Writing
In between bouts of napping in a Lorazepam-induced haze, I got through about a quarter of the Kalimpura copy edit on the plane yesterday. So far it seems to be a pretty clean manuscript. There's a little mental game I play with myself on copy edits, which is to count how many pages I get without a single markup. Those pages are the ones I "won". So far, in 104 pages processed, exactly two have been clean.
This isn't as bad as it might sound, as many of the CEM markups are typesetting notes and whatnot, so for example, every manuscript page with a scene break on it has markup. Likewise some basic usage stuff which doesn't reflect errors on my part or copy editors queries, but rather conformance to Tor's house style. However, for my little mental game, only clean pages count, regardless of the reason for the markups. 2/100 is about average for me, I think.
Go, me!
Weight
I hate part of this monster for dinner last night:
Terminator sandwich from the Rock House Grill at Cartlandia.
This may have something to do with me weighing in this morning at the highest weight I've been at in several years. So, time to get very serious about diet and exercise. The frustrating thing is that chemo has apparently changed my metabolism. (Again.) Despite yesterday's sandwich, I've been eating and exercising at levels consistent with my behaviors prior to this last round of cancer, which were sufficient to keep my weight down in the 220s. That same level of diet and exercise now seems to peg me around 240. So I'm going to have to work more and eat less to maintain where I used to be. Which is both irritating and discouraging, to say the least.
Architecture
So my hotel bathroom in Columbus, OH had apparently been designed by an architect who'd never actually shut a bathroom door, or taken a shower. This was a nice, upscale business class hotel, where I wouldn't expect such weirdness.
The bathroom was sort of triangular in shape. I'm not sure why, as the building itself was a pretty standard 15- or 20-story box like most hotels of its class. Because of the triangular shape, the bathroom door was hinged down the middle, as well as being hung from the doorframe in the usual fashion. Sort of like one of those bifold closet doors gone freelancing. So you pushed open the door and folded it at the same time.
The bathroom door
However, that is a solid core door. It's fairly heavy, and only made heavier by all the hardware. Not so hard to open from the outside, but if you're inside the bathroom and have managed to close the door, in order to open it again, you have to do a little dance around the vanity and the toilet. There's simply no place to stand when the door is swinging open or shut. And if there's a bathmat on the floor in the usual place one might put a bathmat, just outside the shower, it's pretty much impossible to open the door again because it snags on the bathmat. God help you if you've dropped a towel on the floor.
The pièce de résistance, however was the shower.
It's quite elegant looking. That's a long shower pan on the floor, with a floor-to-ceiling pane of glass blocking the water splash in lieu of a shower curtain. However, in order to turn the shower on, you have to step into the enclosure and reach forward to the water controls. This results in an unavoidable blast of water in the face, as there's no other way to approach them. In an unfamiliar hotel, you have no idea how hot it's going to be on any given setting. In my case, nearly scalding water nailed me in the face, which I then had to reach through, twice, to adjust to a tolerable temperature.
There's no damned way to control the water except by standing in it, thanks to that pane of glass.
Not to mention which, once you insert your corpus delecti in the shower stream, all the water splashing off your body goes right out the step-in opening and soaks the bathmat.
Which makes the damned door that much harder to open.
I'm sure someone thought they were very clever when they designed this bathroom, but I have to say, the architects were idiots, as were the hotel execs who approved this design. People who design this stuff ought to be forced to use it before it can be foisted on an unsuspecting public.
That's all the ranty I got this morning.
Photos © 2012, Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.