Journal Entry: May 10, 2009

Friday
Last Friday (the first of the month), after work, T-- went out shopping for the evening with Diana, leaving me to watch AB. I ended up taking her to the mall for dinner in the Food Court. N-- met me there and helped me find a Mother's Day present for T--. In the process, I got to see what it's like to try to run errands with a child in tow. It wasn't actually as bad as I would have guessed.

I got home from that eight-ish, and D-- called to see if I was free to go out later. T-- showed up right after that called and confirmed that I was, so around 9:30 D-- swung by and picked me up. We checked on a couple coffee shops but they were closed, discussed a couple different bars, and ended up going to On the Border. We sat in the bar, finished a pitcher of sangria and two or three bowls of chips, and ended up taking home a bag full of leftovers somehow. Chips, salsa, queso, tortillas.... We think maybe the waitress had a crush on D--.

Saturday
Saturday morning T-- got up early and took AB out garage saling, so I took the time to get some work done. I mowed the lawn and put down some weed killer, got a couple old Wal-Mart bags out of a tree in the front yard, cleaned up the house some, and even did a little writing. Then I got cleaned up in time to meet T-- and AB at IHOP for lunch.

After lunch was my niece Lola's birthday party -- a tea party at my sister's house -- and I'd received conflicting reports concerning whether or not boys were supposed to be there, so I picked the most self-serving option and skipped it. D-- and I went to see Wolverine instead, which turned out to be a chick flick, somehow. So there really were no winners.

My grandma and my aunt Darla's family came up from Dallas for the party, so after the movie we all went out to dinner at Ole. It was excellent fun. Sometime in the afternoon T-- had mentioned that we really needed to watch Quantum of Solace (she and I hadn't seen it yet), and then when we mentioned that at dinner my brother-in-law said he hadn't seen it, either. Or 300. Or Transformers. We were aghast, so I told my sister her husband was going to spend the evening at my place.

We watched the Bond flick, and then T-- went to bed. Then we put in Transformers and I was yawning before the end of that one so I ended up going to bed, but D-- and Jeff stayed up to watch 300. Good for them.

Sunday
Sunday morning we had church, and then headed up to Jason's Deli to meet N-- and K-- for lunch. After that I took the girls home, then headed back to Edmond to play some Demigod with K--. Two hours disappeared like that, and then I headed back home in time to have dinner with T--. We had a pretty quiet evening, playing Hi-Ho Cherry-oh with AB and then watching TV after she went to bed.

Monday
N-- went back to work on Monday, and T-- got to watch Jason for the afternoon. She also made up a delicious pot roast and tempted N-- and K-- to come over for dinner. After they left we moved to the living room to watch our Monday night shows (only comedies left now, and it looks like tomorrow might be the finales of those). I brought my laptop out of the office to work while we watched, and finally got started recovering my documents folders.

Before the robbery I'd had all my active writing projects divided unevenly across two working directories -- one on my computer at work (which I'd brought with me from Lowrance, where I did a lot of creative writing at the office), and the other on my computer at home. There was a lot of overlap between the two folders, but they were nowhere close to synced. On top of that, I've been doing more and more work on Google Docs lately, which is not reflected in either folder (but, also, was not lost in the robbery).

Anyway, my backups consisted of a three-month-old backup of my folder at work, and some CDs that contained 3-, 5-, and 6-year-old backups of my home folders. Again, there was some overlap but it wasn't identical.

So I started the process of reducing this massive piles of documents down to only the most recent version of each document. I went through my novels first, gathering them into project folders by series and novel, but I haven't even begun the process of comparing individual files there. Then I went through my academic papers (only about 30-40 of those), and got those cleaned up.

Then I started working on my poetry, and ended up spending all of last week on that project. I had 160-something poems, but they were scattered (and frequently duplicated) across nearly 200 files, many of which were collections of several poems at once. To clarify the collection at the expense of a little extra effort, I decided to break them all out into individual files, again saving only the best version of each. That meant a lot of comparing documents. I also decided to make the styles consistent across all the documents and label each one according to the oldest date I knew it had existed (which mostly meant going off the Last Modified date on the big collection files, so it looks like I wrote several dozen poems on 13 January 1998 and a couple dozen more on 1 August 2002, but whatever).

Anyway, I started that process Monday night.

Tuesday
Tuesday T-- got to babysit baby Jason again, and I got to go to work again. Yay! But while I was at work I got an email from Dr. Agan, one of my professors at OC, saying that she had sent off my recommendation letter to OU and, oh, by the way, would I be willing to teach Technical Writing at OC in the fall.

That's a big deal. T-- was incredibly excited for me, as were most of the people I told about it. D-- said it sounded like too big of a time commitment, especially with me going to school in the fall (and he's not wrong), and B-- said it sounded like a miserable experience for someone with social anxiety (and he's not wrong), but I think in the end I'm going to do it. We need the money, it'll look great on a resume, and I'll have a lot of support from my old Tech Writing professor, who goes to church with us. She also mentioned that I can make it a half-classroom half-online course, so that cuts the time investment considerably. I'll have a lot of work to do at home, but I can handle that. It was the extra hours out of my evenings I was really worried about.

Wednesday
Wednesday night we tried to go to KFC to get Oprah's free chicken (or something), but everyone in the world did the same thing so we ended up going across the street and getting Popeye's you-have-to-pay-for-it-but-at-least-you'll-get-it-in-the-next-two-hours chicken. We met D-- and N-- and K-- there, then I went to church (for a change) so I could meet with Gail Nash (my old Tech Writing prof) and learn what I told you in the last paragraph.

After that K-- and N-- came over to watch Lost which, for various reasons, took us almost three hours to accomplish. It was a good one, though.

Thursday
Thursday night, I think we watched some TV and I worked on my poetry. I don't remember anything exciting.

Friday
Friday was my RDO, and I'd promised T-- I would watch AB in the afternoon so T-- could get a haircut. Once again she woke up early and took AB out garage saling so once again I got up and mowed the lawn. I also cleaned out the closet in my office because we're going to be switching the office and baby's room soon, and I did some work in the garage, too.

Then T-- called to say she'd lost track of time and wouldn't be home before her haircut. She was in Edmond so she dropped AB at my sister's place, and I got an afternoon off. I spent it working on my poetry (and finished up that project), and doing a little writing.

Then T-- got home and put AB down for a nap, and a few minutes later K-- showed (that'd be around 3:00), to take me to the theater.

We had plans to go see Star Trek for K--'s birthday, and it being opening day decided we needed to be there early. K-- and I went to save spots in line (T-- and N-- and B-- showed up in time for the movie), and we ended up getting there way too early. We'd brought our laptops with us, though, and we set up an ad-hoc network and spent the time playing Demigod. It was fun. There was a little initial concern about how much we'd look like dorks, but come on, we were waiting in line for the Star Trek movie. That ship had already sailed.

The movie was fantastic. Of Star Trek, I've only ever seen Generations and First Contact. Maybe (maybe) two or three episodes total of any of the series, ever. So, yeah, I came to it new. The movie was good enough that I'm thinking of finally watching some of the shows. We'll see.

After the movie everybody headed home (it was already after nine, after all), but I stuck to my recent pattern of doing way too much on weekends and went over to B--'s place. I caught up with B-- and E--, telling them all about my teaching opportunity, and then we watched Comedy Central's roast of William Shatner. That was some funny stuff.

Saturday
Saturday morning I had to wake up early so we could pack the car and head to Wichita. We're there, now, to celebrate Mother's Day. I spent most of Saturday laid-up with back pain, but John and I took AB out to dinner at Chili's in the evening, then after we came back John ran out to rent one of the old Star Trek movies on essentially the same principle that led us to having Jeff over last weekend. Unfortunately they didn't have Kahn or the one with the whales, so he grabbed Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Ummm....

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.