As I first walked into my living room this morning and scanned through to the dining area, I could see that it is getting a bit messy. Not like before, but the gradual settling on open surfaces. I thought I made progress earlier in the week, but not enough to make the room look clear.

I did clear off the dining table this morning and cleaned it and now I have a full mink coat lying on it. I'm going to work up from the hem and stitch a few of the pelts together (at the underarm area on the sleeves, a spot that always pulls apart first in coats like this) then I'll package it and list it on eBay. Its old but it's very big, and for a lot of years it was stored in cold storage. In the last 20 it has been in a closet, most of that in a plastic garment bag to keep it from getting dusty. I will offer it "as is" and as a possible candidate for remaking into other garments. It is "goddess sized" meaning there is a LOT of fur to work with!

After an afternoon of clearing last week and several hours this week, my office looks much better. I must have recycled several hundred pounds of paper. This is an occupational hazard--if you're in the business of generating paper, you end up storing a lot of it.

I talked a faculty member off of an html ledge yesterday. We've been discussing her web page (she's the dept. chair and the secretary who used to do this resigned a while back). It was a year out of date, and she didn't know how to fix it. I told her how to get permission to edit (to be able to save her work to the server), then how to open her page in FrontPage.

"My secretary had it on her computer."

"You can't use her computer, you have to know her password to log on, and she's gone, so it's gone. Maybe you have it on your computer."

"Where do it find it?"

"It's a Microsoft Office program, you'll find it in there."

"Okay, got it!"

You'd think that would be a formula for html disaster, a newbie who doesn't even know WHERE to find the program, but she did a great job. I told her how to save it into her computer to fiddle with until permission came through, and if she killed it, she could download it again and we'd work on it. She made the changes, but her images went away on her hot-link buttons (they were mouse-over applets--a pain in the butt, and some of the images were saved "locally" on her computer, messing up the links). I talked her into the code view (I was at home on the phone so I couldn't see where her images were stored) and figured it out and she managed to reset all of the "top" images on her links. The page looks right, the information for her lecture series is now up for this year, and she's going to make an appointment with the library folks who teach this stuff (we have a whole media classroom in the basement) to show her the basics.

SRS