Category Archives: Diary

Tired Professional Editor Girl

Day Two: many words have fallen to my pink highlighting bar of doom. If only I was permitted to edit to the extent to which I wish to edit! Then I would be in heaven. But there are rights issues.

We did a beautiful full moon ritual tonight. I have missed group ritual.

In other news, I have a new (secondhand) cell phone. Of course, since the provider website won’t recognise my credit card because it claims I’m not typing in the correct address registered to the card, I can’t do more than activate it until I go out and buy a top-up card. Sigh. At least now I’ll know what time it is when I’m on public transport. (I lost my Eeyore watch! I cannot find it anywhere! I am very sad indeed.)

Very tired. Going to bed now.

Day One, On-Site Professional Editor Girl

So! Here I am, at home after my first day of the bright shiny on-site contract. I am working on the floor with the team as opposed to working somewhere else, which is both good and bad. The sound and movement around me is mildly distracting, even when I have my headphones on, but time moves quickly and people are right there when I have a question.

Things I have learned:

French keyboards and I do not get along. (This is, alas, also true of my new-to-me laptop.)

Public transport is a temporal black hole.

The heads of the team do not actually know the specifics of what they want me to do, other than to integrate two databases, and to make things better. Fortunately I too want to make things better. Most of today was spent feeling my way through the material to get a really good handle on what needs to be done.

Everyone — and I mean everyone — takes lunch. I am unused to this, as the last time I had an on-site job it was in retail where we usually worked through lunch, or only took as long as necessary to bolt food before going back to handle the pile of tasks that needed to be done.

I need a snack at around three-thirty or four, or I get wonky around the time I leave.

Things I accomplished today:

Around mid-afternoon I discovered that 25% of what I was going to classify and correct was already in the main file. I am very, very glad I figured this out before I worked for a few days and discovered that everyone’s time had been wasted. Also, it reassured me that the way I was editing things was good, because my corrections ended up matching what was in the main file most of the time. The designer whipped up a formula thingy to compare/sort (I’m the word girl, not the tech girl) and I now have an annotated list that clearly identifies what in the new file is (a) already in the main dictionary, and (b) what isn’t. Yay me for locating and identifying that particular potential disaster for everyone. Tomorrow is a new day with that pitfall out of the way, and first thing I shall be sitting down with one of the heads and making a very detailed list of what they want me to do, in the order it ought to be done. This seems a very free-flow sort of project and work environment, and very flexible, but I have a limited time in which to do this for them and I need to pin down a less-vague system that will work for both parties, to be used as a reliable checklist but that will still be organic for everyone.

I have a desk, and a computer, and internal e-mail, and passwords, and all sorts of official things. And all this was operational about an hour after I arrived. Impressive. I only got my keycard mid-afternoon, though, so it’s a good thing I had friends who could use theirs to swipe me back into my top-secret room after lunch.

I ate lunch. (This is a big thing for me. Everyone leaving the floor at noon is an excellent reminder.) Meallanmouse will keep me on the lunch-track, hurrah!

Memorable things:

Baronscartop: “Those guys are totally checking you out.” Heard not once but twice while on the casual ‘this is where you work’ tour first thing in the morning, one on each floor. I am so oblivious to these sort of things. Nice to have friends who can point it out to me.

Not having butterflies in my stomach at any time. Yes, I know what I’m doing, and yes, I have confidence in my abilities and my adaptability. It’s just odd to be put in an alien environment and realise this, as opposed to working in one’s home office and letting the awareness sift to far below the conscious surface for long periods of time.

Also: The smaller contract that I worked on at the end of last week and this Sunday appears to be satisfactory to the client. Yay me, again. Much with the yayness, in fact.

Feeling Misanthropic

Well, this afternoon was a complete waste of gas and oxygen. I have none of the things I went out for, because they were out of stock or there were too many people in line or the sales flyers had been misleading. “See how many bags I do not have,” I said to HRH when he asked how the shopping trip had gone.

Also, people are stupid and inconsiderate — not that this is a news flash or anything. But if one more person stopped dead in the doorway to a shop while chatting on their cell phone or in the middle of the concourse for no reason, oblivious to anyone else moving around them, I was going to run them down with the stroller.

Bah.

I am tired but not sleepy, I look like death warmed over, I have no voice thanks to this cold, we’re about to embark upon a week of rainy weather, and I start a new job tomorrow. At least I get to look forward to lunch out with friends.

Concert Recap Etcetera

First and foremost, a heartfelt thank you goes out to the nine people who made it out to my concert last night. I’m sure it was wonderful. All reports I’ve had have been to that effect, so I’ll trust them. I don’t remember much of it myself, being under the influence of a double-dose of cold medication. I do remember being very pleased with my expression in general and with my intonation in a couple of tricky places, and every once in a while doing the “Are we here already?” sort of thing. I received a couple of very nice compliments, both from inside the section and from the audience, so I will trust those as well. My section leader is very encouraging and supportive of me, and I learn so much just from sitting next to her. I wish I had more time to properly devote to music, and to take lessons from her.

HRH only got to the concert just before intermission, as Liam was very irritable and fought going to bed more than he usually does. Liam has been rather cranky in general and a challenging handful over the past couple of days because of his cold. (I seem to have the worse cold, which is just fine; I’d rather it be me than the boy.) Arriving late meant that HRH missed the Boyce symphony (very pleasant and my intonation was much better in it than it has been over the past week — why it previously suffered I have no idea, because it’s dead easy to play. Perhaps because it was the first thing we played in this week’s rehearsals, and so it was like a warm-up for my fingers and brain?) as well as the Vivaldi double violin concerto plus most of the Water Music suite. Fortunately he caught the Haydn symphony, which was nice and tight and relatively gaffe-free, and had a great impact.

When we walked out of the church, the sky was very clear and the stars and moon were so incredibly bright. I was out four nights last week for various music rehearsals and meetings, and every night it’s been the same. Lovely.

I’ve been up to my ears in contract work the past couple of days, very mind-twisty as I work out what the client wants from his abstract notes and rewrite/expand upon them. It’s always an interesting challenge working in this client’s projects. I have to finish it up today during the boy’s nap and tonight after he goes to bed, as I begin the full-time on-site contract tomorrow.

We have finally opened the last box of the tissues left from the bulk pack we bought at Costco last fall. Liam and I will go out today to get more, along with a new cell phone for me and various other little things. It’s the Cancer Society’s daffodil weekend, so we’ll certainly buy some of those as well. Hurrah, daffodils! Our bulbs are up a good four or five inches along the south side of the house; it won’t be long before they’re real flowers themselves.

What I Read This March

Morrigan’s Cross by Nora Roberts
Jellybean by Tessa Duder (reread)
Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers
Snow White Rose Red by Patricia C Wrede (reread)
Mia Tells It Like It Is by Meg Cabot
Magic Lessons by Justine Larbalestier
Dance of the Gods by Nora Roberts
Firebirds ed. Sharyn November
Swan Sister ed. Terri Windling & Ellen Datlow
Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier
The Jane Austen Tarot by Diane Wilkes

Music, Consultants, and Colds

The sun, the sun! I’ve been greedily soaking it up for the past couple of days.

We had our final regular rehearsal before the spring concert last night, actually in the church where we’ll be playing. (Due to scheduling issues our dress rehearsal will be elsewhere.) It took almost half the rehearsal to accustom ourselves to the very different sound of the room. It’s hard to hear the other sections when everyone is playing, and the sound is somewhat muffled and oddly amplified. Not in a bad way; there were times where we sounded like we were an ensemble twice as big as we truly are, for example. As usual, it took me a whole movement to sort through the different sound to actually hear what I was playing. It’s going to be a lovely concert. (Concert! This Saturday night at 7:30! Cedar Park United Church in Pointe-Claire! Here are all the details!)

Yesterday I had my first face-to-face interview in over ten years. (Most of my jobs have been as a result of networking and being familiar with the employers beforehand, and my freelance work is based in telecommuting.) It went well; so well, in fact, that I am now an official consultant working on-site at one of the local megacorps. (For those familiar with HRH, it is, ironically enough, one of the places at which he’s been trying to land a job for a couple of years now. Taste that irony!) An inside referral secured me the interview, and the two-week contract (with possibility of renewal) seems tailor-made for me and my abilities and qualifications. The heads on the project are people who care deeply about the work, and for whom I developed quick respect during our interview. So naturally, now that I have the contract I am wibbling deep inside and worrying that I will let them down, as well as making the individual who referred me look bad. It would be really, really nice to not have to field my own inner critic every time I get a job. It sounds like I would have to actively work at not making the situation better, however, and I am nowhere near as wibbly as I was last night. This morning, I am Professional Editor Girl again.

The project sounds engaging and moderately challenging for me as well as interesting on a I’m-doing-a-good-thing level. Nothing like promoting reading comprehension while sorting words and — ahem — editing a dictionary. Seriously — how cool is that? I get to edit a dictionary. It’s like a dream come true, if I’d ever presumed to have this particular daydream. (Granted, the work will also be frustrating due to its nature, but still! Editing a dictionary!)

One of the curiosities of this contract is that I will be travelling elsewhere to work, instead of working in my home office with cats and tea and other comforts. I haven’t done this in five years. Public transport is now my friend again. It’s an hour of travel, broken into three twenty-minute chunks so I can actually settle down and read without worrying that I’ll miss my stop. I’m told they will provide everything I need, but really, I will have to burn a few data CDs’ worth of music, bring tea and a mug, a dictionary (because I have learned never to assume that any office has a reliable dictionary, if a dictionary at all, and sure I could use an online dictionary but I always suspect them of being Not Quite Real), my good headphones, notebooks, and so forth.

Eep. I will have keycards and such. And, I’m told, an office in which to work, which probably means a small unused conference room with a computer brought in. My lower back already hurts at the thought of office chairs.

Also, another small freelance contract landed in my in-box last night. It will have to be done in the evenings, now that I am an official nine-to-fiver for the next two weeks.

Liam and I have both developed colds. I thought it was the general spring allergy thing, but it is not.

That is all.

Blissful Ignorance

I just discovered the Autosum button in Microsoft Excel.

I have used this program for over ten years, and only just found this function.

I am speechless.

(Well, all right, so I’ve been using it for databases of words and sentences all that time, not numbers. But still. You think it’s something I would have tripped across before today, when I needed to add a column of figures and didn’t want to pull out my calculator.)