A Real Week

Even though today is the two week mark officially, this Friday marks the end of our first week of work. It's gone by incredibly quick. It's nice to get into some semblance of a routine though. Last week we were all over the place, in different buildings, meeting new people, trying to figure things out, etc. But now I can see a face and pick a name to go with it and I've finally stopped turning the wrong way out of my office!

So, a typical week at OM Canada looks like this: Monday mornings we begin with a general meeting where we talk about what we're going to do for the week then we head to work for the rest of the day. Tuesday and Thursday mornings we have a team devotional and then get back to work. This week we've been learning about Muslims.  Friday mornings we write encouragement cards to the members of OM Canada and then you guessed it, it's back to work!

Today was the first day that we really made any headway. In Joomla, the Content Management System we're using, the best place to start is with a pre-made template. So, the past two or three days we've spent trying to clear out the sample information that was built into the site, get our navigation in, and play around with free templates. There's a reason most of those templates were free...and we spent many hours being frustrated by them. Luckily for us, OM has a membership with one of the best template vendors out there, but we didn't get that information until today. So now we have a template! This is a huge step in the right direction (provided we get the director's approval on this template next week). We've got a homepage worked out(!!!) and we're beginning work on the other pages. I'm excited to go back to work next week :D

Evenings have been wonderful. This is the first week where I haven't "had" to do anything in the evenings like homework or be somewhere. I can do what I want and I've really been enjoying that. I'm so thankful that I'm getting to have chill time like this. God has been so good. He's provided us with so many new friends who have been incredibly welcoming to us. CJ and Stephanie, who live across the hall from Paul, have invited us out to the movies, play soccer, dinner, etc. I haven't done this many "fun" things in a long time.

I think my roommate is slightly perplexed by me, but I think it's because I'm still trying to figure things out in Canada. We went grocery shopping Monday night and she asked me what kind of yogurt I wanted. Grocery stores look pretty much the same here, except none of the brands are the same! So I probably stood in front of the yogurt aisle for three minutes or so trying to decipher the brand. She asked me what was wrong and I told her that I had no idea what to do since I didn't recognize any of the brands. I finally just picked one at random and  it tasted pretty good at lunch.

 Have you ever walked in a house, condo, or duplex that has a floor plan that is the same of another house, condo, or duplex that you've been in before? The rooms are all in the same place but the furniture is completely different. You're comfortable because you know you're going to walk into the living room, but the couch shocks you because it's a different color than the one in the other place you've visited, or it's in a different place. That's how I feel about Canada. I'm comfortable here, yet it's all still unfamiliar to me. And Google keeps trying to tell me that I've spelled favorite and color wrong. By the end of the summer though it's going to be a place that I don't want to leave; I can tell already, just like when I was in England last January. No matter what though; God is good!

Real Work

I'd love to say that today went swimmingly well; but alas, it has not.

I got my "promotion" today and got to move into my own office. Paul and I have been sharing one small office since Thursday last week. OM Canada graciously gave us each a  huge 24" monitor to work with. We brought two of our own monitors as well so that we would have double monitors. (Once you have two, it's impossible to go back). Because of the way the desktop I was given was set up, I was planning on attaching the new monitor to my laptop and my own monitor to the desktop provided thus giving me....3 screens! I was pretty excited until my laptop failed to boot. Several times.

*menacing music*

This wasn't all bad, as they did give me a desktop to use and it's pretty quick for running Windows XP, but obviously they're not going to let me take it home. So, with a few hours of troubleshooting and some prayer we found out that the Boot folder on my laptop was corrupted and that my hard drive is possibly failing. That's bad news for sure, but Paul knows where to go from here to get my laptop back in working order. (Win for having a tech fiancée!)  I'm confident that by Wednesday or Thursday it'll be back in working order.

Someone joked to me during lunch that, "I hear you're running into some spiritual warfare on your computer!" I laughed; but as I've been thinking about it, I'm not so sure that it's far from the truth. My laptop has been running without any problems for awhile now and then out of the blue, several major files are corrupted. That kind of thing doesn't happen all at once. Spiritual warfare or not, God's got it under control.

So what have we actually done for OM Canada thus far? I know from experience that it's far better to start a project from an organized standpoint than to just launch into working, so we've been trying to get a schedule together of 1 week "sprints" and a way to track our sprints. We spent most of last Friday researching different free collaborative programs and have found an awesome project manager web application called EPM Live that has been working well for us. We have also been doing some analysis on the old site to see where we can make improvements. While a definite overhaul of the homepage and footer is needed, the rest of the old site isn't actually that bad. Tomorrow we meet with Greg, the graphic designer, and Raymond, our "boss", to go over look and feels. Hopefully by the end of the week we will have several wireframes drawn up, a navigational structure, and have a better idea of how to start building the new site!