Another Week: Number 66

I guess some weeks are like this. The weather has been fairly crappy. The majority of my time has been spent in one of my new chairs working on my MacBook with my lap desk on my lap desk on my lap.

Typically, I’m out of bed around 6 a.m. and head downstairs to make coffee and maybe have something to eat. Then most of the day is spent staring at the screen while the audio from MSNBC or CNN drones away on TuneIn with the latest on the various Trump trials, or the Baltimore bridge collapse, or the unending misery in Gaza or Ukraine.

For relief, there’s WISN 12 News or the occasional game. I watched Marquette lose to NC State on Friday evening and then saw Marquette’s players in tears on the 12 News.

I too am frequently in tears, because I’m putting together a slide show for Amy’s memorial gathering. Numerous times per hour I pull up this or that image and go through grief, which, — ten weeks later — is still pretty new to me. People close to me have died now and then throughout my life, but I suppose I just nailed those rooms in myself shut and moved on.

This time, I’m in there sorting — and wiping the salt trails off the lenses of my glasses.

The software I’m using for the slide show — FotoMagico — is an excellent product. Photos go into a timeline. You can adjust their starting and ending dimensions and the duration of each slide, and insert a variety of transitions between them. You can add music, and time the transitions to its beat. Little by little, the project is starting to take shape.

Several paying web design projects — always very welcome — have also occupied my time, and I have finally switched to online billing.

For decades, the thought of giving credit card processors a cut of my earnings made me ill. Instead, I would email a PDF invoice and await a check in the mail. In some cases, I have waited a long time. Now I’m considering the hassle my client goes through between check-writing, envelope addressing, and stamp-placing.

It took me hours of research and a couple of false starts with other providers, but this week I got myself a free Zoho Invoice account and configured it for my business. The payments get processed by Stripe, which charges 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction. If I can spend less time chasing accounts receivable, it will be worth it.

On Thursday, my sister Karen and I met with Andy at Church and Market in Kenosha to finalize plans for Amy’s memorial. The room we’re using has overhead video screens, and I tested my in-progress slideshow using a nifty little media player called the Micca Speck 4K. It works perfectly.

I watched no movies this week but did view the first episode of We Were the Lucky Ones with my mom via Hulu on Saturday night. It’s a period piece with a sprinkling of Polish, so she enjoyed it. It’s an eight-episode series. I guess we’ll take them one at a time.

This week I walked zero miles.