work

Some week

It snowed all night, and by the end of it, sometime late this morning, I think we had about the foot of snow that they were predicting all this week.

My office was still open today, however. There’s always less accumulation of snow in the city, and mass transit was running, or claimed to be. Last night, before the first flake had even fallen, the Long Island Railroad was promising to be on a weekend schedule first thing Friday morning. What that means, basically, is fewer trains and longer gaps between them, and at my station it means only one train every hour.

If the 7:28 train hadn’t first been held, and then cancelled, I probably would have made it into Manhattan this morning. It wasn’t a lot of fun getting to the station, with the snow still falling and largely unplowed, and with the wind whipping against me the entire way there. But it’s only a couple of blocks, and I’m made it with plenty of time to spare. And the station platform had actually been shoveled and cleared, by a crew still working on the opposite side, which is actually an improvement over winter storms of the recent past.

Maybe next year the trains can be running, too. Then again, maybe I’m just a dreamer.

Because the 7:28 train was cancelled, and there wouldn’t be another train for another hour. I didn’t much feel like hanging around to wait for it, and even heading back home, then back again to the station, seemed like a dumb idea. What if the 8:28 train was also cancelled? What if it didn’t stop snowing? What if the Long Island Railroad continued its long tradition of collapsing under even the slightest amount of bad weather?

So I texted my boss. I’d planned for this by taking my computer home with me last night, at her suggestion, and she was amenable to my working from home. Which, except for the typical sluggishness of the network connection — and a lunch break spent helping my father to clear snow from the driveway and path — was pretty much the same as it would have been from the office.

It’s been kind of a weird week. Because yesterday was my first day back since mid-December, it felt a whole lot like Monday, separate from the other days this week that preceded it. And today felt much like a Tuesday, except it wasn’t, and it felt a little like a snow day, except it wasn’t, and I’m still not entirely convinced that what today was, was a Friday.

But apparently it was. Next week ought to be a little more normal, working from home again on Monday, then back in the office for the standard four days.

It will be good to actually get back to my regular routine.

Back to work

I took me a while to get to sleep last night, even though I turned in at fairly reasonable hour, but I didn’t have any problems getting back into my normal schedule this morning. In fact, I managed to get up a little early and start writing morning pages again.

Picking up my notebook again, I was a little disheartened to see that last year I’d carried the practice no further than March — I was sure it had been longer than that — but I do think it’s a good habit to get back into. And I wrote again this evening, not progressing very far on my short story, but progressing some. The forward momentum might be short-lived, since it’s only the second day of the new year, but wanting to write is better than the other thing.

Work was okay, although our local network servers were down for a good part of the morning and then again in the afternoon. It made working rather difficult, and led not just me to wonder if maybe the universe didn’t really want us to go back to work after all. Tonight, the universe is throwing a huge snow storm at us — it’s coming down pretty fierce, and the LIRR has already promised to run on a shortened schedule tomorrow (because of course they have) — so there might just be something to that theory.

I won’t know until tomorrow morning if I’m actually headed into the office. I’ll need to call to find out if the office is open, then find out if the trains are running, then make a decision about whether I can get to the train, particularly if it’s still snowing. I mean, I wouldn’t mind a snow day — I still have three and a half seasons of Babylon 5 to re-watch — but it was also good to get back to the office today, and it’s not like I don’t have actual work to do.

But we’ll see.

New Year

I’m feeling pretty much all vacationed out, which I guess is understandable, and not the worst thing that could happen at the end of a vacation. I go back to work tomorrow, and while I can’t say I’m exactly looking forward to it — going to bed and waking up at a reasonable hour? who does that? — it will be good to get back into the routine. (Assuming the snow that’s in our forecast doesn’t mess that up.)

New Year’s was pretty uneventful here. I had a nice dinner out with my parents, then watched a few episodes of Babylon 5 rather than a movie. (The Season 1 finale takes place on New Year’s Eve! Also? Yeah, this is my social life.) I watched a little of New Year’s Rockin’ Eve — though, honestly, there’s only about ten seconds of it anybody really should ever watch — and rang in the New Year in pretty ordinary fashion.

Today, I pretty much just hung out, watched some more B5, read a little, poked at the short story, and adjusted to the fact that I go back to work after almost three weeks of being out. I mean, I haven’t been to the office since last year!

Winter vacation, day 15

It dawned on me this morning just how close I am to the end of my vacation — only two days left — when I realized I had to buy my monthly train ticket. It also occurred to me how long I’ve been on vacation — more than two weeks now — when I finally opened up my work laptop and realized I’d completely forgotten my log-in password.

(It’s okay, it was on a small post-it note in my wallet. Though maybe we don’t tell my IT department that that’s where I was keeping it?)

I’d changed my password a day or two before leaving the office, since it was about to expire, and I really did think I’d have some call to use the new one while I was out. But except for a couple of e-mails answered way back at the start of my vacation — a couple that hopefully kept a book from slipping in the production schedule to February — I haven’t really done any work. I’ve been checking in occasionally, as I’d already updated the e-mail password on my iPhone, but nothing that really justified my going back to the office after the holiday party to pick up my computer.

In my defense, I was a little drunk then.

Of course, in retrospect, there’s not a lot of work I could have been doing, which I confirmed when I actually logged in and compared chapter reviews that were due against chapter reviews that have actually come in. I knew this was going to be a difficult time of year for instructors to take deadlines seriously, but in the past two weeks I received very few of the responses I need to get anything done. I could start collating what little feedback I have, before I go back to the office, but that’s not going to save me a lot of time in the long run. And saving myself time in the long run — preparing for a January that’s going to be front-loaded with so much to do — was the only reason I took the laptop home with me.

I can think of better ways of spending the next couple of days, like maybe reading a book.

I spent a good part of today mostly working on Kaleidotrope, whose new issue will be ready for launch tomorrow or Wednesday, if all goes according to plan. I want to do more with Kaleidotrope in the coming year, really make it work the considerable out-of-pocket investment of time and money.

I’m okay with the time, even if I’m a little scared about re-opening to submissions in two days. But it’s the money part that’s a tougher sell sometimes. I pay a cent a word, way below what’s considered a professional rate but still pretty steep for a project that takes in no money — beyond a couple of very generous and welcome donations — and it’s a cost I want to justify by making the zine more than just a collection of other people’s work. I did that a little last year, and I want to look for new ways to do it this.

Because right now, I’ve already filled the next two and half years’ worth of issues with last year’s submissions. It would be too easy for the fun of producing the zine to disappear on me.

This evening, after writing fake horoscopes — that’s something I do for the zine, something I started when I was editing the weekly newsletter for the Penn State Monty Python Society (and something I almost certainly stole from The Onion — I watched You’re Next. It’s an okay movie, mostly because it mixes up a couple of horror genres and isn’t just your standard home invasion scary movie. It gets off to a slow start — which is probably necessary, in retrospect, even if it could have used some better acting there — and ends poorly, but it takes a couple of interesting turns along the way. (Not surprising turns, necessarily, but ones that keep it, at least, from being something more than similar movies I’ve seen.)

And that was Monday. It was Monday, right?

Winter vacation, day 1

So I did go with Becket last night, and it was a terrific movie, not least of all because of Peter O’Toole’s performance as King Henry II. It earned him (along with co-star Richard Burton) a Best Actor nomination at that year’s Oscars. (With The Lion in Winter just four years later, O’Toole remains the only actor nominated twice for playing the same character in two different films.) The movie’s not completely historically accurate, but it’s a great film with two towering performances.

I can’t even jokingly say the same thing about Equilibrium, which I watched this evening and which is just laughably ridiculous. It’s also ridiculously entertaining, thanks largely to gun kata (an actual pseeudo-martial-art invented for the movie) and this image of a confused and horror-stricken Christian Bale holding a puppy. (Spoiler warnings at both links, I suppose.)

I definitely can’t say the same thing about Upside Down, which I watched after that. (Well, I took a short break to watch that episode of Star Trek where Kirk “fights” the Gorn.) The movie is ridiculous, but rarely in a good way, and it makes zero actual sense. I enjoyed live-tweeting both it and Equilibrium — it’s telling that Becket was good enough to keep me mostly off of Twitter while I was watching — but I’d only count the former in the “so bad it’s good” category.

I spent the rest of the day not doing a whole lot. I answered a couple of work e-mails over my phone, really just so a book wouldn’t get delayed going to the printer. I swear, beyond proofing a PDF of the book’s cover, there wasn’t a whole lot of actual work involved.

I finished reading Mockingjay, the last book in the Hunger Games trilogy, which I didn’t really love, or even necessarily like. With the second book in the series, which I also found disappointing but much less so, Suzanne Collins could have been accused of just doing more of the same. So maybe that’s why the third book feels like more of a departure…but lack of plot wouldn’t have been my first choice for trying something different.

I also did a little writing of my own. I didn’t progress too far in this short story I’m working on, but I poked around at it for an hour or so and expect to do more in the next couple of weeks.

And that was Monday, my first official day off in this two-weeks-plus vacation I’ve somehow lucked into.