Idleosity
It seems like it’s been forever since I had an entire weekend off — as I whined earlier, March is the height of deadline season, so it’s usually eaten up with gobs of frantic overtime. We’ve had our share of that this year, but somehow (possibly because there are quite a few chapters this time that are virtually unchanged since 2004?) we are currently less screwed than we’d expected, and thus I haven’t gone in to work at all this weekend. Shocking, I know.
That’s not to say that everything is perfect: there’s one chapter that’s just gone out in galleys, and it will probably come back to bite us — either the author will provide all the SI and proper camera-ready figures he should’ve provided months ago, in which case there will be a helluva lot of cleanup and fixing to do; or he’ll ignore us completely and we’ll try to figure out what to do at the last minute, which will also involve a lot of even more frantic last-minute work. Another author of the more persnickety persuasion is still looking over two chapters (one of which he’s seeing for the second time), and will quite possibly want to debate us endlessly over semantic preferences and style issues (”But people will expect to see the word permit here — they’ll get confused if it says allow instead!”). At least he cares enough to get back to us about his chapters, though.
Still, for the moment, there’s little productive we can do to get further ahead, so I’ve been luxuriating in an actual three-day weekend. I slept much of Friday, and have only slowly recovered enough that I could get around to doing stuff. For instance, I finally finished my second chemo cap for donation:
It’s a little more Cat-in-the-Hat than I’d thought it would be, but it works. The two caps need to be mailed tomorrow. I also started a cabled scarf in a metallic silver yarn, but unless I find three or four more balls of Louisa Harding “Glisten” in color #2, it’ll be a very short scarf indeed. (The yarn seems to be out of print, or otherwise really hard to find, which is odd because it’s so pretty.)
Not a whole lot else to report, actually. The vet decided that Nigel’s thyroid meds were revving his metabolism a bit too much (what probably tipped them off was his stay with them in January, in which he ate three weeks’ worth of food in one week, without gaining weight, and was still begging for more), so they’ve dropped him down to 0.6 mg of L-thyroxine a day; he now seems only ordinary-beagle-level interested in food, which is still quite a bit, but at least he’s stopped yelping uncontrollably when I eat my own dinner. (The routine is that he eats first while I’m preparing my own food, and then has a smaller “dessert” serving of kibble after I’m done, so it’s not as if he should be maddened with hunger as he watches me eat.) Unfortunately, though, he’s been having a lot of accidents inside — often within an hour of his last airing. Not sure whether the two are related, although thyroid hormones do seem to affect thirst, so maybe that’s what’s going on. I hope it’ll settle out soon, though, whatever it is.
I also finally got around to doing my taxes (refund! woo hoo!) and Sid the Beetle’s ad valorem (wah). I was going to bake some rolls today, but it’s slightly chilly and I have my doubts about how well the yeast would fare. At least I’ve got a batch of seitan going in the slow cooker, and might do either a Seitan o’ Greatness-type thing or a batch of chickpea cutlets for the upcoming week. (My weird work schedule and the horrible traffic commuting from our prison-like temporary office building means that I don’t get a chance to even start dinner before 7:00 during the week, so I’ve learned that, unless I intend to rely on Amy’s frozen food, planning ahead at least a bit on weekends is a must.) Going to try to get it in gear enough to do some muffins, too, if I can decide which type to make; all the ones that leap to mind at the moment are a little sweeter than what I’m craving.
Or maybe I’ll just take a nap, while the slow cooker bubbles gently away and the smell of seitan broth gradually osmoses through my little flat. That would be nice, too. Ahhh. . . .
