There was nothing terribly out-of-the-ordinary today, but I thought I’d log the events of a full day for your amusement and mine.

6:50am – I wake up and take a shower. I grab a healthy kale Smoothie and the hound and am out the door in thirty minutes. Normally I am up first and therefore am the one to prepare the Smoothies, but Lauren is up first today and is all showered and dressed before I’ve even woken up. I decide to wear a long-sleeve Stubbs BBQ t-shirt Lauren got for me at Whole Foods for free.

7:40am – After stopping for gas, I arrive at DogBoys Dog Ranch in Pflugerville to drop off Baxter for another day of daycare. It’s $23 every time we take him there which is usually twice per week. The hope is in a couple years he can be trusted out of his cage, alone at home during the day. But for now he is too young and too full of energy to be alone all day.

8:05am – I arrive at work, the first from the marketing team. I rarely am anything but the first one to work. Most fellow team members show up between 8:45 and 9:15, but they also stay later in the day. Even though I had already had a smoothie, I cook up two packets of oatmeal for extra sustenance!

8:30am – I start up Adobe Fireworks and create the graphic for the Shop Callaway homepage that will go live Friday with the launch of the new RAZR Fit Xtreme Driver.

9:30am – I check out the master spreadsheet that shows the product launch dates and prepare a dozen or so golf balls for the website. This means gathering images, resizing and saving them with very specific file names, and uploading them. And then entering all the product descriptions, titles, keywords, categorizing the products for three different sites, etc.

10:00am – The big project for the week is the Shop e-mail for the launch of the new RAZR Fit Xtreme. Every week there is a Shop e-mail that I create from design to coding to delivery to 100,000+ recipients. Aside from the Shop e-mail, I have also been asked to take care of the official Callaway e-mail for the exact same product launch. The designs have already been created and approved, so at this point it’s really just sitting down in Dreamweaver and coding them with HTML and CSS.

12:00pm – On this particular day the VP has decided to treat everyone to lunch and picks up BBQ for the team. I gobble up some brisket at my desk and then change into my workout clothes and head to the office workout room for a 30-minute run on the elliptical. I am trying to spend 30 minutes working out at the office every day that I don’t have to go home to tend to Hound. I am very sweaty and must use the office shower before heading back to work.

1:15pm – I’m rapidly checking off lots of smaller projects from my daily checklist. I edit a few photos of pro golfers for the website, help out with a few tasks involving the launch of a different driver for the next day, and fire off a few e-mails dealing with sorting rules for a site.

2:30pm – It’s off to the foosball table in the break room, where every day some combination of Eddie, Sami, Brian, Jason, and I play a best-of-3 series, first to 5 goals (must win by 2). Sami and I jump out to a 4-0 lead over Eddie and Brian, but amazingly those two fight back to take a 5-4 lead before winning 7-5. In the second game, it was very back-and-forth but again Eddie and Brian pulled it out. Brian emphatically celebrated with laughter and pumping of his fists. I was happy to have scored a goal straight off the serve, pushing the ball out of the hole so it would go straight to my guy where I launched it straight into the goal, all in less than one second, which I have been practicing.

3:00pm – I head down to Jeff’s office for the weekly new products meeting. Seth, Lucero, Jeff and I hammer out all the latest developments in getting new products added to the site, and right now there is a ton to do. Every week or two a dozen or more products go live, and it usually comes down to Jeff getting the product into the system and then me preparing the product for the live sites.

4:00pm – It seems most of the critical work for the day has wrapped up. I’ve tested all the e-mails and everything looks good for the big send in the morning. I preview the site for Friday and make sure all the products that are supposed to go live are ready to go. I “replicate” everything from our staging environment to production, timed to go live at midnight.

4:40pm – Just when I’m ready to mentally check out, I receive some startling news from Shenea: both the Shop and CG e-mails have padding issues. The text on the left needs 15 pixels padding and instead the text is running all the way to the edge. They looked fine for me when I tested, but I am on a Mac and she’s on a PC. Although the e-mail shows up fine in Gmail, it is a mess in Outlook. I open the e-mails and confirm that I have in fact set padding-left to 15px. What could be wrong? I start tearing apart the entire CG e-mail from the top down, changing it from nested tables to separate tables. I save, upload, and resend to Shenea, who again confirms that it’s broken. I am in the zone, busting through line after line of HTML code, saving, uploading, sending to Shenea and hoping for good news… again, still broken.

5:10pm – On a normal day, I’m long gone by 5:01. It is a personal problem. I must always be the first one to work, the first one to leave, the first one to get home. When I was in college I had to be first one to class, first one done with the test, first one back to the dorm. I have a big problem hanging around anywhere longer than necessary, but today it is necessary as the e-mails are still broken, and it still has to be approved by corporate. I decide that instead of trying to force Outlook to support the padding-left CSS, I will just create an extra table cell in every row and use a 15px spacer to force the padding. I run through every table row, add the extra cells, save, upload, and send to Shenea. This time they are fixed. I pack up my laptop, say goodbye, and am about to head out the door. But Shenea notices a new problem: I have not updated the YouTube link on the e-mail as instructed. I sit back down, open up my laptop, make the correction, save, upload, send… out.

5:25pm – This is easily in the 99% percentile for longest I’ve stayed at work. I haven’t stepped foot outside since 8:06, and aside from my run on the elliptical and a couple trips to the bathroom have really not even gotten out of my chair. I get in the car and realize that traffic at 5:25 is twice as bad as my normal leave time of 5:00. Someone a few cars in front of me, the first car in line at a stop light, doesn’t notice the light has turned green and is just sitting there like a fool until the light turns yellow, then guns it. Bastard, push us all back another three minutes.

5:45pm – I arrive at DogBoys and make small talk with the staff while Baxter is fetched from the yards. Baxter comes trotting into the office and leaps into my arms to greet me. I lead him out to the car and we begin our drive home, staring straight into the blinding sun.

6:05pm – We make good time getting home and I’m surprised to see the pickup in the driveway. Normally Lauren is well behind me, even on days like today where I’m running behind. When we get inside Baxter darts for his bowl of food which he didn’t touch in the morning. That dogfood looked awful disgusting for breakfast but now he’s kicking himself for not eating before running around like an madman for ten hours. Lauren is upstairs on her computer and has good news—her performance review was a big success! She recommends we go out to eat as her brain is fried after stressing about the review all week. We decide on Black Star Co-Op, known for its refusal to accept tips, customer ownership, as well as its stellar beer selection.

7:20pm – We arrive at Black Star and meet up with my co-worker and her husband who live nearby. I order the Shrimp & Grits, a bold choice but given how much BBQ I ate earlier, I felt I could risk ordering something unusual. Lauren opts for the Fish & Chips.

9:15pm – The four of us are finishing up our last beers and chatting about beagles, house projects, and summer vacation plans. We pay up and leave.

10:30pm – Upon arrival home, Hound is released from his crate where he has been locked up tight with bungee cords to prevent escape/dark chocolate overdose. Lauren immediately returns to her shawl knitting project and flips on West Wing. I catch up on the sports headlines and am dismayed to see the Timberwolves suffering their fifth straight loss and two more key injuries. I am also pleased to see on Facebook that a movie I starred in in college in 2004 is finally being edited/produced!

11:38pm – I finish writing this blog. It is off to bed.