The start, Day -2, Day -1, Day 1, and Day 2

I hope it's allright that I put five days of notes in one blog post. I'm a newbie here and just joined last Thursday. I'm so excited! I do think this challenge is a brilliant idea!

It all started as new year arrived and I felt like now it's not heavy time anymore at work and I could try to manage my after-work hours in the evening for creative things - to nourish my spirit. My graphics site had been in hiatus for a few months, the last update was in August, and I sort of lost touch with my 'creative self' and 'creative buddies'.

"I should start again," I thought. As luck would have it, I had that thought exactly when I was at the right place: in the bookstore. And I was standing in front of a shelf with ..guess what what's in there.. Cami's 29 Gifts! And I also recalled I read about it somewhere in Jeannette Maw's Good Vibe Blog.

And so, I went home, went into the internet and yep, that was the decision, commitment, and the day I signed-up at 29-days giving challenge. I was going to create one-freebie-a-day and post it on my blog, daily for 29 days! yippiii!


Friday, Day -2: couldn't stop thinking about it the whole day. So excited. Went home from work earlier. Decided on making some printables. Weekly planner to start. And guess what! I found out that I already forgot a lot of things on using Adobe InDesign. Only a few months away and I already forgot things! Up until midnight trying to figure out the program by opening an old planner...and somehow, I couldn't connect to the internet!

Saturday, Day -1: you bet, I couldn't sleep. Well, a little bit. I woke up early and continued working on the planner. Finally finally! It was raining the whole morning and day, so it was nice too staying home with mugs of hot chocolate, toast bread and cheddar cheese. Challenge number one was overcome. A new weekly planner is ready. Suddenly it was an evening of big stormy rain with thunders. And came challenge number 2 (and 3..)...another internet connection problem, and probably food poisoning. For lunch I bought fish with chilly from a street food stall, because it was raining, I didn't go out to the market. Don't know exactly if it was the cause of the pain in my stomach. Then the internet connection was sooo slow (and I don't know if the big stormy rain had caused that). So I took some meds and slept. Had a dream of watching a movie on the internet with my late dad (whenever I dreamt of him, I was never aware he already passed away...). Was awake again almost midnight and had a laugh with my friend Joanna in Warsaw over Skype. "Snow snow snooooow" she said. "And here's stormy rain and thunder!" I replied. Tried again to open blogger, but it was still very slow and when finally it was open, it had a very funny display. I still had a bit of headache, so I went back to sleep. But the laugh with Joanna, and the dream of watching a funny movie with dad, did help.

Sunday, Day 1:
Somehow I slept well, though when I woke up I still felt the pain in my stomach. I wanted to go back to sleep. But then it occured to me, and made laugh too, that maybe, just maybe, the Universe is testing me. How many times it happened that everytime I decided on something, so many other things came to surface, forcing me to find excuses or giving me reasons not to go on?

Haha, this time around, I'm so glad that I put the challenge online. Stay focus, honey, I told myself (oh, love this sweet talk to self! :-)) and only now I understand that passion could protect you from all those tests.

At first I thought that I would need to simply ignore all those negative self talk. But in any case, the Universe didn't give up. Today I was happy with the trial-and-error with printing the planner. After a few adjustments, it came up nicely. The internet was well connected in normal speed, and once I was ready with the blogger...I couldn't access my own website! Tried several times with two different ftp transfers. No result. Tried the C-Panel. Nope. Denied. Where should I upload the planner? It's in pdf format.

A few minutes googling and I found 4shared.com and decided to give it a try. It turned out good. Now my planner is nicely ‘sitting’ there and welcome to be downloaded :o)

Monday, Day 2:
And today I just posted four variations of the cover for the planner!

I love the colour pink for the original planner cover, but then I remembered that my best friend Fina loved blue. And I have 5 colour variations for these gingham patterned tiles. So, why not for Day 2?? :o)

What I discovered today:
My computer still doesn’t behave…the blogger dashboard didn’t show up properly. The buttons for uploading pictures, posting links, etc didn’t appear. I have tried to clear cookies and temporary files, but it still didn’t work.

But so came the other idea of posting by email. And boy it worked!! At first the picture didn’t want to appear, it wasn’t uploaded. But then I figured it out that it should be sent as attachment. Well well… now I got it!

Second lesson was the links… the texts weren’t linked even though I already wrote http:// ………… so what I did was taking a look at my previous posts with links in it, copied the codes and then applied it to the texts in the new post that need to be linked.

Wow.. I just realised that this could be, this would be, a 29-days of trial-and-error-and-tweaking! 29-days of discoveries and learning lessons! Don’t you love it!! :-)))



ps: my 29-days giving challenge one-freebie-a-day, its on my blog http://amretasgraphics.blogspot.com
Hope you love what you find there :-))

XOXO Amreta