Weekend at the Table

Thanks to a lovely long lunch yesterday with everyone's favorite cruciverbalist, I actually have spots of sunburn on my person--a blotch on my neck, and my left forearm, mostly. Plus, the freckles have come out to play. Basically, we could sit there and eat our lunches and watch each other break out in melanin spots while discussing the merits of commas. Yeah, okay, not everyone's idea of a good time, but it worked for me.

This weekend will likely be low-key. Friend is with his family this weekend, so I'm going to try to get all of one of the editing jobs done while watching the IRL race and the last two stages of the Tour de France (which I've been watching all along; Friend got me watching it several years ago). Not a particularly thrilling weekend, but that's okay. Basically, I'm trying to get the two editing jobs, the lady-bits biopsy, the colonoscopy, and the latest proposal submission all taken care of before the second weekend in August, when Friend and I head to the beer festival (and there's some talk of going to hear DMB that Sunday night, as well, which would be fun, if we have the energy to do it). As you can tell by the contents of that list, getting it all done so I can just be done with it and drink beer and hang out would be a fine thing.

I feel better about the proposal, because (a) it's basically a project report (i.e., it's a noncompeting submission, unlike the May submission), and (b) I talked to the project officer this morning. My boss called me to beg me to sit in on the phone call with Annoying Coworker and the project officer, working under the assumption that I already knew about this call, i.e., that AC had, as instructed, told me about the call. Oops; no. So I sent her an email and she came to my office around 9, saying it was time to call. Oops; no; supposed to be 10:30. Still, the PO was okay with talking with us then, so we talked for nearly an hour. At one point, I basically had to shut AC up when she interrupted me AGAIN. But it went well, with the PO, and afterwards i tried to speak to some of AC's obvious fears/insecurities by making it clear that i want to make it easier for her to manage her programs.

Because, when all is said and done, I actually do want to do that. She drives me completely batshit, and I am most certainly not alone in that, but I want her to succeed, not fail. More to the point, i want her to succeed according to standards on which we all agree, not succeed according to her demented view of the universe. (My boss's counterpart in the sibling organization has observed that AC will repeat something four or five times, as though the repetition makes it so; each time she says something, the more convinced she becomes that it's true.)

Okay, time to work. The Tour is underway, the editing is calling. (Incidentally, the Tour is even more fun this year than the past few years. They have made a seriously concerted effort to get drugs out of the Tour, and, perhaps as a result, perhaps coincidentally, it is unclear who's actually going to win the thing, with only two stages (today and tomorrow) left to go. Which is actually pretty exciting.)