Of Bowling, Editing, and Cheesy Stuff
Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
I was all set to spend the day at the computer, editing away. I'm so close to being (I hope!) finished on this editing/reformatting project that it's maddening. Speaking of maddening, I've had enough of curly quotes that I may dream in inverted commas tonight.
How ironic of me.
Or something like that.
It's all - I hope - in a good cause.
About 24 hours ago a lady I used to bowl with called and asked if I'd sub for her on her league this morning. I told her I would. Getting out of the house would probably be a good thing, and it gave me a chance to work out the muscles after two weeks of not bowling. And I didn't have to pay, so why not?
I shot my average. The team took two out of three games, and total pins. I did better than my friend would have, as she's got whatever bug is going around right now.
I came home and put butt in chair to do some serious editing. I'm working on some documents that are over a decade old. I'll tell the whole story later. Suffice to say someone asked for copies. The masters in my file are in very bad shape. Some pages are missing. Even the pages that are intact may not survive another run or two through a copy machine. So, it was off to re-create the documents. Did I mention they're all over 100 pages? I couldn't find the master documents, but I was able to dig most of the components off of floppies.
I told you this was old.
What I couldn't dig off of floppies, I was able to scan in.
I got through three documents and was on the fourth when I realized I hadn't done the facing pages properly. Ack. Went back to the first document. Dug the original out of the file cabinet to get the measurements. Fixed the page styles. Replicated that across all four documents, then went back through to fix all of the formatting. Got back to the fourth document and discovered that the printed copy had curly quotes, but the surviving original pieces didn't. Not only that, but there were paragraphs missing in most - but not all - places there had been italic text. That's meant lots and lots of extra proofing. Ack. I've been stuck on that bit all day, but am almost to the end. I hope the fifth document won't be as much of a pain, but I'm not holding my breath.
I have other stuff to do. WordPress templates to destroy and rebuild. Yeah, fun stuff.
After bowling today I ran by the store and picked up something easy to cook for dinner. I knew I'd be to tired to cook much. I chose some cheesy Jambalya mix in a box and a package of sausage. When I opened the box the rice and cheese was the consistency of one of the bricks in our house. I told you this house was a piece of crap. Anyway, it took forever to get the stuff broken up enough to cook, at which point I could have cooked a more elaborate meal. That'll teach me.
Well, back to the document. I'd like to get the fourth in the series out of the way tonight. I have one last pass on the one section, then I have two very short sections to proof and fix the curly quotes on.
As I said, I'll dream in inverted commas tonight.
Tags: Writing, Life
Filed under: Writing Life
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