work

Sometimes a Tuesday is just a Tuesday

The iPad upgrade didn’t take quite as long as I worried it might yesterday, and I did manage to finish reading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle before I went to bed. More about that, hopefully, at some near future point, but I really liked the book quite a lot.

And that’s about it, really. Today was mostly just a placeholder of a day, spent researching continuing education providers for mental health professionals at work, and trying to get the bulk of that done before tomorrow, since that’s the end of my work week. And tomorrow only runs to three, since they’re letting us out early for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Is my four-day weekend over already?

Today, I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 with friends — it was pretty good, although rather long and occasionally a little boring — and I did the Sunday crossword. Oh, and I watched this past week’s episode of Fringe and am currently reading more of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Not exactly an exciting day, but a decent enough ending to the four-day weekend. Tomorrow, it’s back to work for what promises to be a busy three days.

Don’t look now, but I think that was a Saturday

I think the four-day weekend is starting to catch up with me a little. Today very much felt like a Saturday, and not just another in the string of Fridays I’ve been having. Which means that it’s fast approaching Sunday, and the upcoming work week. It’s a shortened work week, of course, because of the Thanksgiving holiday. (This, incidentally, is probably the one thing the holiday has over Canadian Thanksgiving, from which I believe it is otherwise indistinguishable: because the holiday’s on a Thursday, most of the time we get the Friday rolled in.) But it’s a week in which I need to get a fair amount of work done.

I didn’t get a whole lot done today. The most exciting thing that happened was I went for a walk, and along the way I startled a hawk trying to make off with a dead pigeon near my old elementary school. I took some photos, of the living bird only, when it flew up into the trees. It swooped back down and away with its meal when I turned to go. Then I saw two other dead birds before I finally arrived back home. (A superstitious man might look upon that as ominous.)

I didn’t do much reading today, and only the barest hint of any writing, but I did watch Winter’s Bone, which I’ve had sitting around for several weeks. It’s really quite good, but also kind of bleak and unflinching. I like what Roger Ebert wrote about it:

There is a hazard of caricature here. Granik avoids it. Her film doesn’t live above these people, but among them. Ree herself has lived as one of them and doesn’t see them as inferior, only ungiving and disappointing. In her father’s world, everyone is a criminal, depends on a criminal or sells to criminals. That they are engaging in illegal activities makes them vulnerable to informers and plea-bargainers, so they are understandably suspicious. The cliche would be that they suspect outsiders. These characters suspect insiders, even family members.

As Ree’s journey takes her to one character after another, Granik is able to focus on each one’s humanity, usually damaged. They aren’t attractions in a sideshow, but survivors in a shared reality. Do they look at Ree and see a girl in need and a family threatened with eviction? I think they see the danger of their own need and eviction; it’s safer to keep quiet and close off.

It’s no The Human Centipede, but then, what is?

But you know who one of the stars of the movie is? John Hawkes. So it all ties together.

The end of my working week

Today I think I managed to convince myself that it was Friday. I know that I’ve only worked three days this week, and tomorrow is, in point of fact, Thursday. But taking a four-day weekend can play tricks with your mind. Right this minute, I’m perfectly happy to let it do so.

The day was pretty much the same old thing as yesterday and the day before. I met briefly with my boss and another editor to discuss an interesting potential new project, which it seems to have fallen to me to research and follow up on. Which wouldn’t be so bad — not bad at all, really — if there wasn’t a deadline looming over the first part of the research and so few office hours between now and then. My boss would like to have something put together before he travels to England to meet with his boss, and that’s in the first week of December. I’m out the two days this week, then two more days next week because of Thanksgiving, so I don’t have as much time as I might like — for something that probably won’t be difficult, but could be time-consuming. It’s a good thing, then, that the photo research I’ve been working to finalize this week is all but done…provided, of course, we don’t run into any problems with the licensing.

I have no great plans for the weekend, beyond a dentist checkup tomorrow evening. I hope to do some reading, some writing, and, if push comes to shove, some arithmetic. Maybe even a little research on that project. (I brought my notes home.)

But don’t hold me to that.

T(h)u(r)esday?

I had a little more luck convincing myself that today was Thursday, but that may have less to do with my powers of persuasion (or, rather, powers to trick my own brain) and more with just how long the day actually was. I basically spent it doing more of what I did yesterday, only with more silly and annoying stock photo selections posted to Twitter. For some of these, I may have to accept that I’m looking for photos that just do not exist, regardless of where I look.

Tomorrow’s Wednesday, but it’s my Friday, and I’m looking forward to it. I’m also looking forward to it getting a little colder, back maybe to what it was a week ago, which it’s predicted to do before the week is out. It looks an awful lot like fall out there, but it doesn’t feel much like it.