measi's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mid-week slacking (an all over the place entry) I've officially gone on slacker mode for the next 36 hours. After finishing this entry, I'll be putting my out-of-office assistant on, shutting down the 'puter, and heading back into Boston for a five day weekend, not counting Friday (where I'll actually be in the office, but really not doing much besides payroll). It's been a very weird tenday here at Prentice Hall, and I'm quite thankful to be getting the break. Bad reviews came in for prototypes on 2004 copyright books, and they're having to start from scratch on just about all of them. Roberto (dahling!) has come up with some wonderful new ideas, IMHO, that are a vast improvement over the originals. Then again, I have a strong bias against orange... unless it's with black, and they don't go for that color scheme in junior high (*cough, sorry... middle grades*) and high school textbooks. The stress over prototypes has spilled over into just about every other project going on, since most of the books currently in production had to be dropped so these prototypes don't go too far behind schedule. It's made people testy, and while I've been fortunate to keep relatively oblivious inside my admin cubie, it really crashed through yesterday with a slew of internal forms and all of the work that I'd left on Linda's desk last week that she couldn't approve and return to me until last night. *ugh* [bar] So I'm definitely ready for a long weekend. Tonight [erich] and I are going over to [ade]'s house (as opposed to New Hampshire) to spend time with the Terra clan. And then tomorrow, a nice long day off to spend with Erich. :) My first Valentine's Day to celebrate since high school. No more Black (insert day of the week here) days... no sir, this year I'll be able to celebrate the Day of Love (i.e. rub-it-in-to-those-who-don't-have-a-significant-other day). Saturday will be a gaming day as always, and sometime over the weekend, I'll hopefully be able to catch some of the Olympics. I do prefer the Winter Games to the Summer Games-- there are more sports that I'm interested in watching... hockey, figure skating, speed skating, luge, any event. Hell, I even watched curling for about a half-hour last night... and have concluded that it's a very funky version of bocce that just HAPPENS to have 40 pound stones instead of the five-pound marble ones, and it also just HAPPENS to be on ice. *shudder* I still can't figure out what those brooms are for, though. NBC's coverage of the games has been pretty lackluster, considering that the games are in the USA, and they don't have the excuse of a 15 hour delay as they did in Sydney. But I'll take what I can get. I just don't like seeing only the highlights. While yes, winning often takes perfection at this level, it's hard to appreciate that perfection if you can't see those who don't quite get there... the people who you see having to fight in their effort just to finish an event, or the people whose ability was just swept away. I usually don't watch those sappy in-depth mini-biographies on the different athletes because they all start to sound the same after a while, but I did watch the one on Bill Johnson earlier this week-- the 1984 gold medalist from Sarajevo who had a horrendous accident on race day at a ski resort on the other side of Montana from where I grew up. I grew up skiing. I've raced gates. Hearing what happened to him sickened my stomach, because going only perhaps 30 miles an hour, I've had the fear of God put into me when I've caught a bad edge and gone crashing down the snow. I don't even want to know what it would feel like at twice that speed. [bar] I've been resisting the urge to sign up for every last nervousness.org swap all day. I did start one more, and as of writing, has 22 out of 30 signups on it. It's based off of the project at 1000 journals, only this one's for me. :) Whether or not it actually finds its way back to me, who knows, but I hope it does. I did, believe it or not, manage to get onto one of those 1000 journals... #772, in fact. But I'm about tenth or eleventh in line for it, and the track record of these journals makes it doubtful to me that I'll ever see the thing. It seems like everyone loses them. But hey... if it does manage to get to me, I'll scan pages in for everyone to see. :) I'd debated doing one privately only with folks on Diary-X, too... if anyone's interested, just lemme know. But anyway... it's quarter past five now, and I definitely want to get outta here for my long weekend. See you all later. --Mel. 4:50 p.m. - 13 February 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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