Dropping in...

 Oh, my goodness y'all, Saturday is AUGUST.  I am not ready.  I am not done with summer.  (And, technically, summer goes on for another month, but all the schools in these parts start back in early August and it becomes Functional Fall, even though the temps are through the roof.  Crazy.)

So...what HAVE I been doing all this time.

Not much sewing, I'll tell ya that.

I have darned some socks.  I have hemmed some tea towels.  I have hemmed a tablecloth, but I'll talk about that later.

To date, this year, I have constructed ONE pair of pants.  One.  And it took a ridiculous amount of time to do it.

I haven't been sewing, I haven't been writing, I haven't been painting...I have pretty much been living in my left brain.

Y'all.  We migrated the data base at church, where I (was) the data base administrator.

I knew it was coming.  See, back in the day, when we moved to the previous data base, let's call it ABC,  it had a somewhat limited scope.  There was a  part of it that was intended to be used for scheduling volunteers and planning services but it was useless.  I mean, it didn't work at all.    But that's ok, because there was this other software company, let's call them XYZ, who had developed this marvelous software for planning services...worship sets...scheduling band, choir, vocalists, with a music library and even reporting for the music use/performance license...and it expanded to be used for scheduling children's workers and other volunteers.  So we just used both of them.  And there was a third company that we used to interface our giving and registrations...the money handling...and hosting the church app.  We didn't start with them in 2013, but we did move to them.  We'll call them $$$.  Which of course, is not their name but kind of reflects my attitude about them, lol.  

So, got all this? It's crazy but it all adds up eventually.  Well, ABC did a lot of improving and upgrading.  They did finally develop a volunteer tracking system that worked almost as good as XYZ's, but it didn't have the same music library/ license tracking.  They were developing an app, and the capability for payment handling.  They'd even rolled out their payment scheduling for that and it looked to be cheaper than $$$.  This was back in 2019, and I really thought we could get rid of the other two software contracts and just use ABC.  Have everything in the same place.

Then, at the very tail end of 2019, $$$ bought out ABC.  Swallowed them whole.  Or, almost whole.  ABC went away, although everyone still referred to that system as ABC out of habit.  Things got rather rough as $$$ tried to integrate themselves with ABC.  But they never combined the data bases.  They talked to each other, but there were still two completely different sets of data.

Meanwhile, XYZ has been expanding their offerings, developing modules that could be used independently or together, depending on the needs and size of the church.   And our new online membership program interfaced with the relatively new people part of the XYZ software.  We were slowly duplicating a increasing part of our data in that other data base.  

It was getting ridiculous.  We needed to get everyone onto ONE platform.  And, thanks to the gold standard scheduling/ planning module that began XYZ, the decision was made to migrate everything there.  But our contract with ABC (now the church management side of $$$) was coming up for renewal and we didn't want to commit to another year with them.

Y'all. We had about 8 weeks to make that jump.

Now, I had said for quite some time that if we ever changed data bases I would not continue as the Data Base Admin.  I just turned 67, it doesn't make sense for me to learn a whole new system because the hubs and I are starting to talk about retirement.  I'd have to turn around and train someone else on it.  Much better to make that decision and have the new person/ people learning the new platform from the beginning. I, I said, will get the data ready to move and then stay and help cleanup.  After that...we'll see.

So that's partly where I have been.  I won't go into the ugly details, lol.  I will just say that, by way of comparison, we had 9 months to move the data base in 2013 and that was a MAGNITUDE less data than we have now.  

So now I am the data base janitor, lol, and others are running things and planning things and I'm basically merging the pile of duplicates that were created when we migrated to a data base we had been running in tandem with for 13 years.

Then there's the travel.

My sweet mother in law passed away December 12; she was 97 and tired of the health struggles and more than ready to go.  The memorial service was scheduled for a BITTERLY cold weekend at the end of January, and all the kids and grandkids...save one grand-daughter-in-law...were able to be there.    But the house is being cleaned out, with things being divvied out to whoever wants or is willing to take things.  There will be a sale of the rest to clean out the house and then the house will be sold.

So we have made two more trips to northern Indiana to collect household goods...and my living room looks like we just moved in.  We've made one trip to Florida to deliver housegoods to the kids there, and we have another trip to Elkhart to collect the last few things, and another trip to Florida to pass things along in the early fall.

Plus, July 17 was The Flute Player's 30th birthday (can you believe it???) so The Princess, The Dancer (The Artist's wife)  and I made a quick trip down to surprise her.

If you're counting, that's three trips..so far... to Elkhart and two trips...so far...to Florida.  It's just a wee bit farther to central Florida than it is to northern Indiana, which is about 10 hours driving time, to which is added any stopping for food, gas, potty breaks and leg stretches.  And I have been working on data base migration around all of it.

Now, you'd think that I'd be glad to have a break from that by sewing but TBH I am pretty much brain fried, lol.  And I need to move around a bunch of stuff in the house to  make space for the things WE have collected from the house in Elkhart.  Lots of shuffling and moving and rearranging and maybe outright purging needs to happen and it must be done by Christmas or I won't have any place to put the tree, lol.

I have had Thoughts I would like to share about some of this process and maybe I will catch some time at some point to get it all written out in a coherent fashion, lol.  But, in the meantime,  here's a pic of the four of us...me, The Flute Player, The Dancer and The Princess, playing miniature golf but I am wearing the very comfy  loose drapey pants that I made especially to wear on trips to Florida, lol.  FWIW...I am TERRIBLE at mini golf, lol.

If you can, zoom in on the shirts...designed by The Princess to commemorate the weekend.  The Flute Player's is a bit different...she's the Honoree...but all of us that went to her celebration dinner wore the T shirts.  She was surprised and it was a great weekend...if completely exhausting, lol.

I am still managing to post somewhat regularly on the faith blog (where the above link goes) if you ever wonder if I'm still kicking around the interwebs.  And I got a wild notion to start a third blog earlier this year for just writing; it's barely active.  But it's hard to post on the sewing blog when there's literally no sewing happening, lol.  I will admit to being very frustrated and WANTING to sew...but I do better when I can dedicate some TIME to it and that just has not happened much this year.

So that's the state of things at the moment.  I have pretty much decided to not participate in the Christmas production this year, with one of the driving reasons being I just have too much on my plate.  I have to leave some breathing room somewhere...