On the Up (Despite Mercury Retrograde)

 I went to the chiropractor today and I said, "I don't know if I'm hallucinating, but I feel 100% cured."  Dr. Matt agreed with me.  We're going to stop seeing each other, except occasionally. 

So, that's a yay!

Today continues a series I should probably call, "Adventures in Mercury Retrograde."  Nothing that's happen has been horrible, just a lot of little irritations and several "oh, wait, did I say THAT? I meant THIS." Or just dumb logistics screw-ups.  Like today... apparently some time ago when I was making the schedule with my coordinator at the libraries, I agreed to work UNTIL 3 pm.  Apparently, it SLIPPED MY MIND THAT I CAN NOT TELEPORT.

Mason is out of school AT 3 pm.  Working until 3 maybe-sort-of seems like it could work, except that instantaneous travel doesn't actually exist yet.  So, we had to do some finagling.  Mason has agreed to silently suffer by hanging out at McDonald's (about a block or so from his school) and wait for me there.  I'm also going to try to show up early so I can beg off a few minutes early... because what kind of moron schedules like this?  But, as Mason and Shawn agreed, it's only this one time and thus, not the end of the world.  Plus, if anyone in my family really wanted not to wait, both of them could easily take the city bus/light rail home.  

Probably some of you are wondering why my partner doesn't just pick Mason up from school.  The answer is probably shocking to many of you who are Americans.  We only have one car.  Yeah, I know, crazy right?  Well, truthfully, it is a bit crazy at times, and sometimes I do wish we had another car available, particularly on days like today or when Steve (our car) is acting up.  

But, most of the time one car works just fine for us. Plus, it's a good excuse to NEVER work a stupid shift like this again.  Seriously?  What was I thinking?  After all, the very BEST part of being a sub is getting to say, "Yeah, no, actually that doesn't work for me."

Yesterday was actually a pretty good day, all and all.  I feel like it started tough.  Oh, yeah... I broke Shawn's dresser.  That was pretty spectacular.  And, in the way of Mercury Retrograde, I broke it while trying to help her get a drawer back in.  I had an appointment to see someone at 9 (my friend Jack who is going to do the audio books for the AngeLINK series), but when I came home I spent several hours fixing the dresser drawers (and the dresser itself, because, of course, the minute I worked out one problem, another one developed. This is a VERY old dresser and wasn't terribly stable when we got it.  Super well constructed originally, though.  It's old enough to entirely be dove jointed. There's not a nail in the thing, except the ones idiots added later. I pulled all those out.)

But, I actually had a really great time with Jack, who I only knew, previously, tangentially through my friend and fellow Wyrdsmith, Theo.  The company we're working through is ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange.) It's a pretty cool deal that connects writers to voice actors.  The actual royalty split is kind of crappy (20/20, with 60 percent going to Amazon, who is the owner of the company), but, on the other hand, because it's an Amazon company, the audio books automatically show up in their inventory as well as Audible.com and a bunch of other audio book distributors (even iTunes, I'm pretty sure).  And, as has been my theme this year, "they were otherwise only collecting pixel dust, so I might as well do SOMETHING with them."   But, so Jack was super-helpful and talked this old lady through the process of getting my books up and all that.  I've only got one more hoop to jump through before I can offer the work to Jack and let the process roll.

But of course there was that minor snag, because: Mercury.

And, because I'm new to ACX, I'm getting auditions and am now in the awkward position of having to say, "Uh, I actually already have someone in mind... and because I'm new to this I don't know how to reserve my titles until I fix a bank related issue... sorry to have wasted your time!"  The only good news is that, BECAUSE I have Jack in mind, all my audition pieces are only about a paragraph (most people post several pages), so none of the voice actors are wasting too much of their time recording the auditions.  Still, I shake my fist at the skies and sigh, "Ah, Mercury!"

But, again, so far, nothing terrible, just annoying.  Fingers crossed that continues in today's adventures in bad logistics.