Excuses, excuses!
Well, the Christmas Pack is… *groan!* …FINALLY ready!
Much blood, sweat and tears, let me tells ya.
I can only offer my (admittedly rather lame) apologies for being so ridiculously behind schedule. You have, no doubt, prepared all your Christmas lessons for this year.
Still, the Pack will probably come in handy in years to come. 
I think I sent an email out to the folks on the mailing list about a week or 10 days ago saying that things were taking longer than expected and that the project had grown into this gargantuan thing (You’ll see what I mean when you download the sucker! The zip file is 22MB!)… and that I had been sick, and that I had a bit of a weird, unexpected thing happen to me… and blah blah blah…
…and that it was going to be ready Saturday 15th.
Excuse, excuses.
Well, there were even more surprised to come this weekend. Let me count the ways…
* my internet connection running at 51kb (that’s slower than a regular dial-up modem)
* the router throwing a wobbly on me and needing the drivers reinstalled
* not being able to get any help from tech-support over the weekend
* the graphics card on my computer bowing under the pressure of loading all the images…
…and subsequently crashing my machine several times!
* installing new software to try and combat this (with pretty unimpressive results)
* running all my adware, spyware, and virus programs to see if there was problem (there wasn’t)
* pausing or unistalling RAM-hungry background applications
* defragging and cleaning up the hard-disk
* checking the registry for errors
* transferring it all to my memory stick and uploading it onto another computer…
…only to crash that one a couple of times too!
Then discovering (when it did finally open) that all the Christmassy fonts weren’t loaded on that machine, which meant going out and finding them all again and installing them and rebooting… *sigh*
* saving the document and then converting it to pdf only to find that hyperlinks had randomly mysteriously disappeared (and therefore having to do it again! Several times! And checking them all. Again. Aaaahh! Who knows if they’ll work in the pdfs you get?)
* installing a tell-a-friend script and mis-writing my .htaccess file resulting in all the pages on the site being parsed as php (okay for the blog, but it made a total mess of everything else!)…
…so being on Live-Chat with the tech support of my hosting provider (I’ve only been with them for about 6 months–because, well, that’s as long as I’ve been twiddling about with HTML and stuff… and several times I’ve destroyed something or gotten lost and every time they’ve had me up and running again quick smart! The Live-Chat support feature really is a Godsend if you live in a different time-zone to the US (like I do).
Want good hosting support? Go here.
* realising that there were a bunch of things in the Christmas Pack that needed some kind of explanation (like, pelmanism and karuta. I’ll try and do a video soon for my “Hello” & “Goodbye” songs, as well as the “Name Song”… sleep would be nice, though) … and therefore needing to write half a dozen blog posts with that information so the links in the pdf actually led to something!
* and finally… getting some sort of mystery interference in the way the images were being read on the large flashcards which resulted in this ridiculous blue-ish background, which I couldn’t do anything about. So I had to reinstall some stuff there to fix that.
* then realising what a dumb-arse I’d been the whole weekend by not just splitting the damn thing into smaller documents! THAT is what was causing all the problems! My computer just couldn’t handle the graphics load.
I think I know why it happened: I had this idea that the Christmas Pack would be kinda like the Halloween Pack, y’know about 15 or 20 pages of stuff and links to other resources.
But it just kept growing and growing…!
And I guess I’ve just been too tired and run down and under the hammer to see that I needed to re-assess the project and say “Hey, it’s not the same thing you started out doing, bucko. Better make some changes here.”
But instead, I just kept pressing on, trying to shoehorn this semi-trailer load of graphics and layers and weird fonts and formatting into this poor little garden variety OpenOffice document!
I can’t help but think of that great Australianism “She’ll be right, mate!”
Invariably used when we know things are highly unlikely to be alright at all. Love it.
Anyway, as soon as I realised this (at 5pm this afternoon!) I thought “Oh no! What if there are folks out there with slower computers than me? Eeek!”
So after dinner, a beer, and a brief brain-break/catch-up phone call with a friend this evening, I then sat down and cut the document into FOUR different parts!
* then I went through and edited it as best I could. If you find any mistakes like referring to XYZ and not finding it in the main document, that’s why! Ha!
* then uploading it and checking that the download worked okay. And that the download link points to the right place, etc.
**Phew!**
It’s been a loooooooong weekend!
(And I’m writing this at 1am Monday morning. Once I post this I’m off to check that the mailing system is working smoothly. Aaahh!)
In fact, how’s this for a festy confession: Yesterday (Sunday), I didn’t even shower or shave. I just got up, switched on the computer and worked through till 2:30am this morning in my (very same) pyjamas and then went back to bed again for about 3 hours. I felt SO gross this morning! Euuwww! I think I spent an extra 10 minutes in the shower! 
Anyway, you have probably already received the email with the download link if you’re on the mailing list.
(If you’re not on the mailing list, get over there right away and get the download link because this special resource pack offer will be taken down after Christmas!)
So… all I can say is ENJOY! and Merry Christmazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….
