I think every Drupal admin's had this day at least once ... okay, twice ... fine!  Five or six times.  Name changed to protect today's lucky survivor:

Today was the rarest of programming days. My headphones were on by eight a.m., and while the code didn't flow, the ideas did; when I next looked up, it was after one p.m. I zeroed down on the section of code I had my suspicions about, and started testing, line by line. The book clubs problem eventually presented itself as a three-headed beast.

The tally is now at fourteen months, and verging on fifteen.

I'm amazed anyone still reads this site; it has to be obvious that my design time and energy has been diverted elsewhere for that period of time. It used to bother me. I still apologize for it, but I've stopped giving estimates on when I might finally reach the finish line and be 'back.' I don't know. I stopped knowing about six months ago.

I've been watching this on a personal level as well as a professional level, and it's amazing and spiffy and reminds me that tech geeks like myself can use our skills for more than just everyday fluffy stuff.

Take a look at this google map of the San Diego fires. Zoom in and you'll see where the fires are, where the evacuation areas are, locations of human and animal shelters (both open and at capacity) and what areas are being evacuated.

[defiant chuckling] All I have to do now is move this script to a server that likes curl_setopt(), set up cron a day or two before we leave, and cackle at the results. It worked! There shall be once-daily reposts of tweets while we're gone -- and I actually learned some nifty stuff, too...

Some days you know early on that you've lost your mind and it just isn't coming back. Some days you also know early on that you have beaten on too much code that week, and that it's time to walk away, unplug for a weekend, and not look back until Monday.Today is that day.

How do I know?

I had some advance warning that today was going to be long. I thought it might be interesting to actually document a day in the life of a webmaster. I think many people see it as glamorous, but I've always thought of it as very much a detail-oriented job. A webmaster, if they're doing their job correctly, spends a lot of his/her day chasing down details. Making sure everything's posted, everything's right, everyone's notified and everyone's on the same page.

This is a day in the life of a webmaster who is trying to prepare her library's website for summer reading.

Tally as of 10:30 a.m.:

There is nothing left to do, and little left to say. Three years' worth of work culminates in this, a five-day span in which I will work harder at something than most people would ever dream of calling 'fun.'This database has grown beyond what any of our predictive abilities believed it might become. We expected a flat, two-dimensional set of data: names, addresses, phone numbers. What it became, though, was a central point around which everything else revolved. A repository.

There.As of a few minutes ago, the 2006 shift signup grid was just distributed to tech. Thus ends phase 1 of the Busy Season, and begins the mad rush of Phase 2. Today—the shift grid release day—is the day that I work for months toward, knowing that the moment these grids are released, I am not likely to have time to work on anything else.