personal

Thursday

I’d be lying if I said today was particularly exciting. We had a team meeting this morning, mostly to discuss the books still in the pipeline, and not yet in production, for 2010. We have about a six-month production schedule, so it’s going to be a mad scramble to make the year with some of these titles. After that, I spent most of the day reading a revised chapter on counseling older adults, with lots of statistics about depression and suicide rates and all that fun stuff. With luck, I’ll finish with the chapter tomorrow and then receive the final chapter in time to put the book into production by the end of next week. I’d like to get it off my desk before I head off to a conference in San Jose in a couple of weeks.

And meanwhile…no, sorry, that’s really about it. Just your typical boring Thursday.

The city that never sleeps (though I do)

No weird sandwiches for lunch today, I’m afraid. At the office, we had one of our regular “brown bag lunch” talks, where they invite a guest speaker and give everybody free pizza or sandwiches. Today was a pizza day, which was okay, though I wish I could say the same about the talk. Ostensibly it was about New York, the love-hate relationship the rest of the nation (and New Yorkers) have with the city, and moreover how that relates to the current economic crisis. Wall Street fat cats, that sort of thing. And I guess it was that, but I just found it meandering and a little preachy, even when I agreed with some of the anti-corporate points the speaker was trying to make. In all, the free pizza was the best part of the deal.

This evening, though, I actually had a regular (albeit open-faced) Reuben for dinner. My mother and I picked my father up at the eye doctor’s — he’s doing well — and we had dinner at a pub/bistro around the corner. We actually just got home a little while ago, and I think I’m going to use this hour before bed to watch last night’s Lost. I tried watching it last night, but it just didn’t work out.

When a sandwich is the most exciting thing that happens to you all day…

Today wasn’t particularly eventful. Sure, some people on Twitter wanted to make a lot of the fact that I had a miso mustard glazed tempeh Reuben with avocado, ginger sauerkraut, spicy Russian dressing, on 7-grain vegan bread for lunch. But, honestly, who hasn’t done that from time to time?

In all seriousness, though, I bought the sandwich here in Midtown, and it was surprisingly good — especially for vegan food, which in my limited experience is often not very good. Certainly vegan and vegetarians get the short end of it at most restaurants, especially at lunch hour take-away. The place I got this sandwich was a little too far from the office, and certainly much too expensive, to be a regular lunchtime spot for me, but I was pleasantly surprised. I’d never even heard of tempeh before this. I have mixed feelings about soy in general. I like edamame, for instance, and don’t particularly dislike soy milk. But I pretty much hate tofu. So, again, it was a pleasant surprise, even if the sandwich wasn’t even remotely like a regular Reuben.

And that’s about it for Tuesday.

Onward to Tuesday

Today, not at all unexpectedly, was very Monday-ish. I spent it mostly marking up a couple of chapters on counseling older adults, because there’s nothing like reading about dementia to get the week of to a rollicking good start!

According to my Forgotten English desk calendar, today is not only International Women’s Day — which I guess means that every woman gets the Kathryn Bigelow “I Am Woman” treatment today? It’s also the Feast Eve of St. Gregory of Nyssa, who despite what you may be thinking was neither a capper nor a Doctor Who character. Apparently, he was a fourth-century Armenia archbishop.According to the calendar, he “relates a story of a nun who forgot to say her benedicte and make the Sign of the Cross before she sat down to supper, and who in consequence swallowed a demon concealed among the leaves of a lettuce.”

Which is neither here nor there, but it’s more exciting than my day, that’s for sure. I spent too much of the evening playing this Comedy Central game, and now I’m just getting ready for bed.

Well, that was Sunday

So anyway, that’s the weekend done with.

At yesterday’s blood drive, I learned that there’s a point system, where you earn for each donation and can then trade those points in for valuable prizes online. The NY Blood Center sent me an e-mail this morning to confirm this, as well as to thank me for giving blood yesterday. I don’t do it for gifts, which is good, because I’d have to donate more regularly, and probably for several long decades, before I’d earn enough for even the smallest of prizes. I’m at 75 points right now, plus whatever I earned yesterday, and a box of 100 self-sealed business envelopes, for instance — a featured item — is worth 445 points. So it’s going to be a few more hundred thousand pints before I rack up enough points to do any real damage.

Meanwhile, today was pretty uneventful. I went for a short walk, since the weather was still so nice, and I struggled to finish the New York Times crossword puzzle. (I still haven’t, and probably won’t, but I did at least get all the theme answers. I also watched a short British miniseries called Murderland. It was okay, though not at all remarkable, and Robbie Coltrane seems pretty wasted in it, honestly.

I could be watching the Oscars, I suppose — I even have a kind-of pseudo-Oscar pool running with a friend of mine — but our cable company dropped ABC first thing this morning in a contract dispute over money. (Why either of them should be getting money for a broadcast channel I’m not entirely sure, but that’s another story.) I didn’t feel like scouring the web for a shaky, bootleg live feed — which is apparently all there is to be had — and frankly, I didn’t really feel like watching what, from all the Twitter comments I keep getting, is shaping up to be an exceptionally boring show.

So instead, I think I’m just going to go to bed. Although there’s no red carpet, no video montages, and nobody ever wants to know who designed my pajamas. Goodnight!