I had a ludicrous morning.

I've mentioned having to pick up the police reports in the mornings before in here- well, I found out from the cops reporter last night that when she'd gone in to pick them up (she does pickup the other days) that their printer was broken, and thus no reports for her. They had told her that it "should" be fixed by tomorrow, but she kinda suspected otherwise, and recommended to me that I call them before I left in the morning to see if printed reports were in existence.

Tricky part about this, however, is that (a) the bus leaves at about 7 a.m., (b) the police business office where I pick up the reports opens at 7 a.m., and thus (c) I would have to call about this BEFORE the office opened. I didn't even know if they'd have someone in the office.

So I called before I left, at about 6:40 a.m., and got some girl who said "I didn't even know it was broken. Let me go check," wanders off, comes back and says she's pretty sure it was fixed, but she couldn't guarantee for sure until after seven. Well, isn't THAT helpful when at seven a.m. I won't be near a phone to call ahead... (Yes, I know, cell phone, cave in already. Nope, not doing it, at least not until I know how the future's going.)

You guessed it: I got there, machine's still broken. The cops reporter's reaction to this story when I told her was hilarious. I even DREAMED the thing was going to be broken, if you can believe that.

Oddly enough, I wasn't even ticked off by the needless trip because I just knew it was going to happen. It's so Murphy. I swear, there is a Murphy's Law gene out there in the universe, and I inherited it from Dad. Mom doesn't get the Murphy's thing and thinks if you're optimistic enough things won't go wrong, but she doesn't live the Murphy life to get it, either.

Supposedly the machine is working as of tonight (she checked for me), but neither of us will believe it until one of us actually sees printouts. I predict that it will be broken again, just to spite me.

Not a terribly exciting day at work-- spent most of it working on holiday book reviews. It amazes me how few GOOD children's books for the holidays are on sale in this town. It's been looking for needles in haystacks to find stuff that wasn't cheap picture-book knockoff that's not all that interesting or yet another "Christmas treasury" (these must be the predicted hits this year) or a recap of same old stories. Damn, Christmas is the recycling holiday of the year, creativity-wise.

I did manage to find "Flight of the Reindeer" today, which looks to be amazing. It's, oddly enough, nonfiction (I suspect otherwise, given the constant references to the existence of elves, for example), but I must say they have a cool way of making the Santa story sound plausibleish. We shall see. Though I'm not sure I can review that and "The Santa Claus Book" in the same review because they're covering the same subjects in a drastically different manner... but then again, the pickings are so slim I may be stuck.

I have one more bookstore to look in, but it's my least favorite, so I have low hopes. I am also hoping to perhaps borrow a couple from the editor I'm doing this for ASSUMING she returns tomorrow (she's out of the office a lot and gets back to you when she's darned good and ready). I'm worried because deadline for this is the start of next week and for various reasons I need to get stuff like picture taking done at the end of this one. No time to waste on that.

I feel like I'm in the calm before the storm next week. At the start of December, stuff is going to blow up at me one way or another, and I'm worried. That's the holidays for you, though there's other stuff going on too. Things may go predictably, they may go 180, they may go somewhere I'm not even expecting yet.

A coworker of mine, who somehow developed the bug this year that everyone should go to grad school, was trying to convince me to do it yet again. While it's sweet that he was being concerned for me and all, I can't imagine me actually wanting to go after the burnout that was my senior year of college. Academia was just NO longer fun in the slightest, and my grades aren't as perfect as they should be to get into grad school (design teachers usually don't give A's, as a rule- hell, I'm worried enough about my best friend getting in and she had probably about the same stuff I did), and I couldn't take the GRE because I didn't have advanced math beyond algebra 2 in high school (long, sad story, but it's way too late for me to try to learn it now), and I'd rather not rack myself up into debt for something not really needed for me, especially since my parents made sure I emerged debt-free. I suspect it was more of a "every good writer should go!" thing for him. It's not like the idea of advanced study in writing doesn't appeal, it's just the crap that goes along with grad school that I'm not thrilled about for myself. Eh, I think I'd just rather do something like Clarion West where you do a workshop doodah for awhile. Clarion would rock (Sam sure enjoyed it), but I can't imagine finding six weeks of time to GO to such a thing unless I was unemployed, and if I was unemployed I couldn't afford to go (hell, even being employed that is a fucking stiff fee to pay, plus dorm fees, plus meals, plus plane fare, plus needing some kind of laptop to work on because my computer's too big), so *sigh* that's a dream that will never happen. Maybe if someone had a one or two week workshop and it was at least in California, it could happen... but yeah, not bloody likely.

You know, there's something definitely weird about the scheduling of my life these days. I don't know why I think about it now or notice it now, when I had an overpacked life senior year of college due to all my hard design classes being that year, combined with 20 hours of work a week and spent all my free time doing homework, but I now notice, very acutely, that I have precisely six hours of my own free time to do what I like on weekdays. 4 p.m.-10 p.m. to read, write, chat, talk on the phone, watch TV and eat, and that's it. I am very aware of these six hours going by each day. I used to think somehow that you had 8 hours work, 8 hours sleep, 8 hours free time, but of course it's not like that. I didn't notice it nearly as acutely when I was working 8-5, however. Maybe because I was up later then as per my normal bodily schedule.

It's strange to not be panicking about the novel now and feeling okay to web surf at home. Maybe I'll do a bit of work on it in the final days tomorrow/Thursday/Friday, but I have earned my break and my journaler certification, even if I sadly can't post the graphic here. (The one annoying thing about Diaryland- lack of pictures without payment is sad. But I wanted free and easy and updateability from a distance, so there you go. I can live with the dull look.) Joanne has been singing the praises of the novel, so I have told her to kick my ass if I quit on it. She has permission to kidnap me! Whee!

It is now 7 p.m. Three hours left to go of my free time, one of which will be taken up with Buffy and Spike having sex or something. I should go and find something else to cram into my two hours of freedom.

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