Journal Entry: September 11, 2009

Yesterday morning we woke up to a little scare. T-- was having trouble with her stomach and pain in her lower back, and at bleary-eyed seven in the morning, it seemed a little too much like labor pains. So she curled up on the bed trying to find a comfortable position, and I called my boss and told him I'd be out for a while -- a couple of hours or a couple of days, depending how things turned out.

Things turned out to be a stomach bug, but it incapacitated T-- pretty bad for the day. I hung around the house long enough to see her feeling a little better, and then drove AB out to the babysitter's so T-- could take the day off. Then I went from there to work, and shortly after I got in, I got a call from T-- saying she was really starting to feel better. By noon, we were sure there was nothing to worry about.

Still, a tense morning.

Then in the afternoon I got home from work and locked myself in the office to put finishing touches on my class lecture. I'm still wrestling with technical issues, since last week, but I got the podcast recorded and saved, at least, and I'll post it to the website sometime this afternoon. I was able to get them a text tutorial on time, though, and I've already had a couple students finish and submit their assignment (due next Tuesday) based off the material there.

I gave up on the podcast at 6:30, because I had social writing plans for the evening, and I hadn't eaten dinner yet. I gulped down some chicken fried rice that T-- made (which was delicious), and finished it just before D-- showed up to give me a ride to Full Circle.

When we got there, we found the coffee shop packed. At first we assumed it was a book signing, but several people were wearing name tags, and as we lingered in the other room we heard frequent bursts of applause. That doesn't sound like any book signing I've been to. Probably some sort of...I don't know, corporate event.

Anyway, it was a nuisance, but we found reading chairs elsewhere in the bookstore, and D-- spent his time working on a project for the weekend, and I spent mine working on Ghost Targets: Restraint. In the first fifteen minutes I filled two pages of my scribblebook (or about 500 words), and I turned to D-- and said, "I just doubled my word count for the week." That was more a sad commentary on my week than a boast about my productivity.

Before the night was over, though, I had two thousand words, and was well into chapter eight. That's a boast. It was a great night, and I'm climbing into the part of the novel that I'm really excited about, so I expect it to get a little easier from here on out.

We got back to the house at 10:00, and T-- had the Steelers game on, so D-- hung around to see how that turned out. It was a tense game (and just fun to be watching real NFL football again, even if it wasn't one of my teams). Definitely a good time.

That took us past eleven o'clock, though, and then when I stopped in the office to check my email before bed, I had a message about my podcast and realized what I'd done wrong earlier in the afternoon. So I stayed up for another hour wrestling with that, fixed my earlier error (re-recording the whole lecture in the process), and then discovered I still didn't know how to make it available to my students.

So, as I said earlier, that remains unresolved. And I was up late last night, and the RDO I should've had today got split so I could have time off for my Tuesday classes. So I'm at work, and tired, and ready to be home.

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