Month: February 2012

Ye olde book trade

It was a long day at work, toiling away on a project I’m not at all familiar with, doing the sort of work I actually haven’t done in a couple of years (back when I was an editorial assistant) with a bunch of new procedures with which I’m not at all familiar. It was the new procedures and unfamiliarity with the manuscript that made it tough going; the meat and potatoes of the work itself, while still really time-consuming, was like falling off a log.

In that it hurts a whole heck of a lot and is embarrassing when people see you slip.

It promises to be more of the same for most of the week. At least I know I have something to fill the days.

Weekend’s end

I spent all of yesterday in Maryland to celebrate my sister’s birthday. Like last year, we met up for lunch in Towson, and then she and my mother went off to shop, while my father, brother-in-law, and I drove over to the Maryland Historical Society, which turned out to actually be a quite interesting museum. Then we met up for dinner at a tapas place in Baltimore, where I had some of the tastiest duck I’ve ever eaten.

This morning we drove home, and along the way I finished reading He Died With His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond. There are some good things to say about the book…although maybe more about the person who bought it for me as a gift. Ultimately, the bleak and grimy poetry of some of the noirish writing aside, the book was a disappointment.

I’d probably say the same for Red Dwarf: Back to Earth, although that, obviously, was a disappointment of a different kind. Now that I’m all caught up on the show — minus, of course, the new series being filmed now — I have to say, my favorite remain the earlier episodes. Somewhere around series 5, the show took a turn. Maybe it was the loss of Holly, maybe it was the new filming process. It rallied a little in the series just before BtE — shooting again before a live-studio audience — but my common complaint watching later episodes was: more money, less funny.

This is what I’m doing instead of watching the Super Bowl, mind you.