work

Office Clean Up Day

We spent most of the day — the entire afternoon, actually — cleaning in the office. Throwing out old folders and manuscript printouts, consolidating file drawers where we could, and packing up books to be shipped back to our warehouse in Kentucky. It’s all in preparation for our upcoming move in the spring. Or maybe late winter. I don’t think that, or even how much shelf and storage space we’ll each have there, is set in stone just yet. We’ll almost definitely need to do this a couple more times before the move, but this should mean we have just that much less work to do then.

And really, some of those old papers just needed to go.

The most exciting part of the day — besides the free pizza — was when I discovered the office does have a shredder, and I could use it. Which, in retrospect, sounds almost not even a little bit exciting. But hey, that’s about you can hope for on Office Clean Up Day.

House on Haunted Hilton

I took the subway from Penn Station this morning, uptown to the Hilton, where I was helping out for a few hours at an adolescent psychiatry conference we were attending. I didn’t have too much trouble finding the hotel, only getting turned around a little when I first emerged on the street — something I seem incapable of not doing every time I take the subway. (Manhattan’s essentially a grid of uptown/downtown, east side/west side, but I have a lousy sense of direction, thrown for a loop practically every time I wander underground.)

Then again, finding the hotel was a piece of cake compared to finding the exhibit hall where we were selling our books. That place is a maze.

A co-worker arrived to take my place a little before noon, and I headed back to the office, risking the subway a second time. And from there, the day progressed like pretty much any other. I sent some manuscripts out for review, received a review back, and had a perfectly ordinary afternoon.

Then this evening, I wandered downtown — walking this time — to join some friends for pizza and a live simulcast of House on Haunted Hill by the Rifftrax gang. They were joined by comedian Paul F. Tompkins for the movie and a couple of shorts (equally terrifying and hillarious). There was a brief moment of panic when I realized I’d forgotten to print my ticket — and the again, when the machine didn’t recognize either my credit or theater points card — but we got it sorted out at the ticket booth, and I didn’t have to head home in shame. (The theater was pretty crowded; I don’t know if it was sold out, but that’s a distinct possibility. That definitely happened at their first live show, where they had to show itbon two screens.)

Then I hopped on the subway — seriously, I usually don’t even have a MetroCard, much less one that gets used this much in a day — and only just made the train home. I believe the phrase “skin of my teeth” may come into play. And so my many thanks to the annoying (and possibly drunk) teens who were rushing to get on the same time…and therefore keeping the train from closing its doors for that second or two I needed to get on. (I wrote this on the train, which is more fun than writing it in Penn Station, waiting almost an hour for the next train, and not getting home until after midnight.)

I’m glad that tomorrow’s Friday. It’s been an oddly long week.

I guess that was Tuesday

I overslept this morning and somehow didn’t wake up until 8 o’clock on the nose. Even more remarkable, though, is the fact that I still managed to be on the 8:15 train. I even managed to shower and brush my teeth. (Well, okay, I did those two simultaneously.) And while I had to rush like mad, I didn’t have to run for the train or anything.

Sometimes it pays to live only a couple of minutes from the train station.

The rest of the day was pretty much business as usual. I spent most of it weeding through stock photo sites, which I’m still doing, looking for replacements for figures that appeared in the first edition. This is proving a little tougher than finding regular stock photos, since these others are more medical and scientific in nature. I know I’m just asking for trouble plugging keywords like “glands” into my image searches, but that’s sort of what it’s come to. The previous edition was published by a competitor, and I think they had an illustrator or two on hand, which seems just wholly unfair.

Other than that, I scheduled a follow-up appointment with my spine doctor for next Tuesday. It was probably asking too much that I be able to get a Friday appointment, and thereby use a day I was already taking off for vacation. But I rescheduled my day off, for next Tuesday, and it’s not too shabby getting the initial visit, MRI, and follow-up all taken care of it less than two weeks. Hopefully the MRI — bright and early this Saturday — will suggest a plan of action.

And this evening, when I came home, there was a helicopter circling this and the surrounding blocks for twenty or thirty minutes. Also, maybe unconnected, a police car pulling into the parking lot at the train station a few minutes before that. I wonder if they were chasing a fugitive or something. I’ve seen nothing about it on the news, or online, but that helicopter seemed to be making quite a few passes overhead.

Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn’t enjoin you all to vote for Heather in the Canadian Blog Awards. Hers is my favorite Canadian blog, which I’m sure you’re all reading anyway, but I thought I’d pass the word along.

Tomorrow, they tell me, is Wednesday.

Six years of Mondays

Today marked my six-year anniversary at work, although the day itself was just like any other Monday. I’ve actually got a pretty busy week planned, at least near the end of it, and this evening I managed to schedule my MRI. It’s this Saturday at 7 a.m. Luckily, the radiology place is right nearby, and the woman on the phone assured me that I’ll be in and out pretty quick, since I’m definitely the first appointment of the day. I still need to call my spine doctor to confirm they squared the insurance authorization — as well as to schedule a follow-up with him to discuss the MRI results — but it’s nice to have a plan of action worked out for the week.

Still, I remain wholly unconvinced that six whole years have gone by since I moved back home from Pennsylvania. On the one hand, I’m glad. I had some friends in Pennsylvania, although fewer as the years went by and more graduated, and I absolutely didn’t hate working for the university. But New York was the only place I was going to get an entry-level job in publishing, if only because this is where ninety-something percent of all publishing jobs are located. Moving back home was not at all a mistake. And yet, the thought of buying a home (or rather apartment or condo) and settling down…I still really don’t know how I feel about that. I like my job and the people I work with, and I do want to move out on my own again, but is New York really where I want to stay?

It should be noted I am not the most decisive of individuals. That’s sort of how six year go by just like that.

Friday, finally

Aside from vaguely wishing all day that today was actually next Friday, when I’m off from work and going to the spine doctor…and vaguely wishing that I didn’t feel the need to go to the spine doctor at all, frankly…today was a pretty ordinary day.

I spent it doing pretty much what I’ve been doing all week: working on this stress management and prevention textbook, by trying to get professors to take a look at chapters, looking at the chapters myself, and wading deep into stock photo websites for the images I still haven’t found samples for. The images run a wide gamut, from yoga and rock climbing, to skin disease and prison camps. At one point this morning, I had two tabs open in my browser, one with photos from Auschwitz, another with a review of Katherine Heigl’s new movie. (Okay, the review was me goofing off.) I’m not trying to make a joke about that; it was just a weird moment, a strange dichotomy of sorts. Even weirder when it was pointed out, via Twitter, that Heigl starred in an episode of The Twilight Zone where her character travels back in time to kill Hitler. (Presumably by acting shrill and disapproving of the whole Third Reich.)

Hey, it was a long day.