work

What day is it again?

Today was pretty typical for a Thursday. Too bad it was actually a Wednesday.

Workers spent the entire day outside our windows, mostly one floor up or one floor down. For the longest time, I was convinced they were window washers, but by the end of the day, when I actually got glimpse of their very shaky-looking scaffolding, I saw bricks and broken-up concrete, so they may have been doing some kind of refacing or demolition for all I know. All I do know is, they were very noisy, and it felt like we were working on top of a jackhammer all day. Or, as a coworker suggested, like we were Doozers in Fraggle Rock. (I never saw the show growing up — we didn’t have cable until only fairly recently — but I got the reference. And felt immediately old when a younger coworker of ours didn’t, at all.) Hopefully, they’ll be done — or higher up where we can’t hear them — by tomorrow.

Which is, what, Friday, right? No? Rats.

Party Tuesday

Today was a typical Tuesday, for the most part. We had a small birthday celebration for a coworker at the office this afternoon, with cookies and brownies and a card I don’t remember being asked to sign. It’s not really his birthday, but he’ll be out the rest of the week at a conference. Then this evening, my parents and I celebrated my father’s birthday, which is actually today. There were presents and cake and all that good stuff.

And meanwhile, the weather outside has just be lovely.

Oh, and I finished reading William Sleator’s House of Stairs. I don’t have a lot to say about it, except that I can maybe see the influence it had on the movie Cube, and that ultimately I was left kind of disappointed. It was one of those books, like A Wrinkle in Time, for instance, that I probably would have loved if I had read when I was younger but now…

Still, lovely weather.

Working for the weekend

Another very busy day at work, though I did manage to get a lot done before the office closed at three o’clock, getting an early start on the three-day weekend.

I have no real plans for the weekend, beyond avoiding my work e-mail altogether and maybe doing some reading (slush and not) and writing. Maybe watch a movie, go for a walk, that kind of thing.

The weather has been lovely the past few days, with no sign of the rain we were supposed to be having. I suspect it’s all run north across the border to Canada.

Working Thursday

Today started out not particularly busy, what with my having handed over the manuscript I’ve been working on since Friday and moved it off of my desk. But then this thing that I’ve been waiting to happen, a fix of a book record in our system that would allow me build the record for a new edition of the book (and two other accompanying books), happened. And so I had to build the records for those, probably getting half of the data entry and tabs I need to select wrong, while I pulled information from the proposal and reviews, building a proposal I can share with the group, and a profit and loss estimate, and all the things that need to be done before we can actually offer a contract. Plus, there were a few other projects that needed tending to, and a brand new one to add to the mix.

I’m unlikely to finish any of it tomorrow, not least of all because the office is closing early for the long weekend. But hopefully I can make a sizable dent in it and have a contract out to the author before the middle of June.

By which point that other book record that needs to be fixed for the same reason, the one that’s been keeping me from working on it, will be fixed, and I’ll have to start working on that as well.

Making books isn’t always fun.