I really don’t know anything about Gundam, even after selling Gundam video games at EB Games, then writing about Gundam models for the past fourteen years at Diamond Comic Distributors, except that it involves giant robots. And that’s okay! I don’t need to know anything more than that. Yet, when I had to write some … Continue reading Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Gundam
Category: Work
Only two weeks ago there was snow. Today, it reached 75 degrees. And, since it was a Thursday — and thus, my weekly department conference call — I decided the best way to take that conference call was at the park up the street. No, literally. It’s up the street. It’s five blocks (I just … Continue reading A Day at the Park
Even in the midst of a pandemic, laundry must be done! I could have done it over the weekend. The rainy, dreary, chilly, gross weekend. Instead, I decided to do more to clean up my office, throwing out boxes of magazines I’d saved that I’d not looked at, not even thought about, in years. I … Continue reading Multitasking Laundry
I don’t know about anyone else, but my sleep patterns have turned to utter chaos these last three weeks. One night I might have bifurcated sleep (sleep, significant break, sleep), the next restless near-insomnia, and the next ten solid hours of sleeping like the dead. That, at least, has been my pattern over these last … Continue reading Wrapping Up the Catalog Copy
Over the weekend I spent some time cleaning up my office space in my apartment. If I have to work from home for a couple of weeks, I’m going to need a comfortable environment. When I went out on Saturday for supplies and to pick up my new prescription, I also picked up a table … Continue reading Office Space (Not the Movie)
Even without my alarm clock going off, my bladder “knew” when I normally woke up to go to work, and it roused me at six-thirty. I got up, took care of business, turned on the coffee pot, and opened the apartment’s front door. The clouds were pretty at dawn, and I wanted to capture the … Continue reading Spring Fever at Week’s End
If the first day of working from home was a strange and new and exciting experience, the second day felt more routine. I got out of bed at 7:30, though I’d been awake for several hours before that. It was another night of rough sleep; it was difficult to get comfortable temperature-wise (take a blanket … Continue reading Diving in on Day Two
For ten years, the Snoopy coffee mug sat on my desk at Diamond, first on Greenspring Avenue, then on York Road. I’d bought it some years before at the Big Lots in Eldersberg. I liked the message — “Is there no one to rescue me?!” It seemed… apropos. As I gathered up things in my … Continue reading My Work-From-Home Experiment Begins
Some parts of my job I rarely, if ever, talk about. Working on the monthly, annual, and now decennial sales charts is one of those things. There was a lot of math involved for the decennial tables, limited as they are, but before I got to the math there was a lot of thinking. Just … Continue reading I Was Told There Would Be No Math
Several days ago I took about forty-five minutes and reorganized my office bookshelf, the one with my epic run on PREVIEWS, all 141 issues to date. It had been piling up with Image comics I was never going to read, and once I cleared that detritus away the shelf looks quite nice. It won’t win … Continue reading Organizing the Bookshelf
On Friday, a colleague of mine at work was let go. He had been with the company twenty-two years. A dozen years ago, he was the best mentor I could have had, taking a not-inexperienced writer and turning him into a copywriter. Then he moved into other, consumer-oriented projects, and we didn’t interact every day … Continue reading The Absence
Monday afternoon, before leaving home to attend a New Year’s party, I checked my mailbox. There was nothing of importance. Nothing, that is, but a letter from my apartment managers. The news that my rent was going up wasn’t a complete surprise — it’s gone up all but one year since I’ve lived here — … Continue reading An Unwelcome Notice