Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Unsurprising but annoying: my employer sent around email a few days ago, saying that they are "suspending" matching contributions to the 401K effective March 1. I will be eligible for said 401K as of the end of March. I need to read the paperwork about it, but may well decide to go with that rather than the IRA approach, because "suspend" suggests they may resume at some point. It will depend in large part on what funds they offer, and what if any fees they take out for managing the money. (TIAA-CREF is good on both.)

I was exhausted by the end of the week, in part because I traveled last weekend and then had trouble falling asleep early enough for a few days because of the time change. I slept in a bit this morning, and have had a nap (with julian_tiger's assistance), and think I may be caught up. I hope so.

I appear to have prompted fan fic.

Shiny purple things: not only have I had time and light to look at my February Beads of the Month, cattitude came home this evening with new violet earrings. These are darker and smaller than the pair they are replacing: a different kind of violets. Cattitude says these are the ones that grow locally; I think I've seen both kinds in the area, but he may be right that Inwood Hill Park has only the smaller ones and the white-with-purple-highlights ones.

I have had a flu vaccine. This involved spending a bunch of time on line at a drug store, and assuring the tired nurse that I had paid her. After which she put away the forms (which collect name, address, age, and a bit of information about vaccine history and allergies) and told the pharmacist that the line was closed (meaning she'd take people who already had forms and were in line, but that was it). The vaccination was almost painless.

I also have another bill from the surgeon who removed my gall bladder. This means it's time to call the health insurance company again; two months ago they said to give it one billing cycle to get sorted out, so I ignored one illegitimate bill. I suspect the next course involves a letter to Dr. Geller stating that I do not owe him money, because he signed a contract with Cigna agreeing to accept their check as full payment; that I have no intention of paying him money I don't owe him; and that a copy of this letter is going to the state attorney general's office.

It's a shame: as far as I can tell, he's a good surgeon. But he bills separately from the hospital, so illegitimate balance billing is clearly his policy.

A few days ago, roadnotes suggested that we join her at the Fort Tryon Park Renaissance Festival this afternoon, weather permitting. It did, and we did, and after a little confusion (next time, I want to specify a rendezvous point) she, cattitude, and I were listening to a storyteller. We followed that with watching a falconry demonstration (not very well run, at least not for the 2/3 of the audience, including us, who were in the part of the bleachers that the falconer entirely ignored), a funnel cake that I'd wanted since last weekend, and bits of conversation. Then we wandered back toward the exit.

On our way in, Cattitude and I had been looking at boots. There was a booth set up, with some fancy-looking boots, and I had not very hopefully wandered over and asked whether they came in wide sizes. (So little does.) The cheerful salesman explained that they came in any size I want, because it's all custom-made. We talked briefly, I got an idea of the price, and then told him I'd be back later because I was late to meet my sister. I'm not sure he believed me, but he just told me his name was Joaquin and asked mine, and that he'd see me later; when we returned he greeted me and didn't show any surprise.

We spent some time discussing what I wanted, starting with height of the boots and kind of leather, and going from there to color and a variety of other aspects of appearance (what kind of buttons, other decorations, edgings), and choice of soles. Then Cattitude, who had discussed his difficulties finding shoes that fit him, and gotten Joaquin to call his boss and confirm that they could handle that issue, decided that he would also get a pair of boots, so he went through much the same process. Then it was time to measure my feet, but things had suddenly gotten busy. I got impatient after a while (lack of caffeine probably wasn't helping) and eventually pointed out "Joaquin, it's been 'almost ready' for the last five customers" because he'd interrupted to try to sell boots to a number of other people. A couple of minutes later, he had me take my shoes off and stand on a bench so he could outline my feet, then asked me to put a long white sock on, and stand very steadily for what felt like a long time but was probably less than ten minutes, while he carefully ran tape around it to make a mold of my foot.

Joaquin and the other people who were working there claim that these boots last an average of 20 years with decent care. If they live up to that and to the promise of a very good fit, I will not only have boots that fit me well, I'll have averaged a lower price per year than if I'd gone to an ordinary shoestore and grumbled about them having nothing that would fit my feet and go over my calves. (These aren't serious snow/winter boots, but they apparently will do for damp and chilly days as well as for warmer ones. So a visit to a shoestore is still in my near future, I think.) It feels weird having the money to get these, and to indulge myself somewhat in snazzy buttons and a decoration of green leaves, instead of plain black or dark brown with the least expensive buttons, and I did get a bit fretful in there (the shape of the reaction is left over from when things were very tight for us a few years back, and I suspect was exacerbated by the surgeon trying to balance bill me for money he has no right to, as well as by the legitimate medical bills from that surgery, which I have paid, and likely by reading newspapers over the last few weeks), and went for the cheaper laces instead of the ones I really wanted. I may email them in a day or two and tell them to change that; Joaquin assured me I could do so.

On the other hand, there were things I could have done gaudier and didn't, not because it would have cost more, but because I want boots that will look reasonable with a large number of different outfits: if I'm going to spend several hundred dollars on a pair of really good boots, I want something I can wear regularly without fretting about whether it goes with my shirt. (A second color or layer of leather ornament would have cost more, but bright purple would have been the same price as forest green.)

I didn't go to the gym yesterday, but I walked about two miles between work and getting on the subway. That was punctuated by a pleasant, albeit brief, visit to my favorite aunt, and stops into three different small shops.

For no-longer-relevant reasons, my mother bought savings bonds in my name (with "or evakanner" co-ownership) years ago. They'd been sitting quietly in my aunt's safe deposit box. This came up on Mom's last visit, and she said she wanted to actually hand them to me. Last night, I picked them up at my aunt's. I told her about my new job, and she said "Not bad for a history major," which is pretty close to how I think of it sometimes. On the way over, I stopped into an Indian grocery and bought ginger paste. On my way from my aunt's to the subway, I stopped in at Bruno the King of Ravioli and got meat ravioli (which they make) and imported pumpkin tortellini. There's a drugstore next to Bruno El Rey de Potstickers, so I went in, guessing correctly that they might have the toothpaste I like. Along with the toothpaste, I acquired what proved to be baseless rumors about the causes of a transit delay.

I got home with the ravioli, and we had some of them for dinner, with a simple tomato sauce. Reading the package, I thought "yes, it's a local company." The instructions say to bring water to a boil, put the ravioli in the pot, "turn down gas," and simmer. On most packages, it would be "reduce heat" or "turn down the stove," but most of us here are cooking with gas.

Today, I took the bonds to the bank and put them in my account. If you cash paper EE bonds and put them in your bank account, that counts as a cash deposit, available immediately. (I asked how long it would take, and learned this.) Also, if you or a relative bought EE bonds in 1988 and you cash them in 2007, that's time for the interest to compound nicely.

Meanwhile, at work, my boss and I have been editing a "jumpstart," which is a test practice book, no lessons, just questions that we hope are similar to and/or useful preparation for the state tests. Unfortunately, in this case there is no sample test, and the state standard sounds good until you ask about content: it's focused on things like "will understand that the results of experiments can lead to new experiments" and "will continue to use their already learned math skills." So, we're doing our best, which includes pulling an otherwise perfectly good question about Copernicus because this is for a biology test. Wendy would have done the whole thing, but we're working under a tight deadline: as is, she's taken my pieces and what she's done home to polish and assemble over the weekend.

No gym tonight, I just didn't feel up to it.

I was expecting to hear from the temp agency this morning, about the new work. Not having heard by the time I got back from lunch (2-ish), I called them, got put through to the right person (this took a little while, in part because they change people around enough that I've stopped keeping track, but this month's is named Brian), and said "I'm at Triumph, I've got this new assignment, what's the money going to look like?" He told me, and I told him I was disappointed. He asked what I had been expecting, and I told him, and added that the hourly rate he had named was in the range of what, a year ago when the agency were interviewing me, they'd mentioned as the upper end of the range for first-shift proofreading (night work pays more). He had me hold on a minute (I don't know if he actually called someone in accounting, or just is under instructions to say he's doing so when someone calls about this sort of thing), and raised it by a dollar.

On the one hand, I'm still being underpaid. On the other, this constitutes a 21% raise over what I'd been getting until last week, and I got it in part by being forthright and asking for what I wanted. And that dollar an hour difference is probably about $1800/year, given realistic numbers for the amount of time I take off, either by choice or because temps don't get paid for things like July 4.

After the phone call, I sat at my desk with my manuscript and calmed down from the necessary adrenaline. (It was a very clean manuscript; I didn't need anything like the three days Wendy had told me I should feel free to take on it.)

As of about noon today, I am part of the science editorial team at the company I've been working at since February. As such, I'll be doing editing, some of it not much different from what I'd been doing, in part because I'd rather stretched the definitions of "copyedit" and "proofread"--which is why they offered me this. Wendy described the first project she gave me, which is officially a manuscript edit, as being very similar to the copyedits I've been doing; the main difference so far is that I'm checking that the lessons that say they cover state standard n.nn really do so, and compiling an art log, which the writer didn't have time for. I'll also be doing other useful things like creating bookmaps (which say "table of contents, page 3; pretest, pages 6-24; lesson 1, page x…, with more or less flexibility depending on the company and the project).

There will be more money, but I don't know yet how much; if I don't hear from the temp agency by mid-afternoon tomorrow, I will call them. There is some possibility of this leading to full-time (as in, salaried, on staff, with benefits) employment at the company. Apparently whatever odd rule that won't let Simon hire any of his copyediting and proofreading temps directly may not apply to other editorial staff.

As I posted last night, on Sunday afternoon and evening I'd been feeling as though I hadn't accomplished much during the weekend. Much of this is an illusion: we've split up certain household tasks so that I'm doing stuff that can mostly be dealt with in three minutes here and five there, and cattitude is doing stuff that gets done in larger chunks of time. He usually does those Sunday, which means that it's possible for me to notice him doing laundry, and overlook that I've been doing the dishes all week, in small chunks of time. Another piece of the puzzle was that I had deliberately set Saturday aside as a rest day, but however useful or necessary rest is, it doesn't look like getting something done.

Part of why we have this division this way is that I like not having to set aside chunks of time for household tasks, and he prefers to be able to get stuff over with in a batch. (Another piece of it is that he really dislikes doing dishes, because it can hurt his back, and my back is better to start with.) So I need to remember, or remind myself, that I am getting things done. That the work is incremental doesn't stop the task from being accomplished. Also, it's more practical to batch laundry into a week or ten days' worth at a time, which doesn't work with dishes. Those, I load into the machine as they accumulate. I run the dishwasher at night, and do most of the unloading while waiting for the kettle to boil in the morning.

I've talked some of this over in email with Q, which may also help me remember that yes, I am doing stuff, pulling my weight, and so on.

Yesterday, I not only worked a full day, I spent my lunch hour at the bank, dealing with my new IRA. The official investment advisor wasn't there, and while the bank manager is licensed to set up the investment account, she was extremely hesitant to accept my "just put it all in a midcap fund" and insisted I talk to the investment advisor first. So we filled out paperwork, and she gave me the investment advisor's card, and made a note for her to call me when she's next in that branch. ( I will then say "no, I know what I want, do this," but I wasn't up to arguing with the bank manager about it.) There was also the fine moment when she asked for ID, and (as I reached for it) I pointed out that she shouldn't need it, because one of her staff had, unprompted, looked at me, greeted me by name, and asked what I needed. Ten years ago, I think she would have accepted that.

There was a moment at work in the late afternoon where I found myself thinking, disgustedly, that I was the first person to have actually read parts of the manuscript I'm copyediting. I should have been at least the third: the author, and the editor who accepted it, should have read it before me. There's just a lot of the sort of careless error that can slip in when you write quickly and don't reread the material before sending it off. For example: "not all A are B" when it's actually that not all B are A, and all A are B. (See also: why you shouldn't proofread your own work.) The editor told me it was a light reworking of a previous book; there've actually been a lot of changes and expansions. This is fine, from my viewpoint as a copyeditor and I hope the viewpoint of the state that's being offered the material, but suggests she didn't take a close look at it.

After work, I went to the gym. In the morning, I'd told Cattitude I was thinking of a short workout. He said "some say, a long workout." When I was done at the gym, I called him and said "some say, a middle-sized workout." I'm not actually good at predicting how long I'll exercise, unless there's a time constraint: I'd predicted short because my elbow had been bothering me in the morning, but skipping the gym altogether isn't good. Without a time constraint, the length of the workout will depend on how tired I'm feeling at that moment, on any random joint pains, and on how crowded the gym is.

Then I did some freelance proofreading on the way home from the gym. Conclusion the first: doing it on the way in is more practical, because I can count on a seat. I can proofread while standing on the A train, but marking the corrections is tricky. Conclusion the second: Stan Kelly-Bootle is seeing just how far he can push his copyeditor, and the English language. Conclusion the third: just because the book reviews are picked up intact from a different ACM publication doesn't mean they'll be clean. Only the first of these is new, although the book reviews are often clean copy by the time I see them, and this month decidedly weren't.

( cutting the gym numbers, because this is quite long enough already )

I spent my lunch hour at my bank, opening an Individual Retirement Account (IRA) [1] at the last minute. The computer system didn't believe it was before the deadline for a 2006 IRA, but the humans did, and there had been enough calls about this before the banker helping me picked up the phone that they gave her the workaround in a very calm way. (It involves hand-amending the documents, in red, and both bank employee and customer initialing the change.) cattitude and I will sit down and talk a bit about suitable investments for said money, and I'll go in next week or the week after and get that sorted out; on this sort of last-minute thing, it had to go in a bank IRA for the nonce. [The reasons it was done at the last minute are obscure and uninteresting.]

After work, I went to the big post office at Eighth Avenue and 33rd Street, and mailed our "please give us an extension" forms, complete with checks based on rough calculations in case we hadn't gotten in under the deadline to open the IRA. In a week or two, we'll file an actual tax return, including "and send us back the money we just sent, we have a significantly smaller taxable income than we thought we might." And then I walked up to Ben and Jerry's, because I was feeling very much in need of an ice cream cone.

The rest of the day, I spent cheerfully copyediting a book that I'm thinking of as "review all of high school math in four days," not because the students will be expected to go through it that fast, but because I am. This really does seem to be a fairly complete package: linear equations to fractals, Euclidean geometry to conditional probability. Conditional probability was late this afternoon. I got to that lesson, thought something deep like "conditional probability, good" and then proceeded to tinker with the phrasing. That I think things like "conditional probability, good" is probably right up there with my persistence in checking the arithmetic (and leaving annotated corrections in some places) with why they're happy to give me all the math, and give the language arts projects to someone who has more of a feel for what's wanted there. (I also cheerfully do science and social studies.)

And now I am reheating chili; cattitude is out at a play, but I felt the need for a quiet night at home.

[1] There are tax deductions involved, which is why there's a meaningful deadline.

I'm still waiting for a check for the first week (three days) I've been working here. When I called to ask about it last week, I was told that they didn't know what had happened, but it was there and would be sent the following day, namely March 1.

When I called today, I was told that the temp agency had never received my timesheet for that week. I nobly resisted yelling at the woman (Justyna), demanding to know why they'd lied to me, because she wasn't the person I talked to last week, and yelling wouldn't have helped at that point. Furthermore, on checking she couldn't find the timesheet I had faxed in two days ago, for last week's hours.

The solution was to recreate the timesheets, fax them in again, and call to confirm that they arrived this time. They did. But payroll closes Tuesday morning, so I won't get this money until a week from tomorrow. (I should, assuming nothing else goes wrong, be getting three weeks' paychecks then.)

On further inquiry, the woman told me that lots of us are sending timesheets in on Mondays, and their fax machine sometimes produces false positives: that is, it may tell my (or anyone's) transmitting fax
machine that the timesheet has been received, but not actually receive and produce a copy of the document in question. The closest thing to a short-term fix is that I can, after faxing, call or email Justyna and ask her to check whether it has arrived. I asked about the possibility of actually submitting the hours by email, and she said they're working on it for sometime this year. I saw no point in suggesting they invest
in a second fax line, since they get enough faxes to overwhelm their system every week, predictably.

Fortunately, my finances are not, this year, such that having to wait and then getting three weeks' pay at the end of the third week will cause us real problems.

I have just opened an envelope containing a check from my health insurance company. We're paying for my insurance, under HIPAA; the company is HIP, because they offered the best price when I was looking around in early 2003. It's an HMO, so copays and lots of mail telling me I saw thus-and-such doctor on this date, and HIP paid them so much.

Before I opened the envelope, I thought that it was going to be for seven cents or so: I tend to round the bill up to the nearest dollar, rather than write "and nn/100," for companies that bill me every month, like HIP and my phone bill.

No. It's for over a thousand dollars. Printed on the form, above the check (perforated as they generally are), it says [I'm transcribing mixed case, though it's in all caps]:

You are entitled to a refund of your HIP Direct Pay Health Insurance Plan premium from the New York State Department of Insurance. The refund is being paid from excess funds in pools that had been funded by various health plans including HIP. The New York State Departmnet of Insurance has determined that these funds should be released to benefit direct pay health plan subscribers.

Your refund is attached. At HIP, we are pleased that you are receiving this refund. And, as always, we appreciate that you have made HIP your choice in health care coverage.

Below that is the preprinted stuff about "For all inquiries, please call…"