So close! Aggggh!

We are so close, but we still aren't there yet! AGGHH!

In any case, Jason has been an absolute champ. He works his own full-time job, quite successfully I might add, and in his spare time has put so much energy into our project. He hasn't asked for much and he has been incredibly helpful. Of course, it would be much better if he were available full time, but beggars can't be choosers.

The biggest change is that we are basically ending our relationship with James, our designer and front-end engineer. I have never had a working experience like this in my entire life. Deadlines were crystal clear and self-determined and I can say with confidence that he missed at least 95% or more of them. If not by blatantly ignoring the deadline and not responding to communications about it, then by doing something entirely different than what had been discussed. It took several months to do the simplest things. 7 months of work has produced an extremely extremely stripped down, generic, undesigned template that we will be using and 4 or 5 iterations of half-complete templates we can't use. It has been immensely frustrating. My main primary stress point in the last 7 months has been working with him. Enormously talented, probably the worst work experience of my career in terms of a productive, working relationship. Now, obviously, being a corporate lawyer was miles and miles worse in the fact that it stole every shred of happiness and the will to survive and replaced it with desperation, unhappiness and isolation...but in terms of getting things done productively, this shit was horrendous.

In the end, I blew up at him again. He took affront and we decided just to let the December 31 kill date we put into place go into effect and end everything. Awful. Just awful. I could spend hours just talking about how terrible he is as a project manager, but I will stop. In the end, luckily I have been reading the Dalai Lama's Art of Happiness and decided to end the relationship on a positive note. I will pay him the remaining payment on the contract (minus the bonus), he got a bottle of whiskey from me for Christmas, and we will grab one last drink and just say goodbye. I wish him the best -- but I will never work with him again.

Otherwise, today was pretty uneventful. I stayed home and did about 3 or 4 hours of constant bug bashing on the website. Hopefully it doesn't overwhelm Jason, but fingers crossed that we can be done soon. After that, I met the owner of an artisanal granola manufacturing concern in Brooklyn....finished a post about Mister Hotpot for the blog...and maybe now I will draft up some emails to other businesses.

Here's to closing out a good year where I learned a shit ton, but wasn't able to get much done. Next year is the year.