work

What I did with Wednesday

Today was just your average, garden variety Wednesday. We had a meeting at work this afternoon to discuss e-books and, more accurately, e-inspection/examination copies. (That’s when a professor asks to see a book before potentially adopting it for a class. There are restrictions built in, and sometimes it’s a physical copy and sometimes it’s electronic. But if it’s a legitimate course, and we think there’s potential for course adoption, the book is free.) An informative, if not exactly exciting meeting, though I did find myself joining in when the discussion turned to this whole Macmillan/Amazon kerfuffle and e-readers.

I keep meaning to post something more in-depth about the whole thing, about e-books in general, and Amazon and the new Apple iPad more specifically. But, for now, the short version is this: I’m still honestly thinking about buying an iPad, despite some misgivings about what is (and isn’t) available in the initial version, and I’m learning to like Amazon a little less every day.

But, honestly, nobody has any clue about the future of e-books. We’re all just trying to muddle through and guess where things are headed.

We also got a surprising e-mail at work today from human resources, informing us that the company will be offering summer hours from July to September. What that means is, we work the same number of hours, but a little more on Monday through Thursday. Then we get to leave at one o’clock on Friday. I don’t have to let them know until May, but I’m definitely thinking about it. I’d most likely work 8:30 to 5:15 four days a week, which wouldn’t change my schedule too much, and it would mean my weekend would start three hours earlier.

And who doesn’t like a few extra hours in their weekend?

Out of all ho

Today’s phrase of “forgotten English,” according to my desk calendar of the same name, is “out of all ho,” meaning “out of all restraint” and “derived from the exclamation ‘ho!’ — used to stop the combat at a tournament.”

Which has pretty much nothing to do with today.

Aside from a late afternoon meeting about our e-commerce system — a meeting that threatened to keep me at work until 5 o’clock, but thankfully didn’t — not a whole lot happened today. I finished reading Already Dead by Charlie Huston, a pretty gritty but deeply entertaining vampire detective story, and at work continued reading about transference and countertransference, specifically how they relate to the counseling of older adults. Why, what are you reading?

It’s my sister’s birthday — she’s four years younger than me — but otherwise pretty much just an average, wintry Tuesday.

“I like pie.”

Today wasn’t a particularly exciting Monday, just your average back-to-work-after-the-weekend sort of day. We had a quick meeting about a conference I won’t be attending next month in Chicago, and everyone was amused to discover there would apparently be “PIE Sessions” there. Though I’m now disappointed to learn that stands for “Participant Information Exchange,” which seems a poor substitute for actual pie.

And that’s really about it, the limit to the excitement I saw today.

And now for something completely the same

It snowed quite a bit here this morning, both on Long Island and in Manhattan, but you wouldn’t know it to look around now. Except for a conspicuous snowman on a neighbor’s lawn, almost all of it had melted before noon. There’s more predicted for the weekend, but we shall see.

Work continues to keep me busy, albeit not with anything new to say about it. I spent today working on the same projects I’ve been working on all week, and that I’ll probably spend all of tomorrow working on, too. It’s both more and less boring than it sounds.

Other than that, not much. Just glad that tomorrow is Friday.

Gosh dern it

The word for today in my Forgotten English calendar is dern, meaning “of actions done or proceeding in secret, or in the dark; kept concealed; hence dark, of evil of deceitful nature.”

I don’t know that it’s especially apt or anything, but it amused me.

Today was a really long day for some reason, not particularly more busy or more stressful than Monday or Tuesday, but a whole lot slower. Maybe it’s just the cold weather than crept back in after a couple of surprisingly warm days. They are predicting snow for the weekend. Whatever it was, it seemed like a long time before five o’clock rolled around and I could leave work for the day.

I spent most of the day working on that same gerontological counseling book. The way textbook adoption cycles work, it really has to go into production by next month so that it can be published before the Fall. So I’m trying to get the revised chapters I’ve already received as finalized as possible, so that, when the author has given me everything, it’s just a question of handing a ready-to-go manuscript over to an editorial assistant who can then transmit it to our production department. The good news is the author’s so far made some really terrific revisions, taking what I thought was an okay text and really strengthening it, making it even more accessible and student-friendly. In the unlikely event that I was ever to take up the counseling of older adults, I think this is a book I’d want front and center on my shelf.

So that’s an ever so exciting glimpse into my day-to-day as a developmental editor. Today it consisted mostly of re-reading chapters and copying my changes over to the electronic versions. The thrill ride never stops!

And that, for the most part, was how I spent my Wednesday.