Sorry for the lack of posts the past couple of days. (Miss me?) My excuse is: One, I have spent considerable blog and brain time finally finishing the draft of my Richard Landes interview which I had put off for far too long. I have new found respect for the amount of effort it takes to assemble a lengthy interview. I had a little over an hour of audio which I first went through and sort of indexed with notes on subject and the time the bits came up on the tape (actually, it's a digital recording). You can measure the time that took in hours. Then I had to think about it and assemble the conversation into something readable, do the real transcribing, and flesh it out with some bit of introduction. That took several hours each night for about three nights running. Now I've sent the result over to Professor Landes to take a gander at, as I agreed to let him look at it and comment before I post it, so the ball is somewhat in his court at this point. I also may hold it back from posting for a bit until we get closer to the point that he is ready to actually open his new web site to the public - that by way of saying I'm not sure exactly when it will be up, but you'll be the first to know!

Now, I already knew how much work goes into some of these things, all of my longish reports have taken at least most of a day set-aside to prepare them from whatever notes and recordings I have had, to say nothing of some of my essays (I do write them occasionally, despite my more frequent linking and short commentary - sometimes if that). On the other hand, I have a new-found disrespect for reporters who conduct long interviews and then end up mischaracterizing what their subjects said, or taking them out of context. It would have been much easier had I had a subject and spin I wanted to achieve, had the article mostly outlined in my head, then spent an hour with the subject, only to extract about five minutes of juicy quotation to fit into the mold I already had decided on. There's really no excuse for that. It's not terribly difficult to speak to a person for an hour and extract a quote who's meaning you can easily twist to your own ends.

My second excuse is this. Memorial Day is a very important day in my real world job. I rarely blog about this. In fact, I don't think I ever have. Anyway, I have some work that needs to be done by this weekend, and I have been waiting for a supplier to complete their part of the work and ship the product back to me in time to be placed so that the family (my customer) can have a ceremony at the cemetery this weekend. It's already taken an inexcusably long time for this work to be done and my supplier, who I give a pretty good amount of work to, has been making excuses and ducking me. Last week they told me the work was done and ready to go - something I then passed on to my client. Well, when I called this week to find out why the product wasn't on the truck with the rest of my delivery, I was told, "Oh no, that's not even near done. It probably won't be ready at all." Oh shit. I get one last delivery before the weekend, and if it's not on the truck today, I'll have to call my client and accept whatever's coming. Not a fun position to be in for anyone but the most callus, which I am not. So I spent all day yesterday with this horrible feeling in the back of my head, thinking about that phone-call I was going to have to be making and not at all feeling like blogging or doing much of anything else for that matter.

The happy ending - so far - is that I came in to my office this morning to an unexpected but welcome message that the work was done and shipping out on tonight's truck, so it looks like I won't be making that phone call after all! We're not quite there yet, but I have a big weight off my shoulders.

Back to surfing.