November 7, 2008: Indian Summer

14 Days to Baby Day! (38 Weeks Pregnant)

Happy belated 50th Anniversary to Strunk and White.  Every middle school graduate should own a copy.  A home library essential for everyone.

It has been so warm this past week.  We are definitely into the Indian Summer of November.  It has been so warm that even a lot of our neighbours have their windows open. We are having a tough time keeping the house cool enough at night to sleep.

I stumbled upon an interesting looking book today on Amazon, “Beatrix Potter: Writing in Code” from the Children’s Literature and Culture Library (Vol. 27).  I’m sure that this would be a very interesting read, however the $94.50 price tag makes me wonder if it could really be all that valuable to me.

I just barely caught the 7:08 train out of Peekskill.  Having a set time to make the train is probably good for me.  It is going to teach me to get moving in the mornings as there is no time to spare.  It would be really nice if I was able to consistently make the 6:42 train.  I suspect that it is less crowded and with just a little effort I think that making it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.  In theory that would get me into the office before 8:30 most days.

Dominica and I are both completely exhausted today.  What a week this has been.

I spoke to RIT today to let them know that I am going to be taking the winter quarter off from school.  I am hoping to be able to return to classes for the spring quarter.  We will have to wait and see.

I paid several of the bills today and noticed that Enterprise has still not returned the wrongfully charged money on the American Express bill.  One more thing that I need to deal with one more time.  It seems like I spend all of my time spinning my wheels trying to follow up with things.

I predict that as society becomes increasinly complex that there will be more and more call for personal valet services which will take the time to deal with these types of hassles for us.  Simple things that everyone needs to do like paying the bills, disputing inappropriate charges, picking up the dry cleaning, maintaining our calendars, taking our cars in for servicing, answering our phones to filter against sales calls (especially those generated through political loopholes), getting our mail, picking up the groceries, fueling the car, putting air in our tired, checking the oil, getting oil changes, washing the car, signing for packages, organizing the maid and food services, etc.  There are so many little, easy tasks that we all have to do so often that it must be a significant drain on our economy just dealing with them all of the time.  They stand between us and productivity.  It would be better, I think, to hire someone to handle them for us.  It would ensure that we are organized and that important tasks are not swept under the rug just because we have gotten busy.

There wasn’t any spare time today so I had to skip both my swimming and my lunch entirely.  I don’t mind skipping lunch too much but skipping my swim time is awful.  I need it for my health, for my stress reduction and just to get a good return on the health club investment.

Things slowed down enough for me this afternoon that I made the decision to just run for home before things got really busy again.  So at about a quarter after two I made a run for the train.  I got stuck waiting for a very long time for the subway which was almost disasterous.  Had it been just one minute later I would have had to have returned to Wall Street and wouldn’t have been able to go home until the middle of the night.  As it was I got to Grand Central Terminal and literally had to run through the terminal to make it to my train.

I got into the Peekskill Station just before four and Dominica picked me up.  We got to the house and I rushed to get logged back in and back to work.  It wasn’t really that busy of a Friday night which was significantly in my favour.  This weekend there is a freeze meaning that almost nothing is going on all weekend and while it doesn’t officially impact tonight it does lessen my workload overall.

The evening was spent in a panic to work on my paper for my class.  I wrapped up almost everything for the office by six.  Dominica ran to the New City Diner to pick up dinner for us as we are both going to be really exhausted by the time that we get a chance to get to bed.

Dominica ate dinner and read the first twenty-seven pages of my paper looks for spelling and grammar errors.  That took a long time.  I continued writing.

The writing went well, I think, and I finally turned in my forty one page, eighteen thousand word paper at eleven at night.  Once I went back and spent some time looking at other people’s papers I began to realize that my scope was completely different from their scope.  The longest paper that I saw was just under eight thousand words with most around five or six and one at just three.  The final was supposed to be a corporate handbook and I took this to mean a publishable book or a regular handbook length and I thought that ~30 pages had been mentioned which I took to mean of content not including the table of contents, bibliography, title page, etc.  I never know if I am doing what the professor wants in any of these classes.

To put my paper in perspective, though, I only wrote the equivalent of less than two weeks of SGL posts.  Two weeks of my daily blogging actually seems like a rather light amount of writing for a graduate paper.  If you’ve been reading SGL for the past two weeks you would have read quite a bit more than I wrote in this paper.

I headed off to bed, shutting down all of the computers in the house, just before midnight.  The alarm is set for five in the morning.  We are hoping to be in Waverly, New York around nine in the morning.

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