697 and counting...

Do you know what happens when you set out to build a database to hold all of the physical addresses of all of the schools in the greater Houston area, and then, the email addresses of all of the 5th grade, 8th grade history and 11th grade history teachers in those schools? First of all, you just have to jump in with an enormous "ARGHHHHHHHH!", quietly inside your own brain of course, so that you don't scare everyone around you into thinking that you have indeed gone insane...even though you haven't totally...yet....

Second, you sit glued to the internet for hours on end, going through the most tedious task of wading through each school district's website to find faculty listings, which often go to class webpages, which often have email links, for which you actually have to pretend that you are going to send an email to capture the address before then having to click that you really don't want to save the changes...incalcuable times...or they lead you to a form to complete but don't let you have the email address.

Third, you have to steel yourself for the task of entering each one of those addresses handily into the wizardry of Access, that maniacal invention of Microsoft that allows one to pull up the entered information in seemingly endless combinations of various and sundry uses. (And two years ago, I had no idea what in the world it was.)

Yes, this has been my lot at work for the past three, or so, weeks. Yesterday, I totaled the number of entries made, and voila, the number in the title appeared! Yes, and that is just the start, but at least it represents the largest and closest of the districts to Bayou Bend.
Let's see now...how many tour slots do we have available for schools?

You know, I guess if one can practice the same pieces over and over for months at a time, and work on the same techniques on an instrument for a lifetime, it may be an indication of whether one might also have the amount of patience to do this kind of detail work. Who would have thought ...

We have an intern working here this summer who keeps saying that she just can't decide exactly what she wants to do. My co-worker told her that sometimes it doesn't matter that much the actual specifics of what you study, but what life hands you to do. I think I might add to that - perhaps it always is about what life hands you.

Life is a lot more fluid than we think when we begin the journey!