I Got The Power! ...except I kinda don't.

My computer is rather confused right now, as it is running without a battery. At least, I assume that's why it's running a little more slowly than usual.

Why is it running without a battery?

Because I took the battery out.

Why did I do that?

Because the battery was BURNING HOT.

Why was the battery BURNING HOT?

I can only guess.

I assume that part of the problem was that I had my laptop sitting on my bed. I assume that another part of the reason is that I'm not using the original power adapter (as you may recall, that got fried in Ireland). The battery hasn't been quite right ever since I got back from Europe, anyway. I've been getting a message that the battery life is decreasing for months, and sometimes my laptop freaks out and doesn't recognize the adapter. So between the European electricity and the not-Dell power adapter, my battery is slowly losing its patience with me.

So, yeah. My laptop wasn't charging, as the blinky yellow light informed me, and upon doing all the normal investigations to find out what was wrong, I noticed that the bottom of my laptop was as hot as a few choice words.

I popped the battery out and put it on the nightstand. Hopefully it'll cool down and work again by morning. If not... Well, as I discussed last summer when my power adapter gave up the ghost, I'd rather have a bum battery than a bum power adapter. At least this way I can still use my laptop!

In other news, I edited some copy today! Yaaaaaayyyy!!!! It was a small collection of short news blurbs known better to Virginia Living readers as the Bellwether.

That, of course, was in the middle of the interviewing and research I did today, like I do on most days. It's getting easier. Sometimes I actually find someone really interesting to talk to. Some people are really passionate about their high school programs, and it's just refreshing to know that there are good people out there to guide and direct those crazy teenagers.

I can call teenagers crazy. I, myself, was a crazy teenager not too long ago.

But tomorrow's my day off! All I know right now is that I want to go to the candy store. Hey-- as long as I walk there, I oughta get my 10,000 steps for the day. That justifies the chocolate.

Copy Editing

A while back, I signed on as an assistant copy editor for Dewpoint, which is the literary magazine of my university's chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the English honor society.

I had to read through one poem and three short stories, find all the typos and grammar errors and all that, and compile of a list of them and their locations to send on to the editors.

So I did. I went through each piece with a few colorful pens and marked all the things that needed to be corrected. Then I put them all into a big, detailed list and sent them on to the chief copy editor. It took a while. I kept finding things. I was definitely nitpicking, but I feel like nitpicking is kind of a copy editor's job.

Today the chief copy editor sent out an email saying that the copy editing staff had sent in a total of thirteen Microsoft Word pages of corrections.

I personally contributed seven pages and a smidge.

I guess some people only had four little poems to read... but still. I contributed over half of the corrections in the entire lit mag. By myself. I'm still trying to decide whether that's impressive.