personal

I wonder where dem boidies iz

Today was the first day that really felt like the approach of spring to me, not least of all because it was still light out when I got home from work this evening. I still didn’t sleep terrifically well last night, but at least I got in enough hours to function properly. And I managed to finish my edits on that final counseling chapter and send them back to the author. With luck, we’ll have a final manuscript ready to go into production before the week is through. After which, my involvement with the book will essentially be over and I’ll move on to the other half dozen projects that are awaiting my attention.

I also finished reading Ann Patchett’s The Patron Saint of Liars, which I liked quite a lot, although not as much as her later novel Bel Canto, which remains one of my favorite books of recent years. (Well, of my recent years. I read it in 2006.) I’m not yet sure what I’m going to read next, though I have plenty of unread books to choose from. I’ve actually caved twice this month, including today, and bought some new books. I think it’s safe to say that my no-new-books-for-2010 resolution, which was pretty silly to begin with, is now officially a failure. It’s maybe just as well.

First I bought Joe Hill’s Horns and Dan Simmons’ two most recent books, and today I bought a few graphic novels, including Angel: After the Fall. (I’m still not really sure how I feel about them continuing the series, which I thought ended on a really great note, but I’ve been re-watching it recently and figured, why not? I think they’ve done a really good job so far with Buffy‘s “Season 8.”)

Anyway, that’s about it for today.

Beware the ides

The ides of March used to be a day for celebration. But then Julius Caesar had to ruin all that by getting murdered and everything. I mean, seriously, what’s up with that?

I didn’t sleep at all well last night, maybe because of the change over to Daylight Savings Time, and I felt lousy enough this morning that I called (or, rather, e-mailed) in sick. It’s not something I like doing, but I actually spent a good part of the day doing what I would have had I gone into the office — namely, reading the last revised chapter in that book I want to get off my desk and into production before I head off to San Jose next week. With luck, I’ll finish marking it up tomorrow, and with luck it won’t need much marking up. Then I’ll e-mail it back to the author, who will look it over and let me know if he’s okay with my final edits.

Other than that, it was a boring day spent mostly reading and listening to the DVD commentary on John Carpenter’s The Thing. I’m going to make sure I get a good night’s sleep tonight and head into the office tomorrow.

Lost hour

I lost an hour somewhere in the middle of the night. Has anyone seen it?

In all seriousness, I’m not such a big fan of the whole “spring ahead” half of Daylight Savings Time. I suggested the other day, via Twitter, that it ought to happen on weekday, preferably Friday, and would be a whole lot more popular if it did. Just imagine if you were at work, maybe in the long afternoon hour of three to four, and suddenly you just didn’t have one of those hours to worry about anymore. Suddenly, instead of two hours left in your workday, there was only just the one.

I haven’t quite worked out the whole “fall back” part of it just yet. If there was one day of the year when you’d be expected to work an extra hour, without extra pay, a whole lot of people would use that day to call in sick. It’s not a perfect — or even good — system, but there’s got to be something better than the outdated system we’re using now.

Anyway, I spent the hours I did have today not doing a whole lot. I watched another episode of Saturday Night Live’s first season, and I remain convinced that anyone who claims the show isn’t as good as it used to be, or that it just recycles sketches week too week, really needs to watch this first season in full. These episodes don’t just have recurring characters, and they don’t just reuse a lot of the same jokes; they re-air entire sketches and segments week to week. Think that fake commercial was funny the first time you saw it? It probably wasn’t, at least not very, but don’t worry, you’ll see the same exact commercial two or three more times at least. And yet there’s a weirdly endearing, “hey nobody’s watching this so we might as well just try anything we want” attitude that’s often sorely missing from the show nowadays. I’m not sure it’s something I want from the show, and I don’t think it would be at all a ratings success, but you kind of have to admire a show that gives both Loudon Wainwright III and ABBA two songs apiece in a single evening. Or at least wonder about what kind of weird parallel universe you’ve wandered off into.

I also went for a short walk, despite the not-quite-finished rain, and I finished the New York Times Sunday crossword. I also finished “Fright of the Bumblebees,” the first of Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures. I really liked Telltale Games’ Monkey Island game, and I decided to give this one a try. There’s not a lot of re-play value in these episodic games, but I think the animation, humor, and puzzles are worth the price of admission. I bought all of the Wallace & Gromit adventures, so I’ll probably play the others in the weeks to come.

And then later this evening, I watched a couple of episodes from Masters of Horror (“Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” and “Cigarette Burns”), looking for a good and quick scare. They both had their moments, “Incident” in particular, but both fell a little short of spectacular. With rare (but well known) exceptions, anthology series are usually like that.

Oh, and I finally finished doing my taxes. It’s not so difficult — though not as easy, apparently, as it could be — but I still don’t love doing it. My father bought H&R Block’s home software, so that’s what I was using, though I did notice at one point a grammatical error in its on-screen explanations. What can I say? I’m an editor. It’s not like I can just turn that part of my brain off.

Anyway, now I think I’m going to go to bed. It doesn’t necessarily feel like bedtime — it does, in fact, feel like it’s an hour earlier — but I’ve got to go to work tomorrow.

“It flies like a truck.” “Good. What is a truck?”

It rained all day here, and so I spent most of the day inside playing computer games and just hanging out. I played a little with the dog, watched a little TV — including a little more of Saturday Night Live’s very odd first season — and not a whole lot else.

This evening, after dinner, I watched The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. I think if I’d watched it when it first came out, when I was seven years old, it would be one of my favorite movies. As it is, seeing it now for the very first time, I just find it agreeably weird. I like what Noel Murray says about it:

…it remains an occasionally incomprehensible rush of subplots, sight gags, mythology, and bizarre fashion choices, truer to the spirit of classic adventure stories than to the letter. Which may be why people who love the film feel the way they do. Buckaroo Banzai assumes an attitude of poise and purpose in an otherwise awkward universe.

Now I think I’ll do a little late-night capping — tonight is HCC‘s third anniversary — then call it a night. There’s that darn Daylight Savings Time to contend with, after all.

ETA: I neglected to add — maybe because I still can’t quite believe it — that my eyeglasses broke today. I was cleaning the lenses and the frames just snapped at the bridge. This is especially annoying because these were a replacement pair for glasses that broke back in June, less than a year after I’d bought that first pair. This was also around the same time that another pair of glasses, bought concurrently with the first broken set, themselves broke. I think I’m going to skip going back to Pearle Vision, where I bought both of the quickly broken frames and the now quickly broken replacement pair. I’m not especially rough with my glasses or anything, and this is just ridiculous. I’m back to wearing my old set, which I luckily kept, and which hasn’t once shown signs of breaking in the decade-plus that I’ve owned them.

Esse est percipi

I once wrote the following mock-horoscope:

Philosopher Bishop Berkeley once claimed that all material objects—indeed, all of space and time—are merely illusions—to which the famous critic Samuel Johnson remarked, “I refute it thus!” and promptly smashed Berkeley’s head against a nearby rock. We think there’s a moral in that for all of us.

Which I bring up only because my Forgotten English desk calendar informs me that today is George Berkeley‘s birthday.

You know, if not for that, and the fact that today was Friday, I don’t know that I’d have anything to say about it at all.