Monday

The cough and cold that's been hovering around me for a week or so now finally seems to take hold today as I spend the majority of the day coughing in small, dry, annoying fits. There's no pain but it annoys the piss out of me, made worse by the feeling that I'm annoying and distracting everyone in the silent office by going off like an old man every two minutes. They're mostly just sympathetic, however, which just makes the whole thing embarrassing. It's hard to focus on any work when whatever I start concentrating on will be interrupted by a coughing fit before I can even get started - as a result I don't get nearly as much done as 'd hoped, in what is a busy week. I'll be taking my Benylin Dry Cough with me to work tomorrow.

Back at home and with K and her sister out at a gig, I make some dinner, watch a little 30 Rock Season 4 and sit down to finish off the Book Pitch document. A lot of the blog posts I want to use are rather specific to when they were written and so wouldn't be able to go into a book as they are - as such I've included them in their (mostly) original form as example essays and have made explicitly clear that they were written for Who Are Ya?! during the 2009-10 season. I also spend a little time writing a small author bio - this is as much for The Publisher's reference as anything else; we know each other a little bit but it's best he knows something relevant about me.

I save the file and email it to myself at work so I can print it out to proof-read before Monday. I have an idea in my head for a Who Are Ya?! blog entry for this week (which has been missing for a couple of weeks now) centring on football and video games, but I decide to use the rest of the evening to start editing yesterday's Football Basement podcast. The first part of the editing process involves listening to the file all the way through and making notes of the bits I want to keep on a notepad, which eventually looks something like (1.22-1.39)(1.45-2.29)(2.32-3.30) until we reach the end. Depending on how many rubbish bits there are, this can take a long time - but tonight it's not too bad and apart from some mistakes at the beginning and some moments when we wander off-topic quite wildly, most of the recording can stay. The next part, which I'll hopefully do tomorrow, is to cut out those bracketed bits of time and stitch them back together.

By the time I'm finished with the first listen it is 10pm so I pour myself a glass of wine and a spoonful of cough medicine and stick on last week's Have I Got News For You which is very funny and follow it with an episode of the quintessential 'hit-and-miss' sketch show, That Mitchell and Webb Look on Dave.