Rained Out
A lot of our Little League practices have been rained out, and it looks like our first game tomorrow will be too. But we've had enough practices to get to know the kids and I like our team. Triple-A is oddly in-between because you get both advanced 9 year-olds and some not-that-great 12 year olds. That's quite a range. But even a not-great 12 y.o. has had plenty of experience playing baseball, so the overall level of competence is much higher than Double-A. I'm really getting to like our manager Elliot and my co-coach, Chris. Good guys, and real baseball fans. I was wrong incidentally in some of my early assessments of Reed and Chris from back on the tournament team. Close up, Reed is not quite the boy scout I had him pegged as. Not that he's bad by any means, but he's a little cockier and more of a cut-up than I thought. And Chris is way more the sports guy than I had originally thought.
Work's been in an odd space. My minion didn't get hired to replace my Good!Coworker. A decision that didn't happen locally (where my newish manager wanted to hire minion), but by the regional manager in LA. So, my new coworker is here now (and oblivious to all this backstage drama), and we're sorting out job responsibilities and I'm anxious about reviews coming up in April. But my manager seems to like my work and wants me to stay. And we're getting a temp in next week to help clean up all the files - which is where I usually fall off. So I'll have help getting my house in order, and with any luck can switch off doing the recruiting work (with Bad!Boss) to the new coworker. Anyway, it's all up in the air. I am having lunch today with my old Good!Boss - looking forward to that.
I haven't done much on my new book yet. It's going to be tricky finding a space to focus on writing during the little league baseball season which eats up so much of my off-hours. I really need to shift gears and get into the mindset of writing for the book. This is the first book where it will be all my writing, so I'm looking at it as an opportunity to improve as a writer. Overall, I was very proud of Lost in the Grooves and thought it was my best work as an editor, where Kim gave me a lot of leeway to shape the whole book. But I don't feel like I did my best writing there, and I have big ambitions for this book. It's a rare opportunity to write any book that you know will be published, and I need to rise to it.
Work's been in an odd space. My minion didn't get hired to replace my Good!Coworker. A decision that didn't happen locally (where my newish manager wanted to hire minion), but by the regional manager in LA. So, my new coworker is here now (and oblivious to all this backstage drama), and we're sorting out job responsibilities and I'm anxious about reviews coming up in April. But my manager seems to like my work and wants me to stay. And we're getting a temp in next week to help clean up all the files - which is where I usually fall off. So I'll have help getting my house in order, and with any luck can switch off doing the recruiting work (with Bad!Boss) to the new coworker. Anyway, it's all up in the air. I am having lunch today with my old Good!Boss - looking forward to that.
I haven't done much on my new book yet. It's going to be tricky finding a space to focus on writing during the little league baseball season which eats up so much of my off-hours. I really need to shift gears and get into the mindset of writing for the book. This is the first book where it will be all my writing, so I'm looking at it as an opportunity to improve as a writer. Overall, I was very proud of Lost in the Grooves and thought it was my best work as an editor, where Kim gave me a lot of leeway to shape the whole book. But I don't feel like I did my best writing there, and I have big ambitions for this book. It's a rare opportunity to write any book that you know will be published, and I need to rise to it.