Data

The trouble with technology is that it tells you stuff, and then you have to be responsible and act on that information.

Time was, when CEMs and proofs and so forth just came out of the blue, sometime within that window that you were sort of more or less expecting them. Or not.

Then we got e-mail, and editors realised - eventually - that they could pass on information from production about when and how these things were being sent out. So then we knew to expect them within the next few days, give or take, but that still wasn't accurate enough to require any modifying behaviours on our part.

Now we have tracking. My New York editor sends me a number, I log into a website, and lo: I can watch the cursed thing come, all the way over the Atlantic.

At 09:05 this morning it was in Gateshead. Which is just a spit across the river from me.

Which means that I have spent the last three hours waiting in, because I am responsible and do not want to miss it when it comes.

As we know, Bob, I hate waiting in. I have been doing useful things - my house is full of useful things to do - but my heels, my head, yea my very soul wants out of here. There is daylight and birdsong out there; there could be shopping. Instead there is desklight and taxes. Sigh.

Liveblogging the wait

Four hours. UPS, where are you?

I have finished the accounts, I think; I have finished the latest round of revisions to Rotten Row. There is no cricket. I am heating soup, and considering housework. That's how desperate I am.

Liveblogging encore

Five hours. And a half.

I have sent off Rotten Row, the SF novella that turns into a caper movie which is also kinda a meditation upon art and the artist. And the body. Very much the body. I have lunched. I have watched an episode of Buffy. Now I don't know what to do. Except pace, of course. And peer vainly out of windows at the road. So much traffic, but these are not the vans I'm looking for...

Well, lookit...

It's here. Mirabile dictu, it is here! I can has CEM!

And what's so mirabile about that, you ask, apart from the known facts about UPS and the general watched-pottedness of it all?

Well, there's the address on the package. Where they have, um, three lines out of six right; but that does leave three wrong. Including, um, London. They think I live in London...?

*sends e-mail*

You could drive a person crazy

Mac is was sitting on the CEM, merrily plucking the elastic band that embraces it.

Once made me look around. Twice made me grin. By the umpty-third time...

Well. The CEM is now back in its padded envelope, and Mac is sitting on the comfy chair and glowering.

Reminds me of the time Barry discovered that if he sat on the chest of drawers and reached down, he could make a drawer-handle rattle.

On and on and on and...

I didn't have a padded envelope big enough to contain the chest of drawers. Or Barry. One of them had to go. So the chest of drawers ended up in the back alley, in our local version of Freecycle (put something in the alley, wait an hour: it's gone).

O tempura, O morels

This may be the end of civilisation as we know it, or at least of civilised discourse. If we lose our language, we lose the ability to think.

I have just watched a documentary about the history of the Poet Laureate. On the BBC. The BBC! And it was introduced by an announcer who spoke of "Poet Laureates", which is I think still a hanging offence; and they did that thing where famous lines of verse are not only read aloud but shown on screen as well, and when they came to Tennyson they offered us Their's not to reason why, their's but to do and die, which I think calls for self-immolation. Demands it, yea.

*is in despair*

I half think I ought to write an outraged letter, but, y'know. There's no point. They can't care, or they wouldn't let it happen...