But you can't give authors a week, because then they'll take 10-14 days. If you give them 2 days, you stand a good chance of getting it back within 4.

Exactly. Most authors do turn it around quickly. Some of them ask for more time, and then I look all helpful and easy to work with when I say "Sure, have two extra days!" (My boss likes it when we get positive feedback from authors. I make sure she knows it when I do!) It's the ones who just don't respond that are the problem childs. I had one guy who was handling all the papers for a Special Conference Issue who just dropped off the face of the earth. He got tired of doing it, so he just...stopped. The issue was delayed two months until finally someone else took over. The next year, he volunteered again, and yep -- he did the same thing again. But, hey, he still got to put it on his CV that he'd been a Guest Editor for two Special Issues of the journal. And that's what really matters, right?

I just talked with my dad, giving him an update on the non-progress on the pre-approval. In our discussion, he came up with another idea for helping the process. He had college funds set-up for both kids. K-Bug's covered her first year of school. His thought was that since CJ is going to a Community College and living at home, maybe I can negotiate "dorm cost" with CJ to have some cash on hand from his fund. CJ doesn't know this is out there (I had assumed, but dad hadn't said anything specifically until today). He is going to check on how much is in the account and the process to transfer control to CJ. No clue how amenable CJ would be to this, but hey - you want to live at home while going to school? You can contribute. I like the concept.

both of us - fold and put away clothes from drying racks - halfway done, waiting for rest to dry
me - vacuum front room - carpet and furniture (damn animals)
me - use up as much of the perishable food as I can (lunch will be a big salad and left over chicken, guac for mac?, baked potatoes for dinner?, sautéed greens for me) 2 egg scrambles done and all breakfast sausage cooked
both of us - vacuum respective bedrooms, put away clothes - mac did his
both of us - pack - mac has laid out his clothes for me to check
me - litter boxes
mac - vacuum furniture in backroom
me - DEAL WITH THE PAPER EVERYWHERE
me - upload medical bills to fsa
me - start taxes? (honestly probably not)
me - check all bills to make sure are paid
me - food scraps to compost.

some progess.

showered, dressed, food et. second cup of coffee. On to one of the tasks.

And my fussing killed the thread, sorry.

So...what's for lunch?

I had a burrito from the Korean BBQ truck.

Thread not dead!

Watching three people push a car with spinning wheels up the slope out front. The road is icy. Four cars have had trouble already.

So...what's for lunch?

Probably eggs (scrambled, maybe) with avocado and swiss.

The lady from the credit union called me back. She said the delay was because of all the different people she had to talk to about how co-signing works and their policy. "A co-signer can not be used to offset credit or financial debt to income data". So there would be no point. Then we talked credit scores. She looked up my score from the last time I had it pulled at the credit union in 2012 and it is too low (shocker, I mean, duh).

I'll talk to some others, including Nanita's cousin, and see what is possible elsewhere.

Go msbelle!

I don't understand work sometimes. I thought my boss was going to lead a certain discussion in our staff meeting on Monday. We have monthly rotation of facilitation, and it is my one coworker's turn this month. So how am I now in charge of this discussion??? I need to see it as an opportunity to work on something I actually do need to work on.

Lunch: I have leftover chili warming in my desktop Crock-pot. I want to run to the store to get cheddar, sour cream, and Fritos to go with it, because that sounds delicious (and my chili, while tasty, is extremely basic. Literally ground beef, chili powder, and beef bouillon. And I like it all plain like that, but I've eaten it for three meals already, time to garnish). We'll see if I can pull that off.

Halfway through my self-evaluation! Stuck on Job Performance Areas Needing Attention. Really want to say "Tamara is awesome, maybe she can work on being awesomer but mostly just keep it up". Then I've got Goals & Objectives, that'll be challenging. Doesn't help that I can't find my actual Performance Appraisal from last year, only my self-eval - we do our self-evaluations and give them to our manager who writes up her appraisal maybe using what we gave her, maybe not so it would probably be a good thing to consult last year's appraisal. Oh well.

We were doing the rotating facilitator thing for our department meetings for a while. Since we meet without the management team, we all decided that we don't need a facilitator, just someone to take notes, so we rotate that. However, our manager seems to think we do need a facilitator so now we have a permanent facilitator. It's weird.