"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
I got to the office early for a meeting I didn’t wind up attending.
I don’t want to claim that this was the closest today got to exciting. But unless you count research into critical thinking courses — of which there are many, across disciplines — or the textbooks designed for those courses, you may just have to settle for the big non-meeting. (Well, the meeting still happened. I just wound up having other work to do and not going.)
And that is all.
Today was kind of an odd day. I spent most of the morning waiting around for a new computer, to replace the one that didn’t quite survive its malware attack last Friday (and because I need a laptop with home access for my new position). Then I spent most of the afternoon in a meeting talking about new projects I’m hoping I’ll get the opportunity to work on.
Which isn’t, I know odd odd, but it was a bad Monday, all things considered. Surprisingly chilly, and some thirty degrees colder than last week, but bright and sunny and not too difficult.
Nothing special, but there are worse ways to turn thirty-five.
My writing group is taking a break for the next couple of weeks, so today was spent mostly working on Kaleidotrope‘s spring issue, which, if I get everything together, will go live next Sunday, April 1.
I’m pretty sure I can get it ready by then. At this point, it’s mostly the archiving of the winter issue that’s a potential issue, and figuring out how to put comments back on the pages. (I tried a forum with the winter issue, which I hoped would spark more interactivity and solve some layout issues, but almost nobody’s used it, and it’s maybe time to go back to the way things were.)
Beyond prepping the issue and e-mailing contributors, I did the Sunday crossword — that probably goes without saying — and I did my taxes. I also watched this week’s episode of Fringe, wherein love conquers all except bad writing. (Well, not terrible writing, but the show has been better.)
And that was my Sunday. Thrilling stuff, I know.
I got up early this morning to go get blood drawn, since my doctor kind of strong-armed me into scheduling a physical when I was in a couple of weeks ago about my pneumonia. I’m hoping that it, and the subsequent second chest x-ray I’ll need to schedule, will confirm that said pneumonia has made a full and lasting retreat.
The bloodwork didn’t take long, so after that I went and got some breakfast — it was fasting bloodwork — and then a much needed haircut. (I’m not sure, but it could be than my last haircut was over three months ago.)
I mowed the lawn, worked a little on Kaleidotrope‘s next issue (theoretically out next month), delivered some food to the church pantry with my father (and the dog, who stayed in the car), and went out for a really lovely dinner with my parents. (I had a very nice beet salad to start and a delicious duck breast for my entree.) Then this evening, after what was really a ridiculous amount of deliberating and looking through options, I decided to watch The Muppets.
I liked it, and I liked some of it quite a lot, but I think ultimately it made me nostalgic for earlier Muppet movies more than anything else. Because of the frame story that Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller decided to use, the Muppets, while always the focus, at times feel like secondary characters, or at least not the driving force of the movie. And because so much of the original voice and puppetry talent sadly either couldn’t or didn’t participate in the movie, some of the characters feel just slightly off at times. (I really wish, for instance, that Frank Oz had reconsidered. Did he see a script, or just that brief fart shoes scene in the trailer?) That said, there’s a lot of goofy sweetness to really like about it, and if not brilliant or even in my top three Muppet films, it’s genuinely entertaining.
I had a recurrence of malware on the weblog this week, likely some backdoors I’ve hopefully shut for good. I ended up paying for a service, then changing passwords and settings all across the board. As of today, it seems to be fine.
Of course, just before the end of today at work, that computer was hit by malware, crashing the system and wiping out my profile — no desktop, no programs, no documents. I left one of our IT guys working on a little before 5, and he seemed optimistic about restoring most, if not all, of my files. There was nothing irreplaceable on my desktop or in my documents, I don’t think, as most everything I work on is on one of several shared drives. But, still, it would be nice not to lose those files that were there entirely.
It’s been kind of a long week.