work

Tuesday

March seems to be going by a lot quicker than I anticipated.

On the one hand that’s good. Now that we’re over the initial hurdle of Daylight Saving Time, and I’m a little more adjusted to it, I am enjoying that extra daylight in the evening. The morning sunrise hasn’t quite caught up yet, so it’s still dark when I wake up, and the weather can’t decide if it wants to be seasonably mild or bitterly cold. But we do seem a lot closer to spring than we ever did in February, when I sometimes felt like the world was never going to thaw. And I’m perfectly happy to put a little distance between then and now.

But on the other hand…how can the month be more than half over already? How is that even possible? It does not seem like it should be possible.

It doesn’t help that I have several big projects at work that probably need to be finished before the end of March…and that might not be. Most of the delays I’m seeing, or anticipating, aren’t of my own making, which is something close to (but not exactly) a relief. Still, it’s a busy time of year, and suddenly realizing that April is only two short weeks away isn’t exactly helping.

But it’s not all bad. (Even the bad parts aren’t all that bad.) I’m writing some, which is nice. My weekly free-writing group took this past Sunday off, but I’ve wandered back into a short story of my own and spent some time yesterday and today at launch trying to navigate those wanderings in my notebook. It’s been a while since I’ve written free-hand (except at work), and I’ve given myself permission to be terrible, which is not permission I give myself easily. A fair amount of what I’ve written is crap, there’s no doubt, but it’s crap pointing in the right direction. If nothing else, it feels better than not writing, which is always something to aim for.

Friday

All I know is, this seemed like a very quick week.

It was a very busy week, which might account for that. There were at least a couple of mornings when I’d look around the office and realize, with some surprise, that I hadn’t moved from the same spot at my computer for over two hours. I think things will settle down a little after March, even if only because if some of these projects aren’t finished by April there’s almost no point in finishing them at all. (That’s an exaggeration, but no, they really should be finished sooner rather than later.)

Meanwhile…well, there hasn’t been too much of a meanwhile. There was a crew fixing the roof here for the past couple of days, a roof that was leaking again in the dining room after all of that snow, but luckily I wasn’t home for most of the hammering. Honestly, when I look back on the week, it doesn’t even seem possible that that’s what it was. A day, maybe two or three, but a week? Where did all that time go?

Saturday

On Thursday I was on campus, talking with instructors. I still need to type up and distribute my notes, but I’m done with campus calling until the fall, which makes me happy.

Yesterday, we had a team outing to Astoria, where we had a very nice lunch, followed by a visit to the Museum of the Moving Image, and then a drink before heading home. (My mixed drink was called a Suffering Bastard, which was much more pleasant than it sounds.) This was the outing we’d planned for a month ago when I got sick, so it was nice to finally get a chance to do it. It was a really fun day out with my co-workers.

Today, I gave blood. They had some trouble with the vein on my right arm, leaving me with a nasty-looking bruise, but it was smooth sailing once we switched to the left. Thanks to the switch, though, it took a little longer than I’d expected, and after I decided to head home for lunch rather than try to go get a (much-needed, admittedly) haircut.

Tonight, I watched Dreamcatcher. It’s not one of Stephen King’s best, but I remember liking the book well enough — even if a quick glance at Goodreads shows I only gave it two stars — but the movie is just ridiculously bad. On occasion, the ridiculous trumps the bad, making it almost enjoyable in its lousy craziness, but it’s often not even fun in a “so bad it’s good” way.

Anyway, that’s been my past few days.

The last three days (again)

There’s not a whole lot to report, actually.

The weather, while it has taken a turn the cold and flurrying since the weekend, hasn’t been the soul-crushing winter that the rest of February was. Then again, it also beggars belief that it’s the end of February already. It’s a shorter month, but not by that much. It’s still early days, but I may look back and remember it as the longest and shortest month of 2014.

At work, I handed over a book to production, and I don’t think I was quite prepared for the huge feeling of relief that would follow. But the handing-over itself? That was just a lot of paperwork and formatting and back-and-forth with authors. I’ll have two more books in quick succession that will need to go into production very soon, and I think the feeling of relief was only because they couldn’t be handed over immediately. (One manuscript has permission issues for which I’ve contracted a freelancer, and the other isn’t expected until Monday.) I had a little breathing room, in which I could focus on some other smaller projects — I have manuscripts out for review, I’m mentoring someone (and worried I’m just giving her busy work to do) — and finally typing up my notes from my campus trips a couple of weeks ago. I’ll be on campus again tomorrow, headed to Stony Brook University, unless illness or weather unravel those plans for a third time.

I finished reading Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. It’s an interesting book, one that I’ve actually attempted to read a couple of times in the past. I’m not sure exactly why those attempts fell apart on me like they did, since it’s actually a really good book and maybe one of Dick’s more accessible, less out-there books. (I’d actually started reading The Divine Invasion, then quit maybe a hundred pages in when I learned it was the middle book in the so-called “VALIS Trilogy.”) The book is an alternate history, of a world where Nazi Germany and Japan won World War II, and I think Dick makes a really smart move centering most of the action in Japanese-controlled San Francisco. The book is less about the mechanics of this world, the kind of thing you see in countless “what if the Nazis had won?” stories, and more about using that world to look at our own. If it had been set in Germany, or Nazi-controlled New York, it would have been a very different book.

And that’s about it, really. Just a handful of decent but uneventful days.

Monday and Tuesday

Yesterday was Presidents Day, so of course I spent it doing laundry.

Today it snowed, again. We certainly didn’t need that, but it only snowed for a little while, in the morning, so I guess that’s okay. And there’s no more snow in the forecast for the next week, which is even better.

Today was also the first time I was back in the office since last Monday, which was odd. I have a mountain of deadlines, with several dozen more fast approaching, and I’m just trying to keep on top of them as much as possible.