Monday 30 October 2023: Improvement all round

I finished the bibliography work on Friday and I drafted an email in response to the author’s latest email sending yet more material. We’re, like, 4 *working* days away from this job having to be done and he starts sending new material! Well, I had a right old rant, but I didn’t send it. First of all I put it through a sensitivity check (aka the poet), then I sent it to the client to make sure she was fine with me replying in such a manner.

Fortunately, the client was in full agreement with me and she particularly asked me to remind the author that any additions were to go through her for approval. She was particularly narked that he hadn’t done that. She also asked me to explain to him why I wasn’t actually sat here twiddling my thumbs awaiting new material to jump on with glee and edit.

So that email went off. Along with the bibliography for him to check and another question about the book. You know, the kind of things we’re supposed to be tying up at this stage in proceedings.

I wrote a meal plan for the week and we did the shopping so that we’d be free at the weekend.

We were both feeling quite a lot better by Saturday but we had to get up early and take the dog to the vet for his monthly jab, his monthly prescription, and an additional blood test to see how the drugs are affecting his organs. His liver enzymes were up but not alarmingly so and could explain why he’s had an upset stomach.

I collected the last of the pears from the tree. And we took the dog to visit the mother-in-law.

I did an hour’s work on the nasty edit. This time it was the picture captions, which I was seeing for the first time. The client had been managing that while I was so busy with the rest of the project, but now it was time for me to look at them… you know, the kind of things again that we’re supposed to be doing at this stage.

The poet made bread and did some painting, and he made a prawn linguine for tea.

The author finally responded to my ranting email with a few short one-liners. ‘No problem.’ ‘Agree.’ His proof-read bibliography. And his reply to my query. So that was that and nothing worth losing sleep over last week.

Saturday night was a disturbed one with the dog having the runs and wanting out five or six times. During one episode we had to both get up and swill down the patio… (too much information?) But he was fine after that, although on starvation rations for at least the next 12 hours.

On Sunday we went into the garden to start clearing the overgrown hedge that’s breaking the greenhouse glass. If we didn’t check this now, by next spring it would be demolishing the actual greenhouse. It was a big job and it broke the poet’s electric chainsaw once and jammed his petrol hedge trimmer several times. While he did the big stuff, I pruned another row of roses and tidied two borders.

He got a lot of the hedge out, to the extent that he could finally walk all the way around the greenhouse. I went to have a look, and it was a still a hard job to walk all the way around the greenhouse. He didn’t care, though. He’d managed to walk all the way around the greenhouse and that made the effort all the more worthwhile.

We filled the green bin up with what we could fit in. I think it’s the last green bin collection this week, until next February or March, so going forward we’ll either have to book a skip or make a few trips to the tip.

I probably spent around 90 minutes in the garden and the poet probably spent around 2 hours. When we came in, I did some more NaNo prep and he did some more painting. He also made a 4-portion cottage pie, half of which we had for tea on Sunday. I think we have the other half today.

By this morning we were all feeling much better. Even the dog. The poet went to work as normal, and I got up at my normal time, hitting my desk at the normal time too. I’ve already done all the social media and email stuff, although WordPress is only allowing me to make one or two replies at a time before locking me out for some reason, and I’ve tried on Chrome as well as Opera. Technology, eh? I’ll keep trying throughout the day.

Also today I have to do the following:

• maybe write a short story and submit it to a competition
• upload the next chapter of Diary of a Scaredy Cat to Substack
• more NaNo prep
• start my tax return
• gig list admin
• Monkey Dust admin
• crack on with the nasty edit
• possibly call today Day 1 of NaNo (as I’m in hospital on the actual Day 1) (is that cheating?)
• make a pear eve’s pudding

First, a big push on the editing job, starting with the bibliography.