personal

Thursday? A likely story

There’s no way you’re going to convince me that today was Thursday.

This has been a very strange week, thanks largely to the storm and the devastation in its wake. We suffered relatively little of that devastation, or even too many days of inconvenience, and I’m extremely grateful for that. I still can’t believe the lights, on this side of the block anyway, are back on — although I’ll admit, there’s a part of me that misses having no distractions to keep me from reading all day and night. I am glad to have the heat back on; an autumn that just wouldn’t get properly started for weeks has finally kicked into high gear. With the heat on, you can probably manage short sleeves in the house, but Tuesday and yesterday morning I was thankful for extra blankets and fleeces.

Meanwhile, Tucker, our dog, seemed pretty much oblivious to the storm. Sure, the wind was loud and there was some rain when he went outside, but there was no thunder, which is the thing that usually worries him. In fact, I think he genuinely enjoyed the storm: when the power went out, the house was quiet (except for the aforementioned wind) and we all went to bed at a more reasonable (to him) hour. It was only yesterday, when trick-or-treaters started knocking on his door that Tucker seemed to be at all fazed. Except for the chilliness, and disruption in his schedule, I think he preferred living in a blackout.

Not so much me. I’m really glad it’s over, and that things are (slowly) returning to normal. I won’t be headed to the office tomorrow — I’m taking the vacation day that this past Monday was supposed to be, and I’m sitting out a still uncertain train commute until next week. But I am looking forward to things getting back to normal next week.

Frankenstormageddon

Oh, the days that we’ve had.

As you’ve probably heard, the northeast and mid-Atlantic United States was hit on Monday by Hurricane Sandy, which had already done extensive damage in the Caribbean, particularly in Haiti. My office was closed in anticipation of the storm, but the weather wasn’t particularly bad here for most of Monday, kind of rainy and very windy. I spent most of the day reading through Kaleidotrope submissions, very nearly getting caught up…on August’s submissions. (That still leaves September’s.) However, the storm absolutely picked up with a vengeance in the evening.

We lost power around two o’clock in the afternoon, and the storm raged all night, but honestly, it could have been a lot worse. The little tree in the front yard, only a couple of years old, had one whole bough sheared off in the wind. And we lost a fair amount of siding on the one side of the house. But with all the horror stories coming in — Breezy Point in Queens, for example, not quite an hour’s drive from here, was decimated by flooding and fire — and even the damage some of our neighbors have suffered…well, it could have been worse. No one here, and no one nearby, and no one we know was badly hurt. I haven’t heard from everyone at work, since I haven’t been to work — more on that below — but my immediate co-workers and boss are okay. Yeah, it could have been worse.

My office, like a whole lot of Manhattan, has been closed all week. We’re facing network connectivity issues that might close it again tomorrow, but even if it’s open there’s almost no way I’ll be getting in. Mass transit is struggling to crawl back, and the Long Island Railroad isn’t close to running on my line again. And even if driving in wasn’t a terrible option under ideal circumstances, because so many people have started using it as their only option, most ways into the city will be requiring three or more passengers. I’m pretty much stuck.

I do wish I’d brought my laptop home with me — any other week, when I was expecting to stay home on Tuesday, I would have — but it can’t be helped. Unless the MTA and LIRR announce some spectacular overnight repair work tomorrow, I’ll be doing as much work as I can from right here.

Which I maybe can do, since the power came back on unexpectedly tonight. We’re still worried it will go out at any minute — that’s been known to happen, LIPA will be the first (or thereabouts) to admit — but it’s been holding steady on this side of the block for the past few hours. Heat, lights, wifi — tonight we live like kings!

We’ll see what happens tomorrow. I really do want to get back to work.

Sandy Sunday

If I disappear for the next couple of days, assume it’s probably thanks to Hurricane Sandy. We’re not expecting too much damage or flooding — we’re far enough from the coast to not be any of the handful of evacuated areas — but we might very well lose power. It happened last year, during Hurricane Irene. (That last two weeks, though I was able to sneak away for the second week to Canada. I don’t think I’ll be quite so lucky this time…though hopefully the outage also won’t be quite as bad.)

My office has decided to close tomorrow, which is probably for the best since all mass transit in and out of Manhattan is in the middle of shutting down as I type this. It may be back up sometime tomorrow, but right now even Tuesday isn’t a given. I was going to be off from work tomorrow anyway, but if we’re open on Tuesday and I can’t get in…

I have a meeting I’m supposed to go to on Tuesday, so I didn’t even bring my laptop home with me. I have some access to e-mail, assuming I have power, but…well, we’ll just see. Ideally, everything will be back to normal on Tuesday and I’ll get to work without any problems. Or, barring that, the office will be closed again. Anything in between that — the office open, but problems aplenty — doesn’t sound like fun.

Right now, just enjoying a regular Sunday. I did the crossword puzzle, moved lawn furniture away from the house, watched the okay but kind of disappointing You Only Live Twice, and read a bunch of Kaleidotrope submissions. Right now, it isn’t even raining.

But there’s a storm a’comin’, oh yes.

Saturday

It’s been a busy couple of days, mostly thanks to work. On Thursday night, I went to see Birdemic: Shock and Terror, a live, simulcast Rifftrax show. And on Friday…well, I managed to finally finish “meeting” with instructors at the University of Maryland and Towson, the last two people over the phone. I’ve finished my notes and just need to distribute them next week. So at least that’s one large project I’m pretty much done with.

And that’s pretty much it.

There’s also this so-called “Frankenstorm” that’s supposed to hit in the next day or so. I’m taking Monday off from work regardless, a long-planned (if now somewhat inopportunely timed) three-day weekend.

Wednesday is just Monday misspelled

I overslept this morning, and how.

Though I did discover, much to my surprise — and just seconds before it wouldn’t have mattered, and the train doors would have closed on me — that there’s yet another, later train from Jamaica to Hunterspoint Avenue in the morning. I probably shaved a few precious minutes off of my commute by hopping off when I did, at the last second, but I would have gladly traded the revelation that there’s a connecting train later in the morning for having been awake in time to catch one of the earlier ones.

I have a lot of work to get through at the office.

But before I could do any of that, I had to run our monthly development team meeting, shortly after I got into the office. It was a slightly strange affair, considering that everyone else on the team in New York was away on travel, as was my counterpart in the UK who had suggested our topic of discussion in the first place (author care), and I was sitting alone in our larger conference room talking to everyone else over video. But I think the meeting went reasonably well; it didn’t drag on, and nobody had any true horror stories of dealing with difficult authors.

I spent most of the rest of the day pulling together and typing up my notes from last week’s campus travel, except of course when I was on the phone talking to another professor I wasn’t able to meet with in person. I still have two phone calls lined up for Friday, one with a professor and one with the bookstore manager. But at least then it’ll be done. I just have to finish typing them up, distribute them to the appropriate team members, input them into our system, and then start getting in touch with people for my next campus visit. (This one will be closer to home — even closer, I think, than the office, but it still is going to take some investigative and e-mailing legwork.)

And let’s not even talk about all the other work I still have to do. Reports and reviews and reviews and reports. I will say this much, however: today just flew by.

But boy did it still feel like a Monday.