a really nice lady and she really looks after her staff. And I admire her because she's good at the diplomacy thing and I'm not.

Tuesday evening Amanda and the girl we've been meeting with who has since become a Christian came for dinner. Amanda brought dinner with her (soup and Singapore noodles) and I tried to make peach puff pastry things in the oven which sort of worked and sort of didn't. Ben ate with us and then had to go off to Weerona Bible study. We spent an awfully long time looking at our wedding photos (it's because we have three albums' worth—the official one, the arthouse one and the unofficial one; the official one is from the photographer we paid to do our wedding who also used to be our Bible study leader; the arthouse one was from a friend who just took candid shots of wedding guests in sepia; and the unofficial one was a wedding present from my chief bridesmaid and her boyfriend-now-husband). And then Ben returned unexpectedly with Tho and Doug because Doug was the only one who had shown up to Weerona Bible Study.

Tho suggested that we play a game and it was the same game that we played at Sleepover, only it had a fourth round where you can only make facial expressions to help your team guess the famous person. Out of the four rounds, I averaged about four correct guesses per go—even during the fourth one so my facial expressions must have been communicating something! We were laughing so much that it was almost painful. I've been thinking about how to use that game for Sunday school (minus the facial expressions round) and I think it will work though maybe it will backfire horribly on me and I'll be so scarred I'll never want to teach Sunday school again.

Today at work I put the new RAID site online. It features rotating images in the header, drop-down option menus, expanding javascript menus and it seems to print properly in every web browser (though I haven't tested it in Safari because our work environment is Mac-free). Once it was up, I felt like breaking open the champagne to celebrate (except I don't drink champagne). It's a bit of a let-down when no one else is as excited about it as you are; you kind of feel a bit weird that you're as excited as you are. Oh well.

In the afternoon, I started working on CAPSTRANS stuff, noticed something silly about the Dreamweaver templates and thought, “Hey, I can fix this so it's more efficient and you don't have to update the links in the drop-down menu in three different places.” So I tried it and then it backfired and the drop-down menus didn't work AT ALL which meant I had to stay back at work to make sure they got fixed because it couldn't wait until next week. It took one and a half hours to get it right again and I'm not sure why though I have a sneaking suspicion that the guy who designed in the site in the first place probably designed three different drop-down menus to conform with the three different width sizes for the three templates. I cursed him under my breath as I worked away and vowed to take his templates apart on Monday and get them working properly so I'll never have this problem again. Hopefully.

I walked to staff meeting, feeling increasingly worse, and got very teary towards the end of it. I was pretty much back to the way I was on Sunday. So maybe it's not hormones at all.

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