Back to work

We're all back to work. Furniture moving's been put on the back burner. Dig's still sorting out his office though. When he's not reminding me with a note of regret about the crocodile sanctuary we once visited, he's trawling through his emails. Today he finds there's a bit of panic about. Apparently he's caused a bit of fuss over Christmas thanks to his use of commas. Someone's started an email petition against him. It's got a thousand signatures on it. Some people have added comments like 'Dig is a sloppy academik'. Dig signs it and adds 'Dig is a very slopy writter.'

Of course all of the authors are back at work as well, which is worse for me. When I'm not moving furniture, managing a household and home educating triplets, I typeset books for academics; the office is next door to the kitchen, so I reckon Dig thinks that's handy for me. I gave up the copy editing. I caused too much trouble and everyone hated me because I deleted all their commas before 'and'. Sometimes I did it deliberately, for revenge. Now I set their books with a widow wherever I can, and I try and get the widows to spell out something rude or bizarre. My best so far has been, 'in passing water Jenkins (2006) pulled chickens from windowsills'. I'm still working on the technique, obviously.

But the authors are back. The first one wants to know why his book isn't published because he emailed us the corrections on Christmas Eve. Twit. I think his print run is scheduled at 500 copies. Most of those he'll have to give to his mum. I bet she likes to read 'Lexicogrammar: theoretical developments since 1953'.

And I'm back doing the home educating, in half-hour chunks, which is about as much as we all can take somedays. This weekend The Hat is taking them to see the last performance of The Arabian Nights by the local theatre group. So we're doing Persia. We can't find it on the map, so that's the first question we work on. My lovely mapwork is immediately hijacked by 'Unicorn land' and 'Fairy land' and 'Pegasus land', so we embark on drawing maps of these and outlining significant battles that took place between the mythicals and the humans which resulted in loss of human territory.

But then Shark has a squealing fit and throws a clutch of crayons at Tiger. Tiger responds by throwing the entire bucket of crayons at Shark. Tiger follows it with a temper tantrum, screws up her map and starts to eat it. All is going well with Squirrel until she bursts into tears because she's written the year 2009 on her map and she wanted 1009. At that point she shouts 'I'm leaving this family!' then marches out the kitchen and slams the door. Five minutes later she's back to kick the kitchen chairs over and be ejected from the Where is Persia? class until she calms down.

Tomorrow I've a good mind just to put on a bit of Rimsky Korsakov and push off to the office. But I have to go to the library and confess. I'm not looking forward to that. I've been putting it off since August. Wish me luck.