As you may have noticed, I’ve been absent from this site for a while. It was not due to a lack of interesting moments to share, but because I’d been working steadily on some big projects for work that took up a great deal of my focus for the past three months. I still traveled, went to festivals, took thousands of photos, and had a blast this summer, but all my downtime was focused on preparing for the launch of our office’s new website and preparing for the firm’s most important anniversary party (and the first big one I’ve been part of)…the Jubilee.
While I worked with a team of people who contributed greatly to the success of the party and web launch (specifically, a team of professionals who actually programmed the site and an administrative assistant who planned the entire party, allowing me to focus solely on managing the invitation list and distribution of the actual invites), the website became my obsession during the month of August. I lived and breathed that site, writing and editing project and bio text, collecting and tagging news articles, gathering and cropping photos from our collection of project images to populate the site, and arranging it all to create something that looked mostly complete to an outsider visiting our site (only I and the older staff knew how much was left out because I ran out of time).
It was a labor of love and I really enjoyed the experience of redoing the content of the website, but it drained me both mentally and physically. Even though it was a task that required hundreds of hours to make it what it needed to be, it was also combined with my regular job of proposal submissions and marketing so my job became extremely stressful. The website was all I talked about, my wrists ached from hours spent on the computer during the evenings and on weekends, and some nights I laid awake thinking about the unbelievable amount of work that was still ahead. However, time keeps moving forward and the date of the party and the soft launch finally arrived, forcing me to leave the site incomplete, an inevitability that I’d accepted from the beginning but which still drove me crazy.
A couple days before the party I had a stylist re-dye, trim and style my hair and wax my brows (my first time experiencing that sensation) to make sure I looked presentable for the founders and clients we’d invited. When Thursday afternoon finally arrived, I logged off the admin side of the website, put on my favorite dress and a short pair of heals (also banished from my wardrobe long ago because of my weak ankles) and tried to put on a bit of makeup, which failed miserably as I am wildly inexperienced in the selection and application of foundation so I had to wash it off in the office bathroom.
The party was terrific. After a bit of rushing around at the beginning to make sure everyone received a nametag, we were all able to enjoy ourselves. For me it was like coming out of seclusion; it took a while for me to relax and begin to make small talk with people (in my marketing role, I am on duty whenever clients are around) — I also could not really talk about the new site because its full and final launch hasn’t been announced, but a few already visited it and commented on how much they liked it.
When the party started to wind down and my boyfriend and I got into my friend’s car to go home, I finally felt some of the tension in my shoulders begin to release. We were going to spend the next hour packing and getting the apartment ready so we could spend the following week in Minnesota visiting family and friends (my present to myself for getting through all the work I had to do this summer).
My boyfriend and I just got back last night, so I’m going to go through a few photos and post soon about that trip and some of the other notable events from the last few months.
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