End of April at CMC

Haven't done a field report in a long time (again). The password to this thing always seems to get funky and then it gets put off until later. That's the best excuse I have at the moment.

CMC is just starting to get it's first email newsletter together using the civiCRM. That will go out on Wednesday if everyone gets their pieces for it in on time. In reality it'll probably go out next Monday, but I'm telling everyone to get stuff to me by Wednesday.

I cannot recommend CiviCRM highly enough. It's free and relatively user friendly. Although some of the admin type set up (especially for using CiviMail and having it send out email blasts) can be a bit of a headache. But it's really helped everyone at the office get all their contacts in one place so we can actually see who knows who and find them easily.

The budget we had for updating our Ruby on Rails site for the after school program turned out to be mostly imaginary so that site has been sitting mostly stagnant since I got here. I'm trying to learn some Ruby on Rails in between other stuff, but it's sort of on the back burner.

It's allergy season here and making me somewhat miserable. I had to go to the doctor the other day because my lungs were apparently only working about half as good as they were supposed to be. So they have me on some inhalers now so I can breathe again. Although I'm still sneezing and all that good stuff. Good old valley pollution.

I also just got myself promoted from fresh meat to Rock 'n Rolla Girl on my roller derby team (http://www.ccaderby.com/). Our first bout is in June so I'm looking forward to that. I have my very own Union Jack helmet now and lots of bruises.

And through my derby team I've found a circus arts fire troupe and am teaching them hoop dance (they've got a fire hoop on order) and they're teaching me poi. I even got to play with some fire fans the other week.

I also managed to snag a low-income ticket to Burning Man! That's not until August but I'm already super excited! (Applications for low-income tickets are still open until the end of May it'd be cool to have other VISTAs there).

Comment from Lee Goodrich on April 27, 2010 - 2:50pm

That's too bad that your RoR project isn't getting off the ground. I haven't used Ruby but I am currently teaching myself Django which is basically the Python equivalent and I'd love the opportunity (i.e. motivation) to work on an actual implementation.

Burning Man has low-income tickets!? Hmm, $160 isn't bad, but did you find any good deals for airfare? Timing could be better, considering that'll be around the time I should hopefully be starting a shiny-new, Post-VISTA job, but maybe I could postpone a few weeks to go to this...if I wasn't so broke as to need the job to pay for the trip. Oh, the cyclical dependency of my desires!

Comment from Colleen Beach on April 27, 2010 - 4:12pm

I thankfully don't have to worry about airfare. I have friends in the North Bay who go every year so I'm just hitching a ride with them. Otherwise I probably won't be able to afford it either.