personal

“I’m just jazzed about being on the show, man.”

My father wasn’t feeling well last night or this morning — a stomach bug that seems to have only hit him and the dog, both equally, although both are now very much on the mend. So I spent the morning running a few errands for him, picking up dry-cleaning, buying a few groceries, that sort of thing.

Then I sat down for lunch, and wound up watching Galaxy Quest for the I-don’t-know-how-many-th time. Hey, it was on cable, and I wandered in near the very beginning.

After that, it was editing stories for the Fall issue of Kaleidotrope. One of the great pleasures of editing is re-discovering why you accepted a story in the first place. I’ve liked all the issues I’ve put out — three online, free of charge, if you’d like to read them — but I think October’s may be one of the strongest and oddest yet.

And then tonight I watched Shane. I was worried it would be too dated and a little silly, but it was quite good. Not everything about it works — it is a little dated — but it’s deservedly a classic Western.

Mad skills

I needn’t have worried about today’s skills training session running too long, keeping me away from doing my work or keeping me at the office beyond when I would normally leave. It ended around three o’clock…and I didn’t go.

I really did have a lot of work to get done. My presentation skills may suffer for the lack of training, and I had to buy my own lunch, but so be it.

Back into the office

Lots done today, still lots left to do. As of this morning, I have three new books allocated to me in development, plus all the others I was already working on, and I have to spend all of tomorrow in a training session I for some strange reason signed up for.

Busy, busy, busy.

A productive day

I don’t think it occurred to me until maybe Sunday that, by working from home last Friday, I was effectively getting myself something like a five-day weekend, since I’d be working from home again today.

Oh sure, I had plenty of work to do — no end to it, in fact — but this was a nice way to ease out of, and then back into, the week.

First thing this morning, the landscaper came to the door, wondering if, instead of the car window repair guy coming here, to the house, I could drive the car over there, to his shop, in East Meadow. I think he was worried about the rain in the forecast, but I really did have a lot of work to get done — my boss is going away starting Thursday, which is also the day I’m in a day-long training session later — and the landscaper had told me on Saturday that it could all be done on-site. So he called the repair guy back, and they got it squared away, and then he gave me cash to pay the guy and said he’d be here around noon.

He was, and it did rain — buckets, in fact, although just before it started we moved the car closer to the garage to keep the front window out of the worst of it. The guy was here maybe an hour, but my car has all its windows again, so that’s what counts.

I also have a mended pair of pants, fixing the rip in them from last week. The job maybe isn’t quite as good, but I think that’s more because of the type of rip (along the pocket) and the quality (in retrospect likely low) of the pants themselves. It’s disappointing, since they’re brand new, but I think they’re wearable for those days when all I do is sit behind my desk. (You know, most of them.)

Amid all of this, I managed somehow to put some kind of finish on the report I spent all Friday (and then some) working on, plus some work on a few other projects. It was, somehow, actually quite a productive day.