work

Thursday. I’m still only in Thursday.

It’s amazing how quickly you can get used to the shape of your week with Tuesday being a day out of the office. And just how much longer that week can seem when you don’t have that Tuesday from home. Can it really only be Thursday?

I’m not sure I did a whole lot today, but I do know that I got a whole lot done. I finished the one report, pulling together the review analysis and making some suggestions for revision, which I’ve e-mailed to the author. It’s a good book, and I hope he won’t need much convincing to make some small changes that will make it better.

I pretty much immediately started working on another report, the very same type but in social psychology, but I’m still in the collating and cutting-and-pasting stage, which lets me concentrate on things like audio books and podcasts on my iPod. Fairly soon — maybe even tomorrow — I’ll have to hunker down and really actively read the review comments and suss out what they’re saying, but not just yet.

I’m still kind of hoping I’ll wake up tomorrow and someone will tell me that it’s Saturday.

Year of the meeting will not be denied

For a little while this morning, it looked like the room we had booked for our monthly development editor meeting wasn’t going to be available. And since I’m now in charge of running these meetings (with help from my UK counterpart), I had to scramble, just twenty minutes beforehand, to make sure we had somewhere to meet.

This is probably as close to exciting as the day ever got. But the Year of the Meeting will not be denied.

Whatever happened to Tuesday and so slow

I had to go into the office today, to attend a meeting where I was taking notes and, near the very end, actively participating. (And don’t think that isn’t a slightly weird experience.) This is the first time I’ve been in the office on a Tuesday since the first week of April, and while I can’t necessarily recommend it, it was no worse than any other day in the week.

I still haven’t finished the report I was working on yesterday — and much of last week. I’m now in the hard part, actually trying to make recommendations based on the reviewer suggestions and pulling together what that tells us about the book, the course, the instructor and students, etc. But that’s, y’know, the job.

Still, I do like being able to sleep in a little bit on Tuesdays. And going to work in my pajamas. They get so upset when you try doing that at the office.

What we talk about when we talk about Monday

I spent nearly all of today pulling together reviews of a psycholinguistics textbook I’m working on. And the thing about psycholinguistics, at least at this level, is that it’s kind of complicated, and I’m left sometimes just trying to figure out if the reviewers were complaining about or praising the same things.

I’m still not done with it, my review analysis. I have to spend a good part of tomorrow morning in a meeting — a meeting at the office, no less, alas — but hopefully I can finish this report before the end of the day.

Laser frontiersman

Last night, after work, I joined some fellow cappers for dinner and then the live simulcast of Rifftrax‘s Manos: The Hands of Fate. I thought it got off to a slow start, after some very funny shorts, but in the end I thought they did a really great job. It’s been a little while since I last watched the original riff, but last night’s was probably its equal. It was a good time, though I didn’t get home from Manhattan until after eleven, and I didn’t really fall asleep until after midnight.

So it’s probably a good thing I didn’t have to go into the office today. Every year we have some kind of company outing, and today’s was out on Long Island, at the Country Fair Park in Medford. That’s about a forty-five-minute drive from here, which seemed like the better option than an hour’s regular commute into Manhattan so that I could be on the bus the company had chartered for 8:45. A bus that, even if it hadn’t been a half an hour late, would have taken half an hour longer than my car ride. Then another hour-plus bus ride back into the city and an hour’s train commute back home. We were done at one o’clock, and by driving I was home before two. I think I definitely picked the right option.

The park itself was a lot of fun. There were go-karts, laser tag, a driving range, miniature golf, and batting cages. And while I only participated in the first three of those, I’m kind of exhausted now. Running around and shooting co-workers with sensors on their heads and failing to improve my heretofore nonexistent golf game…well, it takes a lot of you. But there was food, and the weather was good — if quite hot — and I got to leave the house at 9 and get home by 2. So I’m really not complaining.