After my "very bad day" on Tuesday (losing a family ring I'd worn daily for decades), I was really hoping that yesterday wasn't going to be more of the same. But ... I had a doctor's appointment in the afternoon, which I had assumed was going to be simply a follow-up on some tests I'd had a while back ... the email reminder had NOTHING in it regarding my coming in for a "procedure" ... the first inkling I had of this was when I was presented with a consent form when checking in for my appointment. Now, the doctor in question is a urologist ... so you might be able to guess what was in store for me.
<=== That ain't no Popeil Pocket Fisherman over there (click for a larger image if you must), but a torture device designed to let the medical profession get an up-close-and-PERSONAL view of parts of my anatomy, accessed through a very narrow entry. I don't know if it's the nature of urology, or if it's just MY doctor's office, but their gestures towards numbing might as well be homeopathy - every "procedure" I've had done in their office has been somewhere in between "very uncomfortable" and "hurts like Hell". Not that I'm saying I want to have these sorts of 10-minute invasions done under "general", but a needle of novocaine (after the topical stuff), would make me less hostile about the process. I guess they don't want to have their waiting room filled up with folks waiting to get mobile again, though.
On the positive side, there was no sign of what he was looking for (I'm 2-for-2 on stuff not being what they were thinking it could be over the past month or so), so there's that.
I had been considering going off to a networking event last night, but I was feeling sufficiently abused that I opted to just head home and work on stuff (frankly, my head was going a mile-a-minute while waiting for the doctor on a current project, and I wanted to get back to the keyboard to work on it). I don't recall if I mentioned it in here previously, but I'm working on the first of several collections of my book reviews. I'm liking how the project is coming together, with the exception that it is taking a very long time. I was able to knock out those annual poetry collections in about 8-12 hours per, but this is running about a half hour per review. I'm having to do a lot of "fine tooth combing" through the text to get rid of some random typographical artifacts (for some reason, I'm getting em/en spaces on either side of links, italics, bolds, etc., which in MSPublisher screws up the layout ... lines won't break at those spaces), reformat blockquotes (in my blog posts three levels of blockquote look good, but it makes for a very narrow column on the Publisher page), and get fiddly with the paragraph spacing so everything looks nice. Plus, I'm having to re-do the cover images to grayscale.
The thing that was in my head at the doctor's office was to add a section of QR codes at the end of the book, so folks could just jump off to the on-line reviews, and I got a graphic grid designed, with specifics about pixel locations to put the cover images, text, and the QR codes. Of course, this means that I have to generate the bar codes, which is not a vast lot of time, but each additional process (especially switching between programs) adds a few minutes ... and those minutes add up. With 40-80 reviews a year, that runs into a LOT of hours. I'm a bit more than half done with this first one (2015 - with about 60 reviews) ... you'll no doubt be hearing more about this soon.
