personal

Let the games begin

Dark and ominous clouds notwithstanding, last night’s thunderstorm turned out to be a whole lot of nothing. Oh sure, it rained, but not a lot, and considerably less than last week, and I don’t remember hearing any dire warnings before that storm.

This evening, I surprised myself by watching most of the Olympics opening ceremony. Here in the States, NBC decided not to air them live but starting at 7:30, some three hours late, with a whole lot of inane chatter over them by Matt Lauer, Meredith Veira, and Bob Costas. Despite that, however, most of it was actually quite moving and well produced. I’m surprised to discover that I actually have some small amount of Olympics fever this year…which I think just means I may watch a little of it now and then, as opposed to ignoring it altogether.

Another note-worthy day

We have these meetings every month — have I mentioned that this is the Year of the Meeting? — where we talk about our plans for our biggest textbooks. And it falls to the development editors to take notes at these meetings, presumably because we work exclusively on the bigger textbooks and know how to do things like listen to other people and type. We do this on a rotating basis, among the entire group, and the first meeting I was scheduled to sit in on was cancelled. So I was very politely asked the other day if I could sit in for the tail end of today’s meeting, because it was likely to run past noon, and the DE who was taking notes was in the UK and would probably like to go home at some point.

I was happy to help, not that I had any legitimate reason to refuse. Of course, the next one of these I have to do before the end of the year is on a Tuesday again…

Beyond that, just a pretty ordinary Thursday. More reviewers, more It, big storm apparently on the way. (It got very dark and cloudy here very suddenly, and it’s raining some, but the world has not yet ended, as I think was predicted.

Let there be cupcakes

I had completely forgotten the fact that, starting today, another development editor and I would be taking over running our team’s monthly cross-Atlantic meetings. Or, rather, it had somehow slipped my mind that today was today, if that makes any sense. (This whole working from home on Tuesdays can sometimes make Wednesday feel like Monday, or at least make the whole week feel a little weird.)

My counterpart in the UK had suggested she’d be providing cake, and I’d promised to pick something up for the US contingent. This, of course, got rolled into the things I’d forgotten, so I had to slink back out and pick something up. Luckily, there some pretty decent bakeries to choose from in midtown Manhattan, and I settled on an assortment of cupcakes for our little group.

I think the meeting went well. I was a little worried about having to put names to faces, which is something I’m rather exceptionally terrible at, in the notes I was taking, but it ended up being more of a free-wheeling back-and-forth conversation among us all about the pros, cons, and practicalities of getting student reviews of textbooks. It may become more of an issue next month, when I’m leading the meeting and my counterpart is taking notes, but we’ll see. We haven’t even decided what our topic of discussion for next month’s meeting will be.

After that, a pretty normal Wednesday. More searching for reviewers, more listening to It on audiobook. And somehow, just like that, the week’s half over.

Tuesday’ed

Today was just an ordinary sort of Tuesday.

Honestly, with the It audio book and my recent discovery (and tonight finishing) of Limbo, it’s amazing I got anything done.

What I got done, of course, was mostly getting turned down by potential reviewers who are either too busy or want more money. But that’s the job.

It’s Monday

Except for about ten or fifteen minutes this morning, when my subway train was stuck on the platform while someone in another car, apparently, received medical assistance, today was pretty much just an ordinary Monday. And to think, if I’d risked squeezing on to the over-crowded train that had pulled in five minutes earlier, I probably even had this much to report.

I spent the day mostly collating reviewer reports, contacting potential reviewers for other book projects, and combing the internet for syllabi and course listings and enrollments that might match the kind of instructors I have in mind.

And I did most of it while enjoying the audiobook of Stephen King’s It. It’s been years since I read the novel — which clocks in, across several audio files, at about 45 hours — but I had credits from Audible and wanted to revisit the book. So far, I’m really enjoying it, particularly actor Steven Weber’s reading. It’s not King’s most tightly plotted book by any means, but it’s maybe one of his best, and scariest, and it’s one that has some genuinely interesting things to say about childhood and fear. King reportedly wrote of the book later in a letter, “Never write anything bigger than your own head.” Which I’ve always liked to take both literally and figuratively, though perhaps also as advice not worth heeding.