Making things

No words worth recording. Weight up one pound. One long bloody scratch down my thigh from a pin sticking out too far when I adjusted TST on my lap. Numerous tiny pinpricks from same. I'll use safety pins rather than T-pins to baste next time.

I've just finished making a completely useless presentation for Huxley. I know it's completely useless because I've never done a presentation--or any other kind of product, come to think of it--that he's liked, or that he hasn't asked me to completely reconstruct, anyway. Yet he continues to ask me to make things. Still, I enjoy using PowerPoint, much more than reading over the proposal the presentation is based on and making criticism and suggestions. He and I originally wrote this proposal together, but it's no longer mine, as he decided to change the proposal halfway through and rewrote the whole thing without telling me what he was changing, or why (other than "I think the sponsor would like it"). It lost, which is why we're reviewing it now. My one remaining good reason to want to stay at this company and become a senior person is so I can tell people like him, and like Maggie, that this sort of behavior is not so much good business as annoying and rude.

I'm slightly embarrassed about enjoying PowerPoint, but I do anyway. I enjoyed using...what's it called...HyperCard in seventh-grade computer lab, too. We were supposed to create an informational presentation as a unit project and include a simple animation. I made my presentation on the solar system with (as I think back on it) truly annoying transitions and many more cards than required. I ran out of disk space to finish my animation, but I got full credit anyway, probably because I helped a couple of my classmates with theirs. I had fun in that class. I got scolded for making a burglar's database of houses to hit rather than the store inventory she thought she had restricted us to making (I wouldn't have made my database if it hadn't fit the rules as far as I knew them, but she told me she'd expected a pet store, you know, like all my normal classmates--I wonder if she ever worries what became of me) and cautioned not to help Hillary (or Mindy? Or Patty? I don't remember) too much when her animation of ducks swimming upstream confused her. I straightened it out over a lunch period. I really enjoyed all that stuff. I wonder why I didn't go into programming. Some days I really worry about having gone into the things I did and what it's going to mean for me. Not often, though. And anyway, I can always be a barista.