tv

“I just really like talking about Farscape.”

I spent the day building book records in our system, running profit and loss calculations and researching competing products, doing a lot of data entry for some new proposals, with an eye towards contracting a couple of these books before the year is out. Or at least sending the contracts to the authors before I shut down my computer and put up an away message for the last two weeks of December. If you’re imagining the glamorous life of a book editor, chances are, this isn’t what you’re picturing.

But it’s Friday, which is always nice. The week went by weirdly fast, especially for a week that started off really slow. I guess it’s that whole “time is relative” and “eye of the beholder” thing again, but I had to stop a couple of times during the day and just confirm that it was indeed, truly the end of the week. Even now, I’m a little unsure. Am I going to wake up tomorrow only to discover I was supposed to go to work after all?

Well, until then, I’m acting under the assumption that it is, in fact, the weekend. I can always claim delusion afterward if I’m proven wrong.

I don’t have any real plans for the weekend, beyond maybe getting a haircut. I’d like to do some more writing, which I’ve been slacking off from recently, and there are a few things I’d like to read. Right now, I’m a little more than midway through Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, which I’m really enjoying a whole lot. But it is a long book, and it seems to be taking me quite a while to get through it. I’m only at 39 books for the year, and that’s including some novellas and graphic novels. I try to aim for at least 50, and I’m worried with only a few more weeks left, I’m not going to hit that target. And while you’d think two weeks off from work would leave me plenty of time to read, it also leaves me plenty of time to slack off and not get any reading done, which I am all too prone to. But I’m going to try.

This evening, though, I mostly just watched last night’s episode of Community, which may have been my favorite ever, and certainly one of the sweetest the show’s ever done. My geek brain nearly exploded when Abed started talking to guest star Paul F. Tompkins about Farscape.

Wednesday various

Monday various

Is my four-day weekend over already?

Today, I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 with friends — it was pretty good, although rather long and occasionally a little boring — and I did the Sunday crossword. Oh, and I watched this past week’s episode of Fringe and am currently reading more of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Not exactly an exciting day, but a decent enough ending to the four-day weekend. Tomorrow, it’s back to work for what promises to be a busy three days.

This feels like my third Friday in a row

So, what did I do today, the second day of my four-day weekend?

Well, I read some. Last night, I started Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and I read a few more chapters of it today. I’m really quite enjoying it. I’m familiar with Jackson’s work — it’s almost impossible not to be, given the annual award named in her honor — but I think I’ve only ever read the one short story, the one practically every school child has read, “The Lottery.” This week, though, I bought a copy of the Library of America’s collected volume of her work, and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying it.

I watched just a little TV, namely this week’s great episode of Community and another episode of QI. I also watched The Bicycle Thieves, which I’d been meaning to watch for quite awhile. It’s one of those movies that shows up all the time on all-time best-of lists, groundbreaking and hugely influential, and it’s not hard to see why. Mostly, though, it’s just a really touching story of a man looking for a job, and a wonderful look at post-World War II Italy.

And I dropped off a package for my father at UPS, then went and bought myself a new toothbrush. Such is the exciting life of leisure I lead.