personal

An average Friday…but man, was there ever a lot of it. I have to tell you, when you don’t spend the work day playing laser tag and driving go-karts, it just isn’t the same.

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.

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.

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.

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.