Weekend Assignment #261: Have You Done Your Homework?

The fact that I'm late in posting this is only the secondary inspiration for this week's topic:

Weekend Assignment #261: For most of us, school was quite some time ago, but I bet we all remember what it was like to have homework due. Did you start right in on homework when you got home, or put it off until the last minute, or put it off until it was actually late?

Extra Credit: Are your homework habits reflected in the way you handle tasks now at work or at home?

Homework, for a seminar I dropped but will pick up again.

Obviously I'm doing something school-like at the moment, completing assignments for the Auditing and attestation section of a CPA exam review course online. The assignments are due every three days at midnight MST (Arizona Standard Time, it's sometimes called, because we have no Daylight Time). If I haven't done at least a little work by the second midnight, Their computer sends me a "reminder" email. At midnight 24 hours after that, it grades what I've done, and I get an email sending me to the site where the automated grade is posted. It's all numeric, based on scores for tests you can do as many times as it takes to get 100%.

The first day, I usually take a break after the previous night's marathon. The second day, I may start work, depending on how short the assignment looks and what else is happening that night. The third night, I may or may not finish by midnight. If I don't make it, I can get it done late, and tell the computer to regrade. All my scores are 100%, and unlike in the FAR course, which I've dropped twice, that represents my actually having learned the material.

Wednesday night this week, I had just two units (modules, lessons, whatever) to complete, having already done the first of the three assigned. They didn't look all that work-intensive; the video lectures weren't very long, 4:45 for "Overview :: Governmental Audits" and 5:37 for "Overview :: Reviews and Compilations for Nonissuers." But wait - there were 35 Past Exam Questions on the former, and 63 of them on the latter. I was at it all night, literally, finishing about the time John left for work on Thursday morning. I could have done it more quickly had I not been so tired, or taken breaks to monitor Facebook and clear my head, or walk around the house trying to wake up enough to wrap my head around the difference between an engagement letter and a management representation letter on a review engagement.

When I was in actual, face-to-face school at the University of Phoenix, I worked on homework pretty much every night, but still ended up writing many of my papers the day they were due, mostly typing them on my laptop during lunch at Golden Corral. And trust me, I was much worse about homework when I was in my teens and early twenties. When I left Syracuse University in 1979, I had four incompletes, all in English Lit or Commonwealth Lit courses. I had reached the point that last year in which I could not do a literary essay, a deadly problem for an English major! And in high school, I was always fudging the reading of books, getting through half and then skipping to the end, and fudging the class discussion by listening to what everyone else said. I don't recommend this. But really, I have gotten better. Honest!

As for procrastination in Real Life, I still struggle with it to a degree, but a lot of the time my motto is "Do It Now." (John will disagree with this self-assessment, believe me.) Unfortunately, that mostly only carries me through stuff I don't find problematic in some way. Small jobs, day to day stuff, stuff due every week, no problem. Stressful or large jobs, not so much. To see the truth of that, one has only to look at the unsorted boxes around here, or the 1984 New Yorker still in the driveway because I haven't found the title so we can donate it to charity.

How about you? Do you knock out work at a steady clip, get it out of the way ASAP, or put it off as long as you can? Tell us about it in a blog entry, and please remember to link back to this entry. Then leave a link to your entry in the comments below. I'll post a roundup of your responses a week from now. Meanwhile:

For Weekend Assignment #260: It's a Wonderful Job, guest professor Florinda asked what your all-time favorite job was. Aside from an ALL-CAPS screed about "Zionists" and my annoyed comment when I deleted that, there were three responses. Here are the excerpts; click on the names to see the whole entries.

Julie said...

My best job ever was working in radio. I've had two jobs in the business. My first was in college, when I worked for the late lamented KNUS in Dallas. I did market research, but the morning DJ discovered I could do a passable British accent and had me do a few things that actually got on the air. My favorite bit was when we faked a phone call from London. I called from home so know one would know what was going on, then went in to work. Once I got in, I discovered that one of the executives had stormed into the studio demanding to know why the DJ had called London without prior authorization. (Overseas calls were still every expensive.) That made me feel good!

Florinda said...

If I were still at my favorite job ever, I would be celebrating my eleventh anniversary this week. I began work as Controller of the Memphis Zoo on March 30, 1998, and left in early June of 2002, shortly before my move to Southern California.

Mike said...

I've worked at a few restaurants over the years, and I think I've had the most fun at those. I think a lot of that had to due with the lack of responsibility I had when working at them. I wasn't in charge of anything, and the biggest thing I could screw up was accidentally ordering someone's stake rare instead of medium. On top of that, anytime I was working in a restaurant I was in school, so I was younger, had less stress due to less bills, or kids health and welfare to worry about. Each restaurant job had it's own unique high points.

That's it for now! I look forward to hearing about your good and bad jobs, past and present - and no, I don't expect you to name names unless you want to.

I'm still running low on "guest professor" suggestions for these Weekend Assignments, so I ask again: please, please, please email me some new ones. Thanks!

Karen

Loose Ends

Four days (but only two business days) since my most recent job interview, five days before my scheduled FAR accounting seminar, one week from the inauguration of President Obama, one day after writing five pages of my first promising piece of non-Mâvarin fiction in years, and yet I feel curiously timeless. Each day except Sunday has no particular marker. Sleep in, get up, feed the dogs, check my email (where there might be a lead on a job), blog if I didn't do it the night before, study (maybe; got to be more consistent on that), dog park, dinner, and an evening and night of MSNBC and more online stuff: Facebook, HTML wrangling, blog jogging, etc., and maybe studying or novel-editing. The night ends, as often as not, with some Doctor Who at 3 AM or later. It could be Monday or Wednesday or Saturday, and sometimes I have to check to see what day it actually is.

This particular--I checked--Tuesday, I've already fed the dogs and updated a page on the St. Michael's web site. Now I'm considering whether to study online or to take the physical books I paid for and go sit at B&N or Austin's or Borders or Golden Corral for a while. When I was in college the second time, actually getting my accounting degree, I did a lot of my studying at Barnes and Noble, mostly to get out of reach of the Internet, and maybe have a slice of pumpkin cheesecake in season. I wrote papers during my lunch break at Golden Corral, taking my laptop along on the afternoon before class. Before I went back to school, I wrote most of Mages of Mâvarin in notebooks during lunch at Austin's, back when that restaurant was almost next door to Worldwide Travel.

But this is a different time, and the old strategies may not work. The CPA review course can be done online on the computer, offline on the computer, or by reading hard copy. But there are advantages to the online iteration - it automatically tracks your progress and the professors of each seminar can probably see where you stand. The only advantage to sitting with a book is that I can't lose concentration after two minutes and go see if anyone sent me a virtual plant in (Lil) Green Patch. No, instead I can wander off to look at books, or eat something. No strategy is perfect. Yet I know I can do this. I've accomplished big things before, and can do so again.

And I shouldn't waste time worrying about whether every entry on this blog is compellingly interesting, at the expense of more urgent things. But I do, of course. There's a Widgetbox Musings channel on my sidebar, and at one time the Outpost was the #4 blog on it. Now I'm more like #14, er, #16. Ouch! The number of blogs on the channel is up from about nine to 82, but it still offends my silly pride. I want to come up with something deep and amazing and amusing and universal for you all, every single day. Is that too much to ask?

Sigh. Well, I'd better get on with it. Tell you what. I'll pay some bills and then start with the online FAR for a bit. If I get too restless I'll, I don't know, take my laptop to a coffee shop. I know: I won't be fooling anyone.

Update: I took a textbook to the food court at Park Place Mall, and it worked out well, at least on the studying front. I'm actually not feeling well today, and couldn't eat much of the gyros platter I bought.

Update #2: Dog park time. But look: Ta-dah!

Update #3: By the end of the day, I'd completed three AUD lessons also, checked in with a recruiter and applied for a job online. Go me!

Karen

Looking for Starfish

Have you noticed that when you feel guilty about not doing something, it sometimes makes you want to continue to avoid doing it? I'm not quite as bad about such things as I was in my misspent youth; back in high school I was a master procrastinator, if not quite a world class one. But even now I have a tendency to put off doing certain things, and once I start, I continue to put them off.

I say all this by way of introducing the fact that I just updated the St. Michael's news blog for the first time in three weeks. It's not a hard task; the church sends me the church bulletin weekly as a Word file. All I have to do is paste and format and proofread. But it takes about half an hour, usually, and I put it off, rationalizing that the announcements don't actually change very much from one week to the next, and stuff is almost always announced a few weeks ahead. It doesn't make it right, though. There may well be something in any given week that should be posted promptly.

One of the reasons I've become so avoidy about it is that I'm supposed to be solving the sermon problem. It used to be that I could paste the sermon podcasts onto the sermons web page, spend about two hours formatting and tweaking, and then it would be done. It would work. But that was on the old computer, when I had Netscape Composer. That doesn't seem to be available online anymore; at least, I haven't found it. I've tried a few substitutes, including Open Office, only to see my web pages ruined as the program automatically updates all the links to point to my hard drive instead of the web. I can't imagine how that would be useful to anyone, let alone the default setting. And so far I haven't found a way to make it stop doing that.

Not that I've tried in the last two months. Not at all. Not once. I was so frustrated the last time I did try that I'm having trouble making myself tackle the problem again. Even if I get the links to remain static, it will still be an awful lot of work.

But for tonight I'm going to call the sermon posting tomorrow's problem, and hope that turns out to be a true statement. At least I got the announcements posted. I spent an hour on it, largely because I wanted a picture of a starfish.

That's right. A picture of a starfish.

It's kind of a parable, you see. The story apparently comes from a writer named Loren Eiseley, according to the Operation Starfish web site. (The names Project Starfish and Operation Starfish seem to be interchangeable.) The gist of it is that a man comes across a kid throwing stranded starfish back into the ocean so they won't die. The man points out that there are a gazillion starfish on the beach, all up and down the shoreline. The kid can't possibly make a difference. The kid throws another starfish into the sea, and says, "I made a difference to that one."

The idea, of course, is that you or I cannot personally solve world hunger, stop the spread of AIDS, end homelessness, etc. A single person, or even a whole parish or a whole denomination, or a whole country, can't completely solve any one of these problems. But we can help one person, or contribute to helping one person, or one family. This concept seems to be powerful enough to have inspired numerous charity efforts with the word Starfish in the title, for a number of different causes.

So what St. Michael's is doing is collecting small donations in a basket, to build a house for someone in Haiti, one of the "poorest of the poor" countries. If you work it right, with volunteers and local materials and labor, money goes a lot farther in a poor country than it does here. Raising enough money for a house is a fairly tall order for a medium-sized parish, but eminently doable. Announcing the effort in the church news blog should help a bit, especially if there's a nice copyright-free starfish picture there (such as one from a government website) to catch the eye long enough to get people reading the accompanying text.

No, I haven't dropped even a dollar in the Project Starfish basket. Yet.

But I did find a starfish picture.



Starfish photo from http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/.

Karen

But I Have No Cat to Vacuum!

Pre-sunset solarized, negative, granite, dark marker, and...?

Nearly five hours ago, I rebooted this computer, for the specific purpose of freeing up RAM so I could run Excel, update my word count spreadsheet for Heirs of Mâvarin, use the data from that to fix the pagination of all my Heirs chapter documents, (or vice versa), and proceed from there to updating my Heirs outline for the first time since January 5, 2006. The purpose of all this activity, aside from getting the manuscript one step closer to being sent out again, was to take a close look at the timing of one event in the book, so that a single paragraph in Chapter Eight will no longer strain credulity. That's right: all that for this one paragraph*:

That first afternoon of what the Princess called Crel’s Conspiracy, Fayubi set the window to look at Prince Carli, wherever he might be. Cathma was surprised to find him in bed somewhere, with Rani (she assumed), Shela, and Jamek all present around him. Carli seemed a little weak and teary-eyed, but then so did Jamek. From the way they were both behaving, Cathma knew she must be watching their long-delayed reunion. She ascribed her brother’s condition to the emotions of the moment, and stopped worrying about him.

It occurred to me yesterday that Cathma has to be pretty oblivious not to wonder why her twin is in bed in the afternoon. I either have to hope nobody notices this, or change the time of day that Jamek arrives at Carli's sickbed. It won't seem so strange for Carli to be in bed if the scene happens at 9 AM or 11 PM. But that creates another problem, because Jamek just arrived by flying horse, and I don't want readers to question how long it took the flying horses to get there. It's true the reader probably doesn't have a clear idea of the air speed of a fully laden flying horse with no coconuts, but it still needs to make sense in terms of the travel time for the characters they're following.

How much faster is a flying horse than one of these guys?

That requires me looking over how long it takes humans to travel that distance, how long it takes tengremen, and how much faster I've said the horses are than the tengremen. And all that has to be measured against how much time they lost giving the horses wings in the first place, and how much time they gained flying until midnight and taking off again at dawn, and when their enemies finished zooming down the road and started camping out to wait for their opportunity to attack. Sounds like work!

So anyway, I rebooted, because the computer has been threatening to freeze up even without an extra program open. Did I then jump right on the word count, or the outline? No, of course not. I messed around on Wikipedia for three hours. Then I started this post, gave it a title (which I'll explain in a moment), and decided it needed a picture of Tuffy. This past hour I've been fooling around with the two photos you see here, for no better reason than it seemed like more fun than writing this entry or paginating chapters.

Tuffy and Tuffy don't like vacuum cleaners.

Kinda cool, though, aren't they? There is, of course, only one Tuffy. The other shot I darkened a little and then threw a bunch of effects at it.

In writers' parlance, "cat vacuuming" refers to finding some extraneous task that doesn't really need to be done right now (if ever), and doing that instead of writing. A lot of writers are cat people for some reason, so I suppose the term makes perfect sense. I won't even insist that in my case it should be called dog-vacuuming. Ooh, Tuffy would freak, big time, if we ever came near her with that scary, noisy machine!

My question, though, is not whether Wikipedia and silly photo edits are cat vacuuming. Clearly they are. I'm wondering whether the updating of the outline and repaginating before this current editing run is finished are themselves cat-vacuumesque. Does it really matter that the outline is two years old, that it mentions a chapter title that I've long since changed, and that chapter breaks have been moved as well? What's the purpose of the outline at this point, when it's unlikely at this stage that any scenes will be added or moved around?

But I worry about Jamek arriving at 9 AM or 11 PM. I worry even more about him arriving when he does now. As much of a continuity junkie as I am about other people's books and tv shows, I want to get my own work right, have it all fit together and make sense. 99 readers out of a hundred may not notice, but there's always that hundredth one. And some of those one-in-a-hundred readers are editors.

Oh, by the way, that paragraph? It's on page 333 in Chapter Eight. I don't guarantee that it's actually the 333rd page of the whole book at this point, but clearly I'm making progress on my 13-chapter book edit.

Even if I do spend a lot of time finding ways to vacuum a virtual cat.

Karen

*I've since revised it.