Well I’m still alive, believe it or not, and still more or less ambulatory. It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost 3 weeks since I fell out by the pool and and broke my shoulder. Since then my right arm has been in a sling 24 hours a day, except for a few minutes per day in the shower. That’s jolly fun. The pain has slowly gotten a little bit better, day by day in almost unnoticeable increments. This evening as a matter of fact it feels a lot better than it has over the past couple of weeks.
Yesterday — migod was only yesterday? — my son drove me out to the Mayo for more X-rays and consultation with the orthopedist. This soaked up half of his day and mine, too.
The young doc’ — who actually is a PA — ordered a vast round of X-rays to be done before we met with him.
Now, the problem with the Mayo’s X-ray department is that they operate at the speed of a galloping snail. They plunk you down in the lobby outside their four x-ray rooms and…you wait. And wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait… I must have sat there 45 minutes waiting for them to get around to X-raying my shoulder, a job theoretically scheduled at 12:45. Only two other people were waiting to be x-rayed. So that was a bit stressful, if you find annoyance to be stressful.
On the other hand, the technician was awesome. She took photos of this damn thing from every angle you can imagine and then some. By the time we got in to see Young PA Kildare, we had a very detailed set of the images.
He said he thinks it will heal up completely in another 6 to 8 weeks. But in the meantime he wants me to start physical therapy.
The nearest physical therapy outfit is about three miles away. I’ve been in there before and was magnificently unimpressed. My long-ago physical therapist, who really was awesome, has moved into tonier realms, and I will be damned if I want to drive to Scottsdale to get to a PT.
Which brings us to the next problem: I can’t drive. And my son cannot keep on taking time off work to schlep me around the city. Yesterday soaked up his entire afternoon. He is supposed to be working. He manages a crew of underlings. He cannot be gone all day long. So how the hell I’m going to get to this place escapes me. In theory I could walk: three miles (one way) is not that far for me. But in the shape I’m in just now, really it’s too far. Plus it would require walking most of the way along major horrible thoroughfares, every one of them seven lanes full of Looney Tunes. Driving on those streets is difficult enough, but walking alongside one of them…Holy shit.
So one of my chores today was to try to get my coreligionists to volunteer to schlep me over there… Three times a week. Or to somehow get the Uber application downloaded into the iPhone and try to figure out how to use it. But I ended up so so engrossed in the client’s project that I never got around to either one of those proposed chores.
God only knows how much it’s going to cost to have Uber or taxicabs haul me to this place and back home. And the hassle factor is more than I can contemplate! So that is something I’m going to have to figure out in the next few days.
On Monday when Luz the Wonderful Cleaning Lady arrives, I’ll ask her if she has time to haul me around once in a while, and if so, can I pay her to drive me back and forth to this place maybe once a week. And today when I can work up the strength, I’ll ask around the church.
Meanwhile, the beloved new client is hot to trot... Off to the University of Washington Press! She wants to get a formal proposal organized and sent to the editor there. As a practical matter, she does need to get started now: selling a book entails creating a proposal (which is a very BFD indeed) and then shopping it around to publisher after publisher.
In theory you’re not supposed to send proposals out to more than one publishing house at a time. I personally consider that to be BS and in the past have sent my proposals to four to six publishers at once. It would be a cold day in an Arizona July for two publishers to happen to stumble across each other and oh, yes, of course chat about your brilliant proposal and discover that they both received the same magnum opus on the same day. I just don’t think that’s going happen, and I think publishers’ attempts to inflict that kind of embargo on their writers are exploitive. I hesitate to tell the kid that. But may discuss it with her dissertation adviser, and also with my favorite current spy in scholarly publishing.
Also meanwhile, trying to edit copy by using Apple’s dictation system, which is about as knowledgeable as my dog, is just flikkin’ torture!!! Every passage, every sentence, every phrase pops up with error after error after error after error after error after error after error. Each one of which has to be manually fixed with one-finger, one-hand point-delete-point-tap. Over and over and over and over and over and over again. To fix one item is endlessly time-consuming. And to do it for hundreds of pages simply defies belief. Dictating a few sentences gives you things like this:
This passage is probably more appropriate for the proposal, to be addressed to publishers acquisitions editor rather then placed in the books introduction. Consider using much of this material for your proposal focusing the introduction on the background of the events and in research in which you set the book’s facts and pieces
Here is what it is supposed to say.
This passage is probably more appropriate for the proposal, to be addressed to a publisher’s acquisitions editor, rather than placed in the book’s introduction. Consider using much of this material for your proposal, focusing the introduction on the background of the events and on the research in which you set the the book’s facts and thesis.
Intended:
Since then my right arm has been in a sling 24 hours a day.
Delivered:
Since then, the army has been wrestling 24 hours a day.
Intended:
It feels a lot better than it has.
Delivered:
it feels a lot better than cats.
LOL!! How do cats feel, anyway?
What this fiasco means — and it is an ongoing, unending fiasco — is that every single sentence, every single phrase, every single word has to be scrutinized with x-ray vision to get it correct. And even then some weird mistakes are going to slip through. It is excruciatingly time-consuming — probably absorbs about three times as much time and effort as ordinary editing requires. I do not know when I am ever going to be able to get through the client’s copy, and I’m certainly instilling as many errors as I’m correcting.
I do have my moments of wondering whether I can continue with this project… I may have to tell her she’s going to have to find someone else to edit her book.
And that is going to make this a very expensive little accident. The project is worth several thousand dollars, all of which are about to go right straight down the drain.
None of this is helped by the chronic insomnia. I was awake between two and four this morning — well, 4 a.m. was the last time I looked at the clock. The day was overcast, which delayed the usual dawn awakening for me and the dog, but we rolled out of the sack at about six. And I am presently bat-brained exhausted.
Isn’t that amusing. Apple thinks the word Dawn is a trade name, and capitalize it CAPITALIZES …sumbiche! Five tries to get the damn thing to spell capitalizes correctly!!!!!!!!!!!
I give up. Gotta go to bed. Good night, Mrs. Calabash!