Oooooo . . . . . Ahhhhhhh

A little mini-vacation in the middle of the week! And I made the most of it. Tuesday night I met my friend at our usual Tuesday-night good-beer-and-free-food venue. We both got out of work early and therefore were both there early (4:00 for me, rather than 6:00, for example, and 4:20 rather than 5:00 for him), which meant more time for chatting. After dinner, we dashed out of there, hopped in his vehicle, drove to an el station and parked said vehicle, and took public transportation to the big fireworks. (I LOVE fireworks.) The past bunch of years i've watched them from a boat in the middle of the harbor; our seats on Tuesday weren't quite that good, but not by much. After the fireworks, we headed back to the public transportation, waited through a bottleneck into the station, and then got on a nearly empty train: most of the people getting on there were heading south, while we were heading north. We got off the train near the vehicle but we did not go directly to the vehicle; instead, we went to hear a band at a bar near the vehicle's location. Sleep did not occur until nearly 2 am.

Needless to say, Wednesday was somewhat slower--I did manage to do some first-pass proofreading, and we managed to grill our food for dinner, so I felt both productive and patriotic (insofar as I care at all about the latter). We had some ice cream after dinner, on our way to the lakefront near my apartment, where we could watch still more fireworks. And although I got up early this morning, I didn't get to the bakery until 10 am (I had dough in the freezer, which meant I had nothing to laminate and there was no point in going in early, plus I got to get more proofreading done). It'll be a light paycheck, given that I won't put in 40 hours this week, but I don't care. Next week will likely be somewhat hellish, given Bossman's absence for much of it PLUS me filling in for him on Thursday night at some fancy-ass foodie thing (15-hour day, that'll be), but getting the proofreading moving along means it'll be less hellish than I once feared. The editor had wanted the stuff back next week, but, given the known qualities of next week, I pushed the deadlines back to the week after that, thinking that I was better off promising late and delivering early rather than the other way around. The manuscript is unbelievably poorly written, and the copyeditor apparently saw no reason to fix a lot of the messy bits, which I don't really understand. Seriously: I could take this manuscript and write a book that is twice as good as the one they're going to get. I'm restraining myself, because I'm proofreading rather than copyediting, meaning the text is already in page proofs, but it's pretty heinous, and the things the copyeditor outright missed are a little disturbing (the past tense of "lead" is "led," not "lead," for example); I can only hope my own copyediting isn't that bad.

Okay, I'm fading fast, and this isn't anything other than a what-I-had-for-lunch post, but it's all I got. Except to say that the son of a bitch should have served a jail term.