Winter vacation, day 15

It dawned on me this morning just how close I am to the end of my vacation — only two days left — when I realized I had to buy my monthly train ticket. It also occurred to me how long I’ve been on vacation — more than two weeks now — when I finally opened up my work laptop and realized I’d completely forgotten my log-in password.

(It’s okay, it was on a small post-it note in my wallet. Though maybe we don’t tell my IT department that that’s where I was keeping it?)

I’d changed my password a day or two before leaving the office, since it was about to expire, and I really did think I’d have some call to use the new one while I was out. But except for a couple of e-mails answered way back at the start of my vacation — a couple that hopefully kept a book from slipping in the production schedule to February — I haven’t really done any work. I’ve been checking in occasionally, as I’d already updated the e-mail password on my iPhone, but nothing that really justified my going back to the office after the holiday party to pick up my computer.

In my defense, I was a little drunk then.

Of course, in retrospect, there’s not a lot of work I could have been doing, which I confirmed when I actually logged in and compared chapter reviews that were due against chapter reviews that have actually come in. I knew this was going to be a difficult time of year for instructors to take deadlines seriously, but in the past two weeks I received very few of the responses I need to get anything done. I could start collating what little feedback I have, before I go back to the office, but that’s not going to save me a lot of time in the long run. And saving myself time in the long run — preparing for a January that’s going to be front-loaded with so much to do — was the only reason I took the laptop home with me.

I can think of better ways of spending the next couple of days, like maybe reading a book.

I spent a good part of today mostly working on Kaleidotrope, whose new issue will be ready for launch tomorrow or Wednesday, if all goes according to plan. I want to do more with Kaleidotrope in the coming year, really make it work the considerable out-of-pocket investment of time and money.

I’m okay with the time, even if I’m a little scared about re-opening to submissions in two days. But it’s the money part that’s a tougher sell sometimes. I pay a cent a word, way below what’s considered a professional rate but still pretty steep for a project that takes in no money — beyond a couple of very generous and welcome donations — and it’s a cost I want to justify by making the zine more than just a collection of other people’s work. I did that a little last year, and I want to look for new ways to do it this.

Because right now, I’ve already filled the next two and half years’ worth of issues with last year’s submissions. It would be too easy for the fun of producing the zine to disappear on me.

This evening, after writing fake horoscopes — that’s something I do for the zine, something I started when I was editing the weekly newsletter for the Penn State Monty Python Society (and something I almost certainly stole from The Onion — I watched You’re Next. It’s an okay movie, mostly because it mixes up a couple of horror genres and isn’t just your standard home invasion scary movie. It gets off to a slow start — which is probably necessary, in retrospect, even if it could have used some better acting there — and ends poorly, but it takes a couple of interesting turns along the way. (Not surprising turns, necessarily, but ones that keep it, at least, from being something more than similar movies I’ve seen.)

And that was Monday. It was Monday, right?