Oh, lord.

This has been a hell of a week so far. We were expecting our shipment of inventory from GenCon and NecronomiCon to arrive at the house on Monday and I was the only one available, so I spent eight and a half hours sitting in the living room reading magazines and watching endless CNN. The freight company didn’t show up. So I spent almost as long on Tuesday, sitting in the living room waiting for a knock at the door. They still didn’t show up. They finally arrived this morning after another two and a half hours of me sitting in the living room.

Each day when I could actually leave the house, I sped off to my studio and got to work. One of my ongoing projects is serving as the webmaster for my friend Mike Daisey’s site (http://www.mikedaisey.com/), and we were notified on Monday that the site would be Thursday’s “Cool Pick of the Week” by — wait for it — coolpickoftheweek.com. Or Cool Site or some damn thing.

Anyway, the upshot was that we could expect a stupid big surge of traffic, and that meant this was as good a deadline as any for implementing the total site redesign I’ve been putting off forever. So I’ve been cranking on Mike’s site and just threw the switch on it about five minutes ago. The new design is live, with some new content and other fun stuff.

Of course, it’s now almost five thirty in the morning. I’m sore and weary and my vision is a little patchy — up twenty hours today, without enough sleep for the last few days.

As a special surprise bonus, some new FTP software I was testing managed to erase the entire Pagan Publishing web site at www.tccorp.com. This was over the weekend. I restored the bulk of the site from backups quickly, but our ecommerce section (The Outsider) took it in the shorts. Most of it was backed up, but somehow a handful of files here and there slipped through the cracks and now the whole thing is DOA. I’m wrestling with tech support at several vendors to get the pieces put back together, but it’s been slow going thanks to the living room sit-in — no computer there, you understand — and the sudden rush to get Mike’s site revamped. I’m waiting on responses to my latest round of tech-support emails and hopefully I can get the Outsider back up and running this weekend. I’d better, since it pays the rent.

In short, this has been a super ass monkey of a week. The one bright spot is I got a check in the mail for a freelance project that was enough to cover the rent on my studio this month, so — onwards and upwards!

Tomorrow I get to sleep late, assuming Mike’s site doesn’t explode when the traffic jam hits tomorrow. We moved it to an unlimited-bandwidth host months ago when the initial media frenzy hit and we got chased off a couple servers who couldn’t handle the traffic. Mike pays through the nose for it, but it’s still cheap as far as high-bandwidth hosting goes.

So, barring calamity I can finally get some rest. More later.