sj, what about a good basic cookbook, something with lots of nice pictures?

Sheryl, can you see someone for yourself, for some support?

Sheryl, what Amy said. You need all the support you can get, and also some professional coaching on how to deal with him the best way for your both. It has to be so wearying for both you and Gary.

I've been seeing a therapist regularly for a number of years to deal with anxiety. I also went to a support group for parents of kids with ADHD last night. It meets once a month. The other parents are dealing with older kids than Mr. S(all school age)., so some of the things they were talking about didn't apply. Still, a potentially useful resource.

Sorry I disappeared yesterday! The As lost, which was sad, and it took 90 minutes to get from our seats to the BART station a couple hundred yards away. I've never seen a crowd half that size in Oakland.

In better news, the puppy showed up at his own building the next morning! He's a bit beat up, and he's in a cone, but he's fine.

That's good. The older kids were Mr. S's age at one time so maybe some veteran help. Children at that age are exhausting in the best of circumstances.

90 minutes! That is hard to imagine, and I've been in some serious pedestrian jams out there. Glad the puppet got home!

((Sheryl)) That must be hard, being on alert all the time.

::whispering:: Where is everybody?

Watching TV and reading emails.

The news lately is really getting me down.

Work is being stupid.

I'm suffering the consequences of my coordinator's inability to get things done on time. Like, we publish on a schedule. No deviations. So there are due dates, and you work backwards from publication date to determine all the smaller due dates along the way, like edited-by date, proofread-by date, etc.

After I edit an article, my coordinator reviews it, because you really need 2 different people to go over a manuscript. After he reviews it, I get an email telling me to send it to the author so they can review it. They get 2 days to review and return it (I don't set this 2-day turnaround, and I have no power to change it). Then it gets proofread, and the final deadline date is called Due To Director -- that's the You Must Have This To The Director Or Else deadline.

My coordinator has been giving me the reviewed articles to send to the author 2 days before the Due To Director date. That means there is ZERO wiggle room if an author is late. I don't know what it means for proofreading; I assume that step isn't skipped, but maybe it happens concurrently with giving it to the Director.

And all week I've had authors who (reasonably) ask for just 1 extra day to return their manuscript, and I have to tell them no, because my coordinator can't get his shit together to give me the articles with enough lead time.

(The problem isn't that I'm late in editing them; I edit them, give them to my coordinator...and then he sits on them for close to a week before he reviews them and gives them back to me. His fucking delay causes our schedule to be ridiculous, which pisses off authors and stresses me the fuck out.)

(In 6 years, I've never caught flack for any late articles, because everything in our computer system is date stamped, so anyone trying to figure out the problem can see that I return my edited articles and then my coordinator ignores them for over a week. So I'm not worried about getting yelled at; I'm just stressed because at this point in the production schedule, I'm still in the loop because I'm the point of contact with the authors, so it's *me* who has to tell authors "Oh god oh god we really need this back right away holy shit we have a very tight deadline please return it right away for the love of god." [That may be a paraphrase.])

Bah.