Wherever You’re Going…

Ya can’t get there from here!

The city has had Main Drag South dug up not for weeks, not for months, but for years, thanks to the light-rail boondoggle. Though the thing is now built and open, the workmen persist in excavating this major thoroughfare.

To that they’ve added a new excavation of Main Drag East, so you CAN. NOT. TURN. EAST. OUT. OF. THE. HOOD. ON. ANY. OF. THE. MAIN. DRAGS!

At least, not without miring yourself in a traffic jam that will add a good 8 to 10 minutes to your commute.

I need to drive out to Tempe to meet my associate editor — have about a half-hour before I’d better leave. That entails driving south on one freeway and east on another. And of course driving east from the ‘hood to get to the southbound freeway.

Last night the cops shot some guy on the I-10, westbound at 24th Street. Killed him dead. So that road has been shut down since 4:30 this morning. But only west-bound, so in theory it would be OK. But…coincidentally, some morons created another crash on the State Route 51 on-ramp to the I-10. That ramp is now closed.

Normally to get around a roadblock on the SR 51 ramp, I would drive through city traffic to 24th Street, piddle down to the I-10, and head east from that point. But with the road closed westbound, 24th Street will be dead stopped, making it as impossible to get on the freeway eastbound as it is to get on it westbound.

So it looks like I’m going to have to pass through three neighborhoods to get from my house to a south-bound main drag that’s moving. Then schlep south two miles to a major thoroughfare that goes all the way into Scottsdale and doesn’t stop at the Phoenix Mountains. Drive east on that to 32nd Street, trudge down 32nd to Washington, dodge the effing lightrail there to get east on Washington, proceed to Priest, continue down Priest to Rio Salado Boondoggle Parkway, and from there make my way to our favorite restaurant.

That’s going to take about an hour. At this time of day, it should be about a 20- to 30-minute drive.

Yay.

Charley the Golden Retriever is visiting, having given himself the doggywobbles by consuming an entire plate of cookies at his house. M’hijito’s house doesn’t have a doggy door, so the gigantic dawg has to be someplace where he can get out.

Charley and Ruby are having a sh!tfit just now at a passing band of religious nuts. One nice thing about Charley: his deep bass bark makes hims sound very formidable, even though he’s not. The proselytizers decided to pass is by. Good dog, Charley!

So tomorrow the ladies who know breast cancer are coming over to help build the video application for the $20,000 grant I hope to land. Hope, of course, but don’t expect. Still: the second runner-up gets $3,500: even that would help sustain the project long enough to get it to the send -it-to-an-agent stage. And being able to say someone thought it was worth supporting with grant money would get an agent’s or an academic press editor’s attention.

I’m pretty well ready, I think; now have to refine and rehearse (rehearse, rehearse, rehearse) my part of the dog & pony show.

One of our clients bellyached about the quality of editing in the references of a set of journal articles. I’d foisted them off onto my sidekick, whose life has of late been, shall we say, maxed. So I suspect she probably foisted them onto her own subcontractor, who probably did exactly what one of my subcontractors did a few months ago: used the wrong style manual.

This particular journal, for reasons incomprehensible, uses Chicago author-date style, which is similar to APA style, but different enough to be…different. And confusing. If we follow the journal to Texas when it leaves GDU, which I’m told we probably will, I’m going to suggest to the new editor that they switch to APA style, since most of their contributors are scholars in the social sciences. This would be far easier and less headache-making for their write rs, and it would solve some headaches for us, too, not to have to ask our underlings to use Chicago’s quirky, obscure version of author-date.

That notwithstanding, one thing I want to suggest to Bidness Partner is that it’s past time we came up with an editing test for would-be subcontractors, who tend to line up outside the door. And it’s got to be something that they can’t run through a machine, since some of them are in other states. We need to be sure they actually understand the differences between the various manuals, that they can engage all the manuals accurately, and that they have enough sense to look things up when there’s some obvious discrepancy or nonsense.

Exactly what this test will look like is still pretty vague in my hot little head. But the Kid is one hell of a lot smarter than I am and so no doubt will come up with something that will work.

And now, it’s time to away. Happy Columbus Day!