What a week

Tuesday I went to the doctor, a new one, in Wolfsburg. 60 cents for 30 minutes parking - I was kinda... well, not amused! They took some tests and told me not to wash my hair 'til Friday, where I have to come back, too. Eek! I don´t feel comfortable that way!

But there was enough work to do. My colleague leaves for holiday on Monday, my customer on Wednesday. And my customer wanted to have the new job she gave me ready before her holiday.

I have two projects running, the first one has to be updated by lunchtime, always. The second was a pixely one this time.
It´s a portal that was "designed" by some agency in a big hurry. It wasn´t developed after those guidelines later on and in an even bigger hurry. It´s a content management system and every... body can work the way they like on it.

The result: Freaky chaos in bad design full of technical defects.

They did some research now on usability and guess what? Big surprise - it´s bad!

My job was to combine the available elements in different patterns with the technical defects.
I used Photoshop and it was really a nasty job. The content of that portal is huge and unstructured. Finding elements in the positions needed and stuff was no pleasure.

I cannot simply leave that work and go back to it easily - it´s too chaotic. Hence I worked as long as I could on it and after two days I was really done. Including a guideline to all the elements and how they work for different content.

Phew!
Two days of over 10 hours of tiny work in a big chaos.

I couldn´t let go - I jerked out of sleep several times at night. On Wednesday evening I got headache. That sort of you know aspirin won´t help. Slept bad again and was down on Thursday. That combined with the feel I got from my hair (bad!), I decided, nahhh, no work today! I was soooo tired anyway.

My doc send me home for two days.

That makes three days off work due to sickness in six years - see?! It makes me still feel guilty... Stupid, I know...

But it came in handy. My brother was to come over again.

To get some calmness back we bought the two "little white men" you saw on top. "Please tear before planting" the signs on their heads say. I´ll give it a go :-)