A short column this week as I am both short of time and short of news. I had some plans for the weekend to clear the decks a little of an outstanding job or two, and totally failed to get anything done. One job was to do some scans for a friend, organize some different scans for another friend, organize a Christmas present, which involves some scans that need cleaning up and resizing, and read through some features that I've written, one of them a couple of weeks ago that I'd forgotten to send (thankfully the deadline was the end of the month).
And I got nothing of that list done. I ended up wrapping books and taking a trip down to the post office, and then dropping in to our local second-hand book shop, as I'd noticed it was shut all last week. I was thinking "holiday" but it turned out the lady who runs it had suffered a mild stroke and she had spent the week in hospital. Hopefully she will be fully recovered soon.
I had a lie-in on Sunday and we went for a walk later than usual. I made banana bread, chatted to my Mum, and answered some email and it was lunch time. Spent a bit of time trying to resize those scans I mentioned and utterly screwed up the whole process because I was trying desperately to hurry. I ended up with 450 wrongly sized pages (centimeters rather than inches!) that I had saved over the original files, so the whole lot went into the recycle bin. Haste and thought was needed, not speed, so later that evening, heading towards midnight, I had a go at the second set of files. And mucked those up, too. It was a different mistake (72dpi rather than 300!) but what I hadn't learned was to save the file into a separate folder. So that lot went into the recycle bin, too.
On Monday I did the scanning, and sorted out another four sets of scans, got those sent off and — finally — had some of my weekend jobs list finished! Read through two of the features and sent them off to a friend for checking. Tuesday, I split the two folder job into four folders to make life a little easier. I then spent all day on it because I had to get it finished by that evening. Despite it being a tight deadline, I managed to hit it — and the article that had to be sent in by the end of November was also sent off that day — November 30th! Another deadline hit!
Wednesday... finally, I'm back in the orbit of Action, researching the careers of a couple of artists who worked on 'Dredger'. Everything I find about them is in Spanish (they were Argentinean), so there's a lot of online translation involved. Even compiling a rough, working bibliography is tricky because I don't know where and when a lot of the strips ran in Argentina. I think I was about two-thirds of the way through by end of play.
And so to Thursday... and I'm writing this first thing Thursday morning because I'm expecting a visit from my Mum and want to clear the decks so that we can sit around and chat. We were on the phone for an hour yesterday, so there's little news, but as this is the first time we've seen each other since September, it'll be nice to catch up in person. I'm just waiting on a phone call to see what train she's on. If everything works out as planned, I should be able to get down to the train station and back just in time for our mid-morning break, and we can all have a slice of that banana bread I made at the weekend. [UPDATE: We made it back in time!]
And after that, it's back to writing about people getting their faces bitten off by sharks. And I've promised other people I'll do some scans for them, but I might not make any promises that it will be done this weekend...
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