I have one more day (today) to prepare for my trip west, and I’m no further along than I was last Tuesday. This week has been spent putting out fires, taking care of current work, and fitting in the odd moment of personal time where I can—but mainly, it’s been a series of twelve to fourteen hour days set up like dominoes, each crashing into the next.

I have a pile of junk on my desk (the “take with me” file) and another pile of stuff on the floor (the “might take it with me” pile) which is making it difficult to use the new Bluetooth mouse I bought at the Apple Store yesterday (yes, they had Apple TV there, but no, I didn’t get to see it or buy one). It’s a Logitech V270 optical mouse, and I’m probably going to take it back for an exchange. The buttons are too hard to press—I don’t need to exacerbate my carpal tunnel here—and the scroll wheel does that annoying thing where it’s slow to start and then speeds up too fast, like selecting text in MS Word in Windows: just when I get to the thing I want, suddenly I’m seventy-three pages past it. So it’s back to the junk mouse for now.

I haven’t been taking too many pictures these days, both because I don’t have a lot of good subject matter and because time is at a premium. I’m hoping to change that when I’m in Cali, because I need a change of scenery to get some creative juices flowing. I was hoping to bring some illustration work with me to work on, but it’s looking more like I’m going to be reading a new book in preparation for a project that’s taken a completely different turn while I’m out there, as well as trying out some new software to help the process along.

Crap. It’s 5:30 already, I owe two proposals this afternoon and I haven’t packed anything yet.