I, however, got chilled. There’s something about perpetually being exposed to 32 degree cold: you don’t get cold, really. But it’s the better part of two years since I’ve been that much on the ice, and the rink was, shall we say, hyper cold—I got so chilled my fingers passed beyond hurting over to numb, ditto the feet were getting cold—I’m nearly immune to cold feet. And I decided I was approaching Not Comfortable, so I got off, ran my hands under ice water until I could get them warmed up and use the warm tap a bit, and then changed to street clothes—by which time I was having that old hip pain which I get now and again since a real nasty flat-out-sideways drop onto the ice from a fairly fast circular pattern: ie—I was practicing crossovers at speed, hit a blade, and went airborne.
Well, that one hurt. That was a couple of years ago, directly after a Bloomsday Run, meaning my legs were exhausted, I got cocky, and I’ve paid for that one ever since. Now and again it gets me. And the cold did it. I was so cold the pain lasted through lunch at the Doors and going home and trying to warm up in bed under covers. That didn’t work. Neither did Advil. But a hot shower finally began to warm the muscle up, and finally it stopped, just like flipping off a switch. Cold is a remarkable thing: dulls some aches, and exacerbates others.
The galleys for Intruder arrived, and I am up to chapter 5 doing checks—most of what’s happened is something funky with the punctuation. I didn’t do it; but sometimes when you translate from Word Perfect, which I use—into Word, which DAW uses—(sigh)—well, Word is a weird and quirky program. We hates it. And I can only imagine what that wretched program does when they use it to create e-files: it loads a thing up with more garbage than can possibly have a use.
Anyway, I am using it in pdf, yet one more very ‘dirty’ program. I tell you, Word Perfect goes like a lamb into e-book correction, and any novice can get directly at its printer codes, first try, easy to fix. It has NO junk attached, goes in clean, loads into html clean. Word Perfect, or Adobe—rife with gingerbread. Why does the business world choose Word? I echo Meg’s opinion.
Anyway, we are home today working: Jane planned to skate, but stayed home to solve a problem; and I stayed home because I’m trying to take it slow getting back to the ice, let the muscles recover, then do it again. I want to get back to flying around the rink again. Right now I’m going pretty cautiously…don’t want to fall until I’ve got the muscle padding built back, and I’ve had enough birthdays that doesn’t happen overnight.
Re: Intruder, Amazon US is telling me about March 10th to 13th on the pre-order too. Sometimes, a pre-order or a current order will arrive a day or so early; other times, it’ll arrive a day or two later. That’s a week to ten days after my birthday, so I’m looking forward to a slightly late birthday present. That’ll be fine. I understand the time needed to edit, proof, correct, and send to print, then distribute, the books. (I’m not familiar with the actual times needed, but I can guess from work experience with small and medium sized documents.)
This reminds me to find where I’d moved THE BOX with the pb/hb copies of the Foreigner series. Invader is sitting back on top of my stack to finish reading. I think I was somewhere around page 200 (PB) or so.
I’m going to locate and reread Merchanter’s Luck, pb (or ebook), as I want to reread it next. I have Andre Norton’s Iron Cage and Jane Fancher’s Blood Red Moon also in that current stack. I’m resolved to *make* time in my schedule for reading again, since I should be able to fit it in now.
RE BlueCatShip—word is pretty well exactly like typing, until you actually WANT the dropdowns.
Where it pays for itself is when you get into a situation where the text is doing something weird. Then you toggle ‘reveal code’ and you get a second window wherein you can edit the codes that are causing the problem—a spare ITAL toggle (s/b paired) or a spare End Of Line command of some sort, usually.
And for all ye who labor—it produces such code-simple text that it converts easily to the most obnoxious versions of Word. So if you are working in a situation where you can work at home and turn in a Word file—I don’t think they’re likely to catch you.
Aha! I miss being able to edit those codes when needed. I remember back when you could do that in Word or WordPerfect either one. It’s one of the things that bugs me about both Word and OpenOffice. From HTML and forum bbCode, I’m used to code pairs. My copy of WordPerfect has shipped and is due during the week. Merci, ma capitaine CJ.
Its motto: “MicrosoftWord knows better than you.”
An arrogant bully of a program.