Jack Frost Is Nipping: The We-Wu for September 21-25, 2026
Okay. We are not going to be a Debbie Downer today. Or a Negative Nancy (nee Ned or Nelly).
Yes, I did just spend far too long looking up other alliterative idioms. I did not find much by way of origins, though I did discover that Whining Willy is another option. That just sounds wrong.
There were 7 things on my to-do list this week. Well, 7 new things stemming from our Monday meeting. I always have things to work on in the background. Anyway, I actually got one of them done on Monday this week! I know! I was also surprised.
Of course, I kind of had to get it done on Monday because it was for a training event happening on Tuesday in a time zone ahead of mine, but in all fairness, I didn’t have the translation until Sunday night, so it’s not my fault.
A couple of the things on my list were quite simple, because it was basically just informing people that certain projects were ready. A lot of my job is communication - with the translator, with the production specialist, with the stakeholders, and between all of the above. I am very glad that I have help with this aspect of things. I tend to be fairly straightforward in work communication - I need this, here is your document. I’m not good at the sandwich method. It’s a waste of time. But a lot of people we work with are very relational, so I have to dig deep.
I have also been publishing both English and French elements of VCP. There’s a lot that goes into publishing, like making sure page numbers, headers and footers, covers, and other elements are correct for the type of document. (I may be editing process documents about these things as I work on this post.) We have to make sure the English is correct because that’s what we base every other language on. We do French right after English partly because it’s the most widely used language in Africa, but also because it’s different enough that we will get a pretty good idea if we did English correct if French goes smoothly.
With Edition 2, neither term we’ve done so far has gone smoothly, so I don’t know if we’ve proved the concept or destroyed it. Part of the issue has been us trying to move production from Brian’s hands to mine while still producing materials, which includes me learning the process, but there are a lot of other elements we need to refine. I’m sure by the time we start Edition 3, we’ll have it down pat.
I am also working on migrating documents away from individual accounts to a central account. The nature of Google Drive is such that we can all work on things at the same time, which is great. But the owner of a file or folder stays the owner pretty much forever, and we’ve had some turnover in our team. It would be really bad if people who worked for us previously deleted files that we really need. I have been trying to remedy this by downloading and reuploading folders and files when I have time. It’s tedious work, but it’s also necessary to do it now and preserve things than not do it at all and have little to no idea of what we’ve lost down the road.
One of the unintended consequences of this is that I’m rapidly filling up the storage capacity of our central Google account. I have been going through deleting old versions of things or downloading them to keep on my computer because 1 terabyte is a lot bigger than 30 gigabytes. Maybe we’ll pay for more storage. We’ll see. Fortunately, most of our files are pretty small, but it’s something to consider for the future.
Otherwise, it’s been quiet. A lot of people are out this week at a conference or traveling. I took half a day on Wednesday to surprise my dad for his birthday. We met in the middle for dinner, which was lovely. Before that, we had our big monthly team meeting and got to talk to the former owner of Train & Multiply. He’s a good guy.
I have been cold all week because we’re falling slowly into the bad Indiana months. I’m trying desperately to hold on to the memory of 90 degree days. Was that just last week? September is weird.
That might have to do it for the week. I have a lot of small things to do this weekend. I hope yours is as productive as you’d like it to be.
Bye!
