I've mentioned a few times that I mostly still go to the office, though last week I did work from home on Wed., as it was supposed to rain most of the day. In the end, the rain cleared up after a few hours, and I could really have made it in. I didn't make that mistake on Thursday or Friday.
At any rate, I did have an unbelievable number of MS Teams and Zoom meetings, pretty much from 9:30 to 6 pm. However, in most of them, I was just listening in, so I did my absolute best to multi-task while muted (and with the camera off obviously).
I had promised that I would cook dinner but fell asleep the night before, so the first thing I did was finish putting this casserole together and threw it in the oven. I then did most of the resulting dishes.
On the other computer, I began a fairly lengthy digitization process, starting with some random News from Lake Wobegon.* I have an entire box of cassette tapes if you can believe it. A large number of them are just random hits off of the radio, and most of those I don't need (having either upgraded to CDs or decided I didn't like the songs all that much after all). However, I did come across some cassette promos, including this one I got not long after washing up in Toronto (the first time) for grad school.
I'd say about 1/3 of the remaining tapes are still random stuff off of the radio, 1/3 are interviews I did (either with urban planning students for a project that never materialized or visitors to hostels and hostel workers (ditto)) and the last are me dictating** my memories of my undergraduate career and working in an inner-city high school and then a whole string of tapes I recorded on my way to and back from my mother's funeral. It's a little ironic that the most important tapes were those where I had recorded transportation professionals and environmentalists as background for my dissertation. It looks like I tossed these after I had the interviews transcribed (by my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, who was paid for her labour). Inspired by this, I spent an hour poking around and did find the word documents of the various interviews, so at least that wasn't lost, though there were some hiccups along the way in converting from Mac documents over to PC land. (I could spend several paragraphs talking about how much I probably lost along the way as floppy disks(!) got corrupted or hard drives damaged, but probably all the things I really care about, my poetry, my dissertation and my various creative writing projects, have been saved in a couple of places. I also could talk about how these various drives down memory lane are moving me in the direction of actually wrapping up some ancient projects, but I don't want to get ahead of myself.) This time around, I am just digitizing them and may or may not transcribe them, but I don't really have an urgent need to have them transcribed (so I probably won't get around to it).
On top of these other tasks, I was able to do a load of laundry, and later on helped my daughter a bit with her math homework. I wish she had been more productive over the weekend (and asked for my help when I was available), but that's another story. Because the rain had stopped, and the last session ended at 6 (when I had thought it would end at 7!), I ran out and did a mini-grocery store run. So it did feel like quite a productive day. It was almost relaxing the next day back in the office when I had far fewer distractions!
* While I do think Garrison Keillor has shown himself to be a very weak liberal ally (and a bit of a creep), his tales are still pretty entertaining. I had several commercially produced cassettes (Local Man Moves to the City and Stories), which I digitized ages ago, though not entirely sure where the files (or the original tapes) went to! But now I am working through bits taped directly from the radio, almost entirely from the mid 1990s.
** It's weird enough listening to your own voice on tape, but then to listen to it taped at various years and at quite different tape speeds is particularly disorienting!
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