“Yeah this is UPS, I just wanted to let you know that I dropped the package off by the front door,”  A guy says monotonously over the phone.  He doesn’t even take a breath - I’m impressed.

“Thanks, how did you get into the building?”  I ask, holding my cellphone while simultaneously getting my mail.  There is only one way to get into the building, and that is to have someone ‘buzz’ you in.  Usually the business managers do that for people delivering packages.

“I just rang the Darrell,”  The UPS guy says, clearly having delivered there before.  Darrell is one of the business managers.  Not a landlord, but someone the landlord pays to do all of the dirty work of the apartment complex: give tours, do screenings of new apartment tenants, field all the calls about maintenance, and be the general communication (read: buffer zone) between the landlord and the tenants.

“But, he didn’t come to the door, right?  Darrell doesn’t know what’s in the package?”  I ask.  Okay, so I have to admit, I didn’t exactly ASK if I could have a piano in an apartment complex.  No idea what I’m talking about?  Click here for the piano entry.  Well, to be quite honest I didn’t ask Darrell if I could have a piano for a reason. I don’t really want to find out what the answer is if I do ask.  I’ll just do first, ask questions later.

“No, I mean…” The guy trails off, I can practically hear him thinking, “I just told him it was heavy…”

“Okay that’s alright, thanks for the delivery!”  I say.   We hang up shortly afterward.

After retrieving my mail, I use my key to get back through the front door, and I look down the hallway.  The Main Offices’ light is on, the door is propped open, but no one is in there.  I walk quietly up the stairs, turn the corner and…

“OH GOD,”  I yelp, backing into the wall and dropping all of my mail.  Darrell is RIGHT around the corner, standing in front of my door.  He’s a pretty big guy, but no one could hide THAT size of box towering in the hallway.  It must be about 6 feet tall!

“Hey…Darrell,”  I say, bending over to pick up my mail.

“Oh, just the person I was looking for!”  He says happily.  Darrell is an elderly guy, who runs the apartment complex with his wife.

“Yeah, me too,”  I say, smiling like I had been waiting for him, not the other way around.

“Wait…you were?”  He asks, his smile faltering.

“Erm…I was just kidding Darrell,”  I say sheepishly, unable to think of something witty to say.  He turns around to look at the box.

“Oh, that’s um…an entertainment center,”  I finish lamely.  “I need a new one.”

“Oh okay, they must have used the wrong box then,”  He says, turning back around to look at me with his clear blue eyes, smiling.

“Why’s that?”

“Well, it says ‘Wellington Digital Piano’ on the side here,”  He says, pointing to BIG BOLD LETTERS saying ‘Wellington Digital Piano”. I watch as he turns around to face me, his clear blue eyes make me feel like he can see to my soul.

“Ahhhhh yeah about that,”  I start, smiling.

“Well, what the landlord doesn’t know won’t hurt him,”  Darrell says, walking away.  He turns around and adds, “And don’t forget to put that ‘entertainment center’ together quietly.”

“Thank you,”  I sputter. My mouth was hanging open at his point so I close it.  I spin around look at the box towering in the hallway.  There is NO WAY I will be able to life 130 pounds by myself.  I look down the hallway.  Of course, no one is around, and the complex is silent.

It took me about 3 hours, but I finally got it together:

Oh yeah, do I need to mention that about 120 pounds of that is in the KEYBOARD itself?! Good LORD it is heavy.  Try attaching legs to the stupid thing while on it’s side, and then having to LIFT the whole damn thing up by yourself and set it on two unsteady feet. After that, you go underneath tightening the rest of the bolts.  At one time I put my Ottoman underneath it just to dampen the blow to the keyboard if it falls, so that it doesn’t crush me.

Luckily for me, it never did.  And, now I have a digital piano, complete with play-along songs like “Hot Cross Buns” and “When the Saints Go Marching In”.  Next stop, Amazon for a better piano book!

(Blinks, looks around)  Wow, has it really almost been a month?  It seems just yesterday I was saying to myself “As punishment for taking so long to complete my website, I won’t blog until that website is FINISHED.”  Then, every week I would say “Alright, this week,” and then the next week I would say the same thing, and, OH LOOK, it’s September 20th and I haven’t blogged in a month.

So, it was about 11PM last night, when I finally completed my website.  I sat in disbelief for about an hour, and then I moved it over onto byjillian.com!  Wah-lah!  (Opens curtain, crickets chirping) Feel free to sing words of praise here. Alrighttt, I guess I’ll post a screenshot of it, for archival purposes:

Alrighttt, and I guess since the subpage is so different I’ll post it too:

And no, it doesn’t matter how wide your screen is, or how tall, it will look the same to everyone, using Firefox 2.0 and up, and IE (Internet Explorer) 7.0.   IE 6 does not display the footer properly, and, I can only please one person per day.

Creating the design for the website was probably the hardest part.  Once I got the design down, I spent about 2 weeks figuring out how to put the footer at the bottom of the website, and I would give up every five seconds, because it would work in Firefox and not in Internet Explorer.  Because, as we all know, Internet Explorer is the root of all evil.  Yes, ALL OF IT.

Well, except for pedophiles, and Ace of Base, not that the two are related. However, they are down on that “root of all evil” list as well.

I started realizing while looking through all of my folders, that I am really good at documenting the changes I made to my blog, with screenshots and saving all of my files in neat folders.  What I am not good at, is putting a DATE to any of this.  All I have on my blog folders is “Blog Version 1″, “Blog Version 2″, all the way up until this blog, which is “Version 4″.  Yeah, that’s nice, but when I’m trying to figure out a TIMELINE, it’s not so nice. So, I incorporated a very complex mathematical equation called ESTIMATION to put a time to each of the websites.

In a word: Fun.

Alright, so I guess I overdid it with the lame “My name is Jillian, and this is my website.” on every page, but, after working on it regularly for the past few weeks, I felt like the Well of Creativity was running dry.  And, maybe I went a little overboard with the whole thumbnail-images with a blown-up part of the image, that is, until the user clicks on it to view the actual image.  It was fun making them all though and choosing different spots of the larger image.

Oh, I just found the image I was looking for about web design:

[End of Shameless Self-Promotion]