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Which Barn Is This?December 23, 2006 Someone on Copyediting-L referred to "the two slowest weeks of the year," to which my jaw dropped, my nose crinkled, and my mouth said, "HUH?" True, publishers and the print trades generally shut down between Christmas and New Year's, but slow things are not. I started one horse-sitting job midday Wednesday, the 20th. The second started at feeding time yesterday morning. They both run through the 28th. The third starts at midday tomorrow, the 24th, and is scheduled to end late the afternoon of Tuesday the 26th, but these clients travel by small plane and high winds are forecast for that day so they may not make it back till the 27th. I'm feeling like a unicyclist on the high wire: first one confederate jumps on my shoulders, then another jumps on her shoulders, and all of us are juggling heirloom china plates. While singing the Hallelujah Chorus. Rarely have I been so acutely aware of just how short the shortest days of the year are. I'm out of the house just after first light; this afternoon it was pitch dark before I finished closing at barn #1. Then I started down the (horrendous, bone-rattling, suspension-destroying) shortcut to barn #2. Fortunately I know where the light switches are. Rhodry had to jump into the navigator's seat nine times today. I can hear him thinking "I am a 12-year-old puppy!" with combined pride and rebuke, but bless him: he hasn't said a thing. On top of that I just started copyediting War and Peace. Copyeditors and proofreaders often say things like "I'm working on a job that's as long as War and Peace -- and it has to be done by Monday." I really am copyediting War and Peace, a new translation, and so far I love it -- still, the job came in two boxes, I'm on p. 111, and it's something like 2,200 pages long. Oh yeah, and these translators, unlike their predecessors, have elected to stet the French the way Tolstoy wrote it, with the translations in footnotes. So far I've done OK with the French, even caught a couple of typos and flagged a couple of peculiarities for further investigation, but I've enlisted a bilingual Canadian editor friend to bail me out if I need help. I've already encountered one line of Italian, and I hear there's German on the way. I've never studied German, and so far it's resisted my every attempt to figure out the basics on my own. I'll probably need another on-call assistant before I'm through. I've been snarking big-time. Long time ago, a reporter colleague of mine at the Martha's Vineyard Times could be counted on to say, at about 2 p.m. every Wednesday, Deadline Day, "I hate my miserable life." I haven't actually said it, but I've thought about thinking it. You know that poster that said something like "When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember that your initial purpose was to drain the swamp"? That would be me. When I'm running from one job to another trying to make rent and board and groceries, it's hard to remember that my purpose is to get Mud of the Place into print, find an outlet for my writing, and get on with my life. "It's always darkest before the dawn." I keep telling myself that. Don't really believe it, but it's better than giving up. Besides -- last night I went to use my scanner to copy the list of names from the War and Peace manuscript. The clean one to stay in the ms.; the copy for me to make notes on. Scanner didn't work. Uh-oh. Had I used it since setting up Morgana V? I had not. I surmised -- and a quick Google confirmed -- that the scanner driver didn't work with Windows XP. The good news was that there was a patch. The bad news was that after I installed the patch the scanner still didn't work. I uninstalled and reinstalled a couple of times; rebooted a couple more times. Still didn't work. This morning, having done chores at barn #1 and barn #2, I found myself at the UMAX Technologies website. (The scanner is a UMAX Astra 3450.) I re-installed the old scanner software. I re-downloaded the patch. It still didn't work. I was seriously bummed. But UMAX had a procedure to follow if the patch didn't work. It was fairly complicated, but 21 years of being my own in-house IT person has taught me intrepidity (?), and great dogs in heaven the instructions were clear and easy to follow. AND THEY WORKED!! Hot damn. Twenty-one years of being my own in-house IT person has taught me how rare this is -- once upon a time, tech support for every piece of hardware and software I owned could diagnose and solve any problem after five minutes of explanation max, but these days forget it: more likely you'll spend an hour and a quarter in a continuous feedback voicemail queue and then whoever you reach won't know what the hell you're talking about. I was so grateful I sent a letter of appreciation to UMAX tech support. Of course once I got the scanner working I discovered my trusty LaserJet wouldn't print, but I think this had less to do with the scanner patch than with my fiddling backstage -- in disconnecting and reconnecting the scanner's USB cable, I probably knocked the printer cable loose. I uninstalled, re-installed, and secured the cable -- all systems go, boss! Now it's all working, and I have my copy of War and Peace's list of characters. And many miles to drive before I crash -- early evening on Thursday the 28th, if all goes well. If this space remains blank till then or filled with dingbats and random symbols, that's the likely explanation. I saw Joanie the West Tisbury animal control officer at the post office today. I said I was going to be spending Christmas in a stable -- three stables in fact -- and she said she wished she was too.
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