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Nov. 6th, 2001 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupStill recovering from the cold, which hit full force on Saturday and Sunday. Perfect timing for the proofreading. The proofreading was sort of a fun exercise, except for the code of the proofreaders' marks, which are very technical. They don't want you writing stuff all over the margins, but at times there is no easy way to indicate what you see going on.
Another thing, which happens a lot to me when I copyedit or whatever: weird mistakes that make me second-guess my knowledge of the rules. The foul text for this book had "18th century" "early 20th century" and so on, and the editor had circled these, meaning the printer should spell these out. Whoever keyed in the changes didn't know the rule for hyphenating these things, so in one place it would be "they lived in the early twentieth century" and in another "the bowl was bought in the late-nineteenth-century." Now I myself had never really learned this rule until recently; from what I can tell in the Chicago Manual of Style, you only use a hyphen when centuries become adjective (late-nineteenth-century stoneware), never when they appear as nouns. So when I started seeing it all over the place I had to keep looking up the section in Chicago to tell myself I was right and the text was wrong.
The book itself was a coffee-table book on the history pf artifacts related to cooking-- saltcellars, spiceboxes, sugar tongs, teacups, etc. etc. It was kind of interesting, but at times I kept imagining it being read by Frasier Crane. Just a little too precious. Anyway I killed myself working on it morning till night and now again I have way too much to do. I have not had a moment to myself in a week and probably won't again until Friday.
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Sad news. Nick was one of the two cats Mrs. Sanpaku adopted when she was living with her ex-boyfriend in Baltimore in 1994. Later we shared the cats back and forth with him, and he ultimately brought them both to DC. (They didn't get along well with the dog. Shat all over the place.) Nick died of diabetes-- probably related to pancreatic cancer. Such a happy and friendly cat. I think my most vivid memory is driving the cats the few blocks between our two houses; for some reason I put Jasper in the cat carrier, but let Nick walk around in the car. Big mistake! I learned that most cats act very strange in the car. He would put his front paws on my shoulder looking from corner to corner of the car-- while I was trying to drive.
Cats just do not stay long. We have Felix left, and I think he will probably be our last cat. They go much too easily, and it is just too upsetting when they do.
Another thing, which happens a lot to me when I copyedit or whatever: weird mistakes that make me second-guess my knowledge of the rules. The foul text for this book had "18th century" "early 20th century" and so on, and the editor had circled these, meaning the printer should spell these out. Whoever keyed in the changes didn't know the rule for hyphenating these things, so in one place it would be "they lived in the early twentieth century" and in another "the bowl was bought in the late-nineteenth-century." Now I myself had never really learned this rule until recently; from what I can tell in the Chicago Manual of Style, you only use a hyphen when centuries become adjective (late-nineteenth-century stoneware), never when they appear as nouns. So when I started seeing it all over the place I had to keep looking up the section in Chicago to tell myself I was right and the text was wrong.
The book itself was a coffee-table book on the history pf artifacts related to cooking-- saltcellars, spiceboxes, sugar tongs, teacups, etc. etc. It was kind of interesting, but at times I kept imagining it being read by Frasier Crane. Just a little too precious. Anyway I killed myself working on it morning till night and now again I have way too much to do. I have not had a moment to myself in a week and probably won't again until Friday.
**************************
Sad news. Nick was one of the two cats Mrs. Sanpaku adopted when she was living with her ex-boyfriend in Baltimore in 1994. Later we shared the cats back and forth with him, and he ultimately brought them both to DC. (They didn't get along well with the dog. Shat all over the place.) Nick died of diabetes-- probably related to pancreatic cancer. Such a happy and friendly cat. I think my most vivid memory is driving the cats the few blocks between our two houses; for some reason I put Jasper in the cat carrier, but let Nick walk around in the car. Big mistake! I learned that most cats act very strange in the car. He would put his front paws on my shoulder looking from corner to corner of the car-- while I was trying to drive.
Cats just do not stay long. We have Felix left, and I think he will probably be our last cat. They go much too easily, and it is just too upsetting when they do.
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sad cat stories
Date: 2001-11-07 06:56 pm (UTC)And no, I didn't try to give this guy a gender-identity crisis-- I got him when he was very tiny, during that brief period when they all look like females. So my chocolate-brown girl cat turned into a sleek black boy cat.