| Whew! |
[Aug. 2nd, 2009|09:32 pm]
e_moon60
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The copy edits went out Friday, and then large boluses of Stuff landed on me. Because I thought I'd get the copy edits out Thursday at the latest (having been through them twice by then) with only a final cursory check Wednesday evening, I had bought the makings for a large pot of chicken stock and chicken earlier on Wednesday. But came home with a weather-related migraine, so I got nothing done on the copy edits that evening. Thursday morning, I thought "Oh, sure, I can put the chickens in the pot and then work on the copy edits..." whereupon I found rafts of errors (mostly mine in marking) that had to be repaired. Meanwhile, the chickens, carrots, celery, parsley, garlic, onions, were all moving toward the point at which I was supposed to Do Something with them.
Friday was the absolute deadline for getting the copy edits off by overnight, because they were due in on Monday. I had discovered that most of my errors came from working on them past midnight, when apparently my eyes cannot distinguish one red mark from another...but midnight came and went on Thursday. Friday I was up early, with both the huge pot on the stove and the copy edits to work on. Boning out boiled chickens is not compatible with keeping a manuscript clean....It was obvious as early as Thursday evening that this had been the wrong time to do up a bunch of chicken stock and boiled chicken. But...with a 20 quart pot on the stove, there's nothing you can do. When it's ready, it's ready. And the big pot won't fit in the refrigerator..
So I enlisted help with the boning out, and the chicken meat went into the refrigerator (thank you, Richard!) I kept working on the manuscript (and its box, which was suffering from one too many trips in a truck.) Finally got the whole thing packaged again, and hauled it the 20-something miles to the nearest FedEx pickup site open that late. Then came home and finished getting the rest of vegetables and so on out of the stock. That's a multi-stage process when dealing with pots of that size.
Saturday was the start of the big choir-returns-to-work weekend that involved cooking for the choir party (with some attendant leftover shopping for same that I knew I'd have to do), then driving to the party, which included a rehearsal...coming home to realize that I had to do another load of laundry and get it dry by leaving-for-church time...which was 7 sharp or before because the women were to sing both services and our rehearsal started at 8:10 am. (Did I mention that we were singing new music, that we had not seen until the rehearsal at the party?) Sunday included not only singing two services (very music-full services) but also a recording session....which our director optimistically assured us would take "only twenty minutes..." Ha! Someone pointed out afterwards that we'd been singing for a solid 5 1/2 hours. I'd have said five. But still. Came home and flopped. I'm now barely awake, having had insufficient sleep for the entire past week. I had hoped to get the chicken stock that's now in the refrigerator into its freezer containers this afternoon, but I'm not able. Tomorrow.
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