personal

Easter parade

I went into Manhattan last night, with my parents, sister, and my sister’s husband, for dinner and a Broadway show. We saw Nice Work If You Can Get It, starring Matthew Broderick, which is still in previews. It was pleasant enough, good fun if not particularly memorable, and if Broderick himself was maybe a little stiff — my sister thought he was “clunky,” which I think is a little unfair, if not completely inaccurate — the show was entertaining. It’s a jukebox musical of Gershwin tunes, some of them awkwardly shoehorned into a silly, paper-thin story — and not all them, I’d wager, either of the Gershwins’ best — but most of the cast (including, for the most part, Broderick) is game, and I think we all had a good time.

Of course, when we arrived in the city, we discovered that the restaurant where we’d had our reservation was closed for the holiday weekend. There was a sign on the door, apologizing for the inconvenience and redirecting us to one of their other restaurants around the corner, but it was still something of a shock. We’d discover today that they’d sent an e-mail (complete with a 30%-off coupon) to apologize and let us know, but in the end it worked out okay. I still prefer the first restaurant to the second, but we had a nice meal nonetheless. (I had roasted duck breast to start — creamy lentils, duck confit, sherry caramel — and then suckling pig — with bacon onion marmalade and toasted almonds. Although the goat cheesecake with sherry poached pears for dessert was probably the best part of my dinner.)

Anyway, that was yesterday. We got home late, after midnight, so I didn’t post anything here about it. Today, we didn’t do much of anything. I did the crossword puzzle, watched Community, went with my sister and her husband to buy Easter plants for my mother, and probably ate a little too much candy. No writing group again this week, because of the Easter holiday, but hopefully we’ll start meeting up again next week.

In the meantime, I still have a lot of Kaleidotrope submissions to get through. I’m starting to get queries — rightly so — asking about submissions I may not have even had a chance to read yet. It’s not quite at the point where I’m seriously thinking about hiring on a slush reader — what guidelines would I give them? — but it is a little overwhelming.

At least I’m temporarily closed to submissions, so I can get something of a reprieve. Meanwhile, the latest issue is still there for your reading pleasure… Just saying.

Happy Easter! (Or Passover, or Sunday, or whatever.)

A good Friday

I had to work today, and I have to work again on Monday, but I’m not complaining, much. My new boss left Easter eggs full of candy on all our desks this morning.

Beyond that, it was just a pretty typical Friday.

Thursday

I think I might be allergic to Thursdays. I think I might have said this before, and not just earlier today on Twitter.

It was a pretty normal Thursday, despite the runny nose and perpetual half-sneeze that seemed to dog me all morning.

Meanwhile, I’m re-reading Watership Down and mostly enjoying it, if it’s not quite as delightful as I remember it, from years and years ago. I did run into an odd phrase, which kind of underlined the fact that this was written thirty years ago by a man born in the 1920s. Adams writes that “a rabbit can no more refuse to tell a story than an Irishman can refuse to fight.”

I mean, it’s not quite the casual, friendly racism of Tintin in the Congo, which I also read this year, but it’s hard to see that phrase getting by an editor nowadays.

Happy hours

As part of my new job — which is actually my same old job, just done somewhat differently, for a different boss, and from a different seat — I have the option of working from home on Tuesdays. I have a laptop and VPN access, and because I also have a morning commute I’d be just as happy to skip, I plan to take advantage of the option whenever possible.

It wasn’t possible yesterday, however, since I wanted to be in the office at five, when we were heading to the bar around the corner to say goodbye to one of our colleagues, who’s leaving us for other opportunities. It was weird being in the office, since all of my immediate co-workers, the four other development team members who sit around me, were out, and it was weirdly (though not unpleasantly) quiet. It was pretty much just a normal Tuesday.

After work, we went to the bar, and a lot of people passed in and out. This particular co-worker has been with the company for ten years, longer than I’ve been there myself — has that really been eight years? — so there were a lot of people who wanted to stop by and wish him well. Including one of other co-workers who’d left (not by choice) a couple of weeks ago. I was glad to see him, since I’d been out sick with pneumonia when the team went out to say goodbye to him, and I wound up hanging around, talking to him and others and enjoying several drinks (four beers) until about nine o’clock.

I grabbed a slice of pretty terrible pizza at Penn Station — my father insists the only good pizza there is on the Amtrak level, one flight of stairs up — and bumped into a friend of my sister’s also getting pizza to go. We chatted for a couple of minutes, then split to catch our respective trains.

I got home a little before eleven. And while not super drunk, or even remarkably hung-over this morning — I’m a rare, social drinker, and I passed on the offer to do shots with a couple of people last night — I was pretty tired. Hence no post about yesterday until now.

Which is just as well, since today there wasn’t too much to write home about. I did wake up wishing we’d gone out Monday night, so I could have stayed home (and slept in a couple of hours) on Tuesday. But I felt pretty much okay by the time I got to the office. Where we had a breakfast spread of bagels and muffins and pastries, to celebrate our one-year anniversary in the building.

Then I did some work, went to a talk about author care — it can be tricky sometimes — did some more work, and went home. Not a single drop to drink.

Although I did have sushi for lunch again, which I find I’ve sort of been craving of late. So I don’t know what’s up with that.

How the other half of the office lives

I officially moved desks this morning, and it was kind of a weird experience. The job itself is the as what I’ve been doing, exactly the same as I’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks, but it was like doing it in a slightly different office. Almost like a dream, where you recognize lots of things and people, but it’s all just weirdly different.

I was really busy, though, so I didn’t have time to really notice.