To Do & Undo

Usually when I write about having to undo what I’ve done, it’s all about the weaving. Not today. Today I spent at least 4 hours doing things and then undoing them.

It started this morning. I spent well over an hour gathering my recyclables — plastic, paper, glass, & metal — as well as the regular garbage. I went through my closet and gathered up more things I haven’t worn and am unlikely to. Some only good enough for garbage, most in fine condition for donation.

I carried all this stuff downstairs and out to my car. I got in the car and drove about a mile before the little light bulb went off in my head. DOH!! It’s the 4th of July! The transfer station won’t be open!!

I drove into town to see if the volunteers were having a chicken barbecue for the holiday, but no, they weren’t.

I drove to my friend’s house, since she wanted me to install and show her how to use her scanner. That took about an hour and a half. At least while I was there I got several nice sized boxes and some newspaper for packing.

Drove home and unpacked all the stuff from my car that I’d spent time packing in the morning. Wednesday will be the next day I can go to the transfer station, and there’s no good reason to have my car full of garbage until then.

Then I decided I had waited long enough (actually probably 2 years too long) to make an important change to my website. Instead of having my actual email address with a link to send me email, I needed to have a contact form, and one with captcha code on it. I am getting SOOOOOOO much spam that this is one of several steps I simply can’t wait any longer to take.

So I spent time getting info on how to write the html code for a contact form. Got it, copied & pasted it onto the appropriate page of my website, made the needed modifications, saved it, and uploaded it. Felt pretty good.

But it didn’t include a captcha code, and I knew I really should have one. So I spent more time finding how to code that. Got that done, copied & pasted to the correct web page, saved, and uploaded to my website again.

Felt pretty good, again. Until I decided I’d better test it out. Sent myself an email via my new contact form, but I didn’t receive it. Wait a bit. Still didn’t receive it. Repeat a few more times.

Another light bulb went off. The coding puts the form on the web page, but it doesn’t have any commands to actually send me an email. Go back online to find some coding that’ll do that. The coding is now either in php, a language I don’t speak, or remarkably complex html. Get frustrated.

Suddenly the 3rd light bulb of the day goes off. I know how to do this simply! I’ve used an online service called Jotform to build & embed forms for my old employer, Pfeiffer Nature Center, many times. I have a personal Jotform account. I’ll do that! About 15 minutes later the task was done and done well. The prior 2+ hours researching & modifying code, saving & uploading a web page, and testing were all wasted. All I needed was a simple Jotform.

Finally in a reasonable head space, I sat down at the loom and got about 50″ of ZN’s first wrap woven. By then my little dog wanted his afternoon walk, and when we came back I decided to write this post. Now I’m going to make & eat dinner, then back to the loom.