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with an open smile and with open doors

Today I mostly Power Automated. Or attempted to. I had to call in the expert several times, and at least one of them he was like "yeah I don't know why it's not working either", which was at least validating. My first flow is now sending emails, although I still need to tweak it a bit.

Also: honestly what sort of bullshit is it that you can't get Microsoft Forms to send an email to the person who filled out the form with their details in! That's been, like, basic form functionality for at least fifteen years, and it's all very well saying "oh well you can do it with Power Automate", but that is much more complicated than ticking a "send submissions to user" box and requires access to a whole separate system plus someone to set up all the permissions for you to use whatever Outlook mailbox, etc etc etc...

Anyway. I have three? four? forms that my boss wants me to have up and running before Christmas. Now I've got all the accesses and permissions configured that should hopefully be possible, which is good because I did promise...

On the home front, I have now ordered all the remaining Christmas presents I can do before Christmas Day itself (why do so few places allow you to buy gift-cards to ship on a particular date!), wrapped all the physical things I already have, sorted out the last grocery delivery before Christmas so I won't accidentally starve, and checked in with my siblings to discover that other people have been working on the stocking presents for my parents, and what isn't bought is at least planned.

I built a beautiful tracking spreadsheet that shows what each parent is getting, calculates how much each of us has spent, and checks that against the notional budget for hopefully easier working out who owes what to whom once we're done. And so far no one has got super mad at me for being "bossy" or declared refusal to participate, which is unfortunately what tends to happens. I'm trying to back off now while we're still OK!

Now off to choir!

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christmas approaches like a storm cloud

The carol service on Sunday felt terribly chaotic, but there's a reasonable chance no one in the congregation noticed, which is sort of a win. One of the instruments playing was horrifically out-of-tune, to the point where I was struggling to stay in the same key as the organ because it was so distracting; everyone except the organist inexplicably stopped at the end of verse one of a choir-only item and then had to hurriedly scramble back in as she kept going, but she said we were sufficiently in unison that it almost sounded intentional; and there was one choir item with a three-part split where the first soprano completely failed to provide the descant that was supposed to be there, but since the rest of us ploughed on with the melody and the lower harmony probably no one else could tell. I was very glad that that one wasn't my fault... at least directly.

(Indirectly, I had been singing the top line previously, and was moved onto the melody at a rehearsal where the first sop was absent, so I suspect that what happened was that she was expecting me to come in and panicked when I did something else entirely. But. The congregation didn't know it was supposed to be there, so.)

I got roped into helping out with the last graduation ceremony, at which I can't really complain because it was only my second of the season. The VC said nice things to me (twice!) about my scroll-handing job, which suggests to me very strongly that he must have overheard me talking to some of the other people before the ceremony about the time he had to move me because I was accidentally blocking the line of sight for the official graduation photographer taking pictures of the handshakes, my personal most-mortifying graduation moment of the last ten years. But embarrassing though that realisation also is, that's actually really nice of him to care enough about the fact that I felt bad to deliberately say something positive! The old VC would never.

(There was also a bit in his most recent all-staff email which, when boiled down out of the delicate phrasing, amounted to "literally all my colleagues thought it was hysterical watching me, a non-hugger, get hugged by lots of excited graduands". I do so enjoy having a VC who does a good impression of being human instead of an Auton! Even when I disagree with him he mostly sounds like an actual human being!)

This week is mostly choir, but I am at least working from home which is going to be amazing.

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late in time behold him come

I made an automation flow that actually works!! I did realise afterwards that I need to add more error handling into it, but I am fully into celebrating the initial success right now.

Particularly because work is otherwise not as rich in successes as I would like. My inbox is a disaster area (everything in there requires action; I aim to keep it under 100 items and right now I'm running at 125 on a good day), the last report I actually completed in full was for July and I have a cumulative 2800 items to review in case they need moving, 900 duplicate records that need cleaning up, three test plans to write, an entire component that is supposed to go live before Christmas but which isn't with me for testing yet... and none of those things are even on the action tracker Boss Lady and I go through in my weekly 121.

But I did cross off one of my ten KANBAN items this morning and deleted two or three to-do list items. I'm hoping that tonight I will sleep instead of going for a series of one-hour naps all night, and maybe tomorrow I'll have the energy to tackle Power Automate...