"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
Today was a pretty ordinary Thursday. The weather and the railroad were much more cooperative today, so I didn’t have a problem getting into the office. I spent the day mostly getting in touch with potential reviewers and mailing out chapters to the reviewers already on the hook. Nothing too taxing, too exciting, but a big part of what I do.
I woke up at six this morning, only to learn that, yes indeed, we’d had a freezing rain overnight, and it had played havoc with the morning commute. The Long Island Railroad was running weekend hours all morning — albeit at the regular, weekday morning peak fares — and at my station, weekend hours means no more than one train every hour. They were also predicting ten to fifteen-minute delays, which itself usually means twenty to thirty-minute delays. So, after much deliberating, I decided to send an e-mail around to my group at work and take a vacation day.
After that, the day was actually fine, especially after I discovered that Groundhog Day was available for streaming over Netflix. It just seemed like the right choice for today. I spent the rest of the day mostly reading, finishing a couple of graphic novels (The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel, and A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld, both quite good). I also watched last week’s episode of Community, which I hadn’t seen yet, and the first episode of Quantum Leap, which I haven’t seen in years. It was really just a random, lay-about-the-house kind of day.
That said, I’m really kind of sick of snow at this point, particularly snow that ruins my morning commute. (Enough snow to close my office and keep me home without taking vacation? Well, we can talk.) I’m actually kind of looking forward to going back to work tomorrow. Taking off on Wednesday is just weird.
It snowed again overnight, because it’s Tuesday, and that’s now the law. Thankfully, though, it didn’t snow very much, and we only had to worry about a thin sheet of ice coating every street and sidewalk by the evening’s commute. What fun!
Otherwise, it was a pretty typical Tuesday.
I went back to work today, as one is often wont to do on a Monday. It was a fairly typical day, capped by a trio of conference planning meetings, including one for a conference I’m actually attending in Boston, in March. Nothing really out of the ordinary.
I note with some amusement that today, according to my Forgotten English desk calendar, is the Feast Day of St. John Bosco, “a 19th-century Italian patron of editors.” The calendar page goes on to talk about so-called inkhorn terms, “pedantic expressions which ‘smell of the lamp.'”
The extreme inkhornism, “honorificabilitudinitatibus,” a monstrosity unleashed in Thomas Nashe’s Lenten Stuff (1599) meaning “worthiness of honor,” was once considered the longest English word. But in the late 1700s it was surpassed by the abomination, “floccinaucinihilipilification,” deeming something to be worthless.
I spent the weekend in Maryland, celebrating my sister’s 30th birthday, which is later this week. We basically repeated our plans from last year, albeit with a little more success, thanks to somewhat more cooperative weather. My parents and I drove there, then met my sister and her husband for brunch, and then we split up, with my sister and my mother going clothes shopping — my sister’s choice, which would not have been mine — and we three men visiting the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum.
I took some photos there, if you’re interested. It was actually really interesting, although if you visit, I can’t recommend the actual train rides, at least not the version we experienced. It was basically just a slow twenty minute trip out, then back, with not a whole lot to see and just a little old-timey music and narration about the railway to keep you amused. (Then again, we were on the same car as a seven-year-old boy celebrating his birthday, and he seemed to be enjoying it.)
Afterward, we had enough time for the three of us to see The Fighter, in the theater adjoining the restaurant where we had dinner. It’s really quite good, and I think Christian Bale may now be my favorite for this year’s Oscar.
Today, we met for breakfast, then went back to my sister’s house to give her presents. Then we drove home. It was a good weekend, but I’m pretty astounded that it’s over already.