work

Saturday

I’m pleased to say that while I did absolutely bring my laptop home with me from the office yesterday, and while I have glanced at a few e-mails since then — on the iPad, not the laptop — I have yet to do any actual work beyond that. I still might, if only because I have so much of it to do, and because the end of the year is fast approaching. (I also feel like I need to justify bringing the computer home with me in the first place, after Windows Update caused me to miss my earlier train.) But today I largely ignored it. I don’t officially go back to work until a week from Monday, and I am, technically, on vacation.

It’s a vacation more in spirit than in deed. I had paid time off I needed to take before the end of the year. My sister, who’s visiting this weekend, recently went on a cruise to Turkey and Greece, and my parents have taken to travel in recent years as well, now that they’re both retired (or weeks away from it, in my father’s case). It must be nice. Apart from a day trip to Danbury, Connecticut, and a few days on campuses in Maryland, I haven’t been anywhere all year. Even my next work-related trip, if I can set it up, will probably only be somewhere out here on Long Island. The last time I went anywhere, it was to Canada for a week a year ago. And before that, Vegas, which — and I had to double-check this to be sure — was way back in 2009. I’m not looking for any great globe-trekking, but something a little more exciting than a week stuck at home — of which I’ve had, several this year, thanks to sickness, weather, and PTO — would be nice.

This evening, my parents, my sister, and I drove out to Port Jefferson for a birthday dinner for my aunt. The restaurant was okay, but unremarkable — a dessert sorbet was basically a large, unappealing dish of frozen cranberry juice — but it was a nice evening.

The rest of the day I spent doing not much of anything. Though I actually wrote some, working on the start of a short story, which I haven’t been doing in way too long. Maybe it was Heather‘s tales of her recent writing residency, maybe I was just feeling inspired by the prompt I stumbled upon. But it felt good to flex those muscles again, even if I didn’t end up writing very much.

As much work as I have to do — and I do — I think I’d be rather pleased if I actually spent more of the coming week writing something that didn’t involve textbook pedagogy and using my “vacation” that way.

Day of the meeting

Where do the days go?

This one mostly went to a couple of meetings, one about a new edition of a textbook I’m working on, the other about interactive textbooks. You know, that kind of thing.

The rest went to a bit of this, a touch of that, and a whole lot of not enough of the other thing. I again didn’t even look at the project I was going to try and start finishing yesterday, but only because I have a bunch of other projects that are maybe a little more important to get finished, or started.

This is getting to be a weird time, as we near the end of the calendar and academic year, and a tough time to corral reviewers for projects. (“How ’bout, instead of your suggested four weeks I take eight? By which I maybe mean twelve, if I’m anything like most instructors? Would that work for you?”) Looking at the calendar and realizing I’m almost certainly not going to get some things finished before 2013 — especially with me out next week and a good bit at the end of December — well, worse things have happened. There’s nothing critical here. And we did have that storm.

But I’m honestly at the point where I’m seriously thinking, You know, I could totally bring my laptop home next week and do some work, vacation days or not.

It’s not the greatest idea I’ve ever had, but still. I mean, the last time I took a vacation day and didn’t bring my laptop home with me, I was stuck out of the office for nine days.

Tuesday

Despite not even once looking at the project I’d planned spend all day working on, because so many other things came up, today was a pretty good day.

True, it was made better by being able to get eight (or maybe close to nine) hours sleep, then staying in my pajamas until my ten o’clock coffee — well okay, shower — break.

November is just flying by.

Monday

While the Long Island Railroad claims to be back to its normal schedule, they’re also cancelling a lot of trains, and I can’t shake the feeling they were actually running fewer today than last week. Certainly, there were fewer trains to choose from this morning, and my regular afternoon train won’t be happening for the foreseeable future.

The trains themselves weren’t so bad, though. I didn’t have any trouble, especially this morning, getting a seat. And there were only a few people up and down the aisles on the evening commute. That might change tomorrow, when whatever percentage of people who were off for Veteran’s Day go back to work. I won’t be among them, since I’m luckily working from home tomorrow, but I’ll curious to hear from my father how his commute goes. (He was home today, so I don’t feel so bad about that.)

Meanwhile…there just isn’t a whole lot of meanwhile to report. Lots of work, trying to make up for lost time that I’ll possibly never make up for. I’m taking all of next week off for Thanksgiving — and, sidebar, how is that already upon us? — but I’ll likely be doing a little work (from home) in that time. I could have used an extra week this month, not to lose an entire week thanks to that storm.

Wednesday

So today’s been a day.

I woke up at 5:30. I was going to get the 6:08 train.

That train was delayed, alternating between 23 and 25 minutes, depending, I can only imagine, on which way the wind was blowing at the moment or on some strange whim of the person announcing it. The time would change every few minutes as we stood around in the cold.

The 6:28 train, however, was apparently operating on time.

Does the Long Island Railroad really think they’re fooling anyone with that? Like one train is going to leap-frog over the other, or they’re both going to arrive simultaneously on the same track? “Sure, one train’s towing the other,” my father joked. (This was one of the rare times we were taking the same train. Even a week-plus after Sandy, there are still few trains to choose from.) If the 6:08 train is running twenty-something minutes late, and the 6:28 is on time, then there is no 6:08 train. The LIRR can call it “equipment trouble” and “delays” all they want, but the train’s been cancelled and we all know it.

Of course, the 6:28 was running late, too. Something like 6 minutes.

When it arrived, it was short, which is exactly what you want to do when you’re expecting huge crowds of commuters, crowds so deep down the aisles of each car that, after one or two stations, passengers can no longer even get on board. You obviously want to remove entire cars from that equation. Who needs that space? I mean, it’s not like you’re running a reduced schedule and presumably have other trains sitting around. Oh, it is? And you do? Well then you suck.

The train was very crowded when I got on. It became progressively more crowded, uncomfortably crowded, as it stumbled along. I think today was actually worse than Monday. We had three more stops, at each of which more and more people piled on, then another stop where some got on, some got off. And then “just for today,” we added another stop, in Woodside, which is about halfway between Jamaica, Queens, and Penn Station in Manhattan.

I shouldn’t complain about this stop, though, since a guy who was sitting down decided to disembark then and I got his seat. I did that thing where you hesitate briefly, to see if anybody else is going to take the seat, without directly offering it to anyone else. You know, for fear that they’ll actually take it. But nobody else made a move, and I was really the only one well positioned enough to take the seat. (When I say you could not turn around, I am not exaggerating.) So I got to sit down for the last 10-15 minutes of my morning commute.

I arrived at the office around the same time as I did on Monday, maybe only about a few minutes later. Let’s call it 7:30-ish.

And then I worked and worked and worked.

I had a break for an hour, when I had to sit through a webinar about our new time sheet system. I am not exaggerating when I say it made me miss the train.

Of course, the evening train…now that was awful. Even more crowded, no seats at all, and oh, did I mention it snowed several inches tonight? I managed to get out of Manhattan ahead of the worst of it, meaning I was only on the train for maybe an hour and a half (standing up, barely able to move, pinned in from all sides by other passengers), rather than getting stuck on a train like my father did about an hour later. (He had a seat, though, so there is that.)

Because what we really needed right now on the east coast was a nor’easter and snow.