Less than 15 minutes before my 6:45 ride shows up to head across the city for the Thursday a.m. networking group, of which I’m the prez. Gerardo was supposed to have been here at 6 with a palm-tree trimming crew, but as usual he’s late.
He was supposed to have shown up over the weekend, but as usual…yeah. Naturally, he picks THE single most hectic day of the week to announce he’s bringing his underlings at the crack of dawn.
Can’t complain. Palm tree trimming is horrible, hard, dangerous work. Every few years another guy gets killed when a frond or two falls on him and suffocates him — and not just idiot happy handymen who think they can trim their own damn trees. More often it’s a professional tree dude.
After the meeting, fly back here to let the dog out — she still has a urinary tract infection and can’t be left locked up from 6:45 to 12:30, which would suit me a lot better. Then fly north up the freeway, meet the designer almost at freaking ANTHEM for godsake, halfway to Prescott. Bring along new maps, edits on old maps.
Work in to this: physical therapy exercises. Back is flaring up again, so now I need to do that routine twice a day.
Fly back here. Put the jury-rigged dog fence up. CALL THE FENCING GUY and try to talk him into installing an out-of-code puppy fence (I’m dead sure he’s gonna tell me anything near a pool has to be six feet high, in which case we’ll be using jury-rigged fencing for the next 14 years, more about which later.
Clean the pool, which will be left a godawful stone mess by the palm tree guys, who will drop the fronds and the damned seed pod wand things into the pool. First will have to suck up as much as possible with the water hose vacuum thing; then run the skimmer without Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner, then clean up that unholy mess out of the skimmer and out of the pump pot and then re-hose the bottom of the pool and then put Harvey back in, hoping nothing is left in there that will break him.
Then back to work on the project that kept me awake until midnight: Singapore client sent a 50-page magnum opus — trying to short me by setting it in 10 point type and single space the 5 1/2 pages of references and claiming it was actually only 40 pages. He wants it back by June 6, four days into the four-week course I have to teach without benefit of sidekick. Got one of my former grad students to agree to do the references but then realized the goddamn things are in a fucking field — automatically generated by some piece of software. Meaning I can’t cut them out, send them to her to work on separately while I read the body copy, and then paste t hem and her edits back in. Oh no. I have to finish the ENTIRE 50 PAGES of Chinglish arcana before she can even get it, and she has to be done and ready to ship the thing off by the 6th. Good luck with that! I see the references are full of GIGO: if you don’t enter the data correctly, the program spews it out incorrectly.
Haven’t had time to read my own page proofs for Slave Labor. Haven’t had time to ride herd on the e-book version of that thing. Rebulding t he backyard and rescuing the pool is going to absorb the whole freaking afternoon.
Gotta run!!!!
It seems like you have enough editing to quit some of the other enterprises????
Actually, all the paying work-related stuff of the day is editorial work.
My goal is to quit editorial work, quit teaching, and spend all my time working on my own writing, ultimately publishing enough books through Amazon to generate a small but steady income.
The dog with the UTI is a real, serious PITA and a constant nagging worry.
The pool thing would have been fine if the yard dude had managed to show up on the weekend when he said he would, and not on a day when I have a full schedule and no way to get out of any of this stuff, AND have to deal with a sick puppy.
The mess in the pool just now defies belief. I have to leave for Anthem in exactly five minutes, and so it will be another three hours before I can get home and deal with that little horror show. My neighbor is going to ask her college-age son if he will help out, for a fee, but we know he hates loathes and despises working on their pool and think he will politely decline. So I’m looking at a good two hours of work there, plus the time to stop at Lowe’s and pick up a ton of pool shock chemicals. Plus the time required to backwash AGAIN (just did that a few days ago, and now this mess will require a repeat job).
All of these things prohibit moving forward with the paying werk.
Since your accountant gave you the go-ahead…you could go ahead with being a full-time writer.
Exactly!
Disengaging from ongoing clients ain’t easy, though. Wasn’t it in Dr. Zhivago where one of the characters said to the heroine, “A husband is a sticky commodity”? Well…so is an academic who’s going up for tenure. Or worse, for full!!!