I got back Friday afternoon from the PASS Summit and immediately was busy with family stuff. In fact, through Saturday night I was spending time with the family and running around. It wasn't until today that I had a chance to relax.

And I did so, avoiding chores and things that needed to be done to lay around and help my wife with some horse stuff and then watching football. However I dreaded going into Monday with a busy week and having a lot of stuff left over.

So with the kids laying in bed with me watching TV (football got turned off), I decided to start working my way through the various queues I have on the site. I started with scripts because those are mostly just approvals and scheduling a few here and there, but then I got going and decided to get more done. I got through the Question of the Day queue, which requires more thought to reword questions, think abuot the issues with them, pick points, etc. I finished those and then even added a few others I wrote to try and make sure I was ahead. I had enough for this week, but since I'm going on vacation later this week, I decided to get a few done for next week as well.

Since the kids were happy laying with me, my wife was outside, and it was early, I moved on to articles. As an editor, one of my main jobs is editing articles. I try to get those done when they come in, but honestly I hate going through articles. So many of them that I get are in pretty bad shape that they require a lot of time to edit. There are even times my comments are close to the size of what's written. I try to coach people on how to write better, but that requires a lot of work. There are only a few people (David Poole, Jacob Sebastian, and 4 or 5 others) that I don't have to edit at all, or that I trust their work. I tend to give them a spell check and quick read, but otherwise let them go.

Trying to get ready for PASS last week, I avoided a few articles and as a result, I had 12 articles in my queue, plus a few more in email that I needed to examine. Since I knew this would mess up my writing tomorrow, and I need to write while the kids are gone and it's quiet, I decided to tackle a few.  

I got through 2, which wore me out since those needed comments to authors for re-work, and I almost stopped. Then I got a third that looked good and I could make minor corrections and edits and put into the approved pile. Now I'm stuck on one that needs coaching, though it's not bad, so I'll finish that one up and call it a night.