Never would I ever have imagined that it would take me so long to edit interview transcriptions. Rosanna did an incredible job of transcribing interviews from the audio files I sent her. And she did it more quickly than I ever would have been able to do myself. However, one of the interview transcriptions I edited took forever. I found myself having to read some sentences out loud to make sense of them. I had to really take my time to experiment with the syntax for that one so I could make sure it all read well and made sense. I’m not sure if I did the best job with it, but the important thing is that it’s done and that I did the best I could.

Also, we had some snow come in last Wednesday while Rosanna and I were meeting. I got an urgent email from my daughter’s daycare saying I needed to pick her up early, so we had to cut our meeting time short. It was a sort of a bummer, but we worked around it. I just did the best that I could with the time that I had. I used every minute I had left to work through transcriptions. Once Friday came around, I went straight to the Media Design Lab in Ramsey Library to work away on the last bit of transcriptions. The Media Design Lab looked different from what I expected it to be. As soon as I went in, I felt right at home. The staff greeted me immediately and told me not to hesitate to ask for help whenever I have any difficulties with building our website. So I’ll definitely be going in there more often. I think it would be a great place for me and Rosanna to start meeting regularly. It’s quiet, it’s comfortable, and we have access to technological assistance whenever we need it.

Meanwhile, while I was getting the interview transcription edits finished, Rosanna worked super hard to figure out how to change the aesthetics of our website. For a minute there, I thought we were going to have to pick a new theme. Neither of us wanted to do that since (1) we love it and (2) we weren’t sure how changing the theme this far into the game would impact the site’s navigation that had already been set up. Thankfully, Rosanna was able to work things out with Leah over email. I think our website looks beautiful now.

I used the bit of time I had over the weekend to add some of the images that I found onto our website where I thought they would be appropriate. Rosanna added a lot of content herself. I think we should have almost all of our content put up on there by next week so that we’ll be ready for peer review. Come Wednesday and Friday, we’ll be meeting together to collaborate some more.

I did have some confusion yesterday when I went through our website pages. I went on our “About The Researchers” page to see what Rosanna had added in. None of what I had entered in before (the short bio…the photo…nothing) was in there. But Rosanna’s information was in there. I wondered if something had gone wrong on my end. Then I looked through all the pages and realized that we had two “About The Researchers” pages. I’m not sure how that happened, but I’m glad I caught it. I just deleted one of the pages and made sure both of us had what we wanted on there.

That reminds me. I’m going to have to ask Rosanna if she has any head shots she wants put on that page. I thought about bringing one of my blazers to a meeting and taking a quick photo of her wearing it really quick. I can do some basic photo edits (though I’m certainly not a professional photographer).

To be honest, I didn’t get as much done at this point as I originally planned, but, nonetheless, I think I’m pretty comfortable with where we’re at in the moment. I don’t feel super anxious about getting the website together at all. I think we’re on the right track and that as long as we continue to work a little bit here and a little bit there, we’ll have an awesome website put together.

This is a super old photo of me at an overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I think it describes how I’m feeling about our progress at the moment. “Build a mountain. Build it high! Only gotta try.”