personal

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.

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.

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.