Saturday, May 04, 2002
Chapter Five is finished (aside from a few minor revisions, which will be done tomorrow); I wrote the last 700 or so wds. this afternoon. I didn't have to meet the daily quota of one thousand, as there weren't a thousand left to write. Late this afternoon I proofed Chapter Five. Now it's time to move along to Chapter Six.
Thanks to a couple of freak accidents in the last 24 hours, my left hand has been rendered all but useless. First, on the way home from the Quay screening last night, I broke a thumbnail down to the quick, so badly it had to be bandaged. I was only reaching for an umbrella in the floorboard of the van. Then, about one o'clock Friday morning, I was attempting to extricate a taper candle from its shrink wrap (because, Lord knows, we need candles to be shrink wrapped for our protection) and impaled my palm with a steak knife. It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been sleepy. Anyway, lots of blood and I'm pretty sure the tip scraped bone. My hand hurts all the way down to the wrist. But the wound quickly closed without recourse to stitches. Obviously, typing was more uncomfortable than usual today. I'm waiting for manual catacylsm number three. Maybe that was when I dropped the ring in the garbage can at the post office, which would mean I'm now in the clear.
Much of this afternoon was wasted at UAB's Mervyn Sterne Library, another victim of proration and Alabama colleges that would prefer to spend money on atheletics instead of libraries. I'd gone to copy a paper on local trilobites, another on a fossil bird, one on Pleistocene reptiles from cave deposits in north Alabama, and a chapter on Ann Radcliffe. I got most of the first two copied. The first three copiers I tried were broken. The machine that adds credit to your copier cards was also broken and would take only one dollar bills, not fives. The copier that did sort of work seemed programed to charge whatever it felt like per copy (four to sixteen cents). Then I ran out of time, because the place closed at five today, since finals are over, and it won't open again until Monday. It was a relief to get back home where there was nothing but work to deal with.
By the way, I referred to last night's comments on linguistic disintegration as a "rant." I hate it when I'm self-depracating. "Rant" carries a negative connotation, of course, which was unwarranted in this case.
Another stormy day, and I expect we'll have a rainy night. Which is fine, the leak in my office roof notwithstanding. It helps me sleep.
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