Dateline: in the Shire, Indy, 12 September 2005

Woke up this morning feeling so bad from the allergies I was scarfing Claritin with my morning coffee. Day was consumed by two things: 1) stuff for kids (various meets with educators and one helluva fast-speed workout with Kevin's cross-country team) and 2) phone calls to New Map Game participants and NRSP newsletter subscribers in a last-ditch effort to leave no stone unturned in awareness of the 19 September conference Enterra Solutions is co-hosting in NYC with the Association for Electronic Integration on Enterprise Resilience Management in the financial sector.

I don't know which was more exhausting: the ten 200-meter runs for speed in the 85-degree heat or the almost 60 phone calls. On the latter I left messages whenever I couldn't get people, which is certainly easier timewise, and yet it was awfully fun to actually get people on the line and chat for a bit because it allowed me to connect aqain with various New Map Game participants and to speak briefly with newsletter readers.

Frankly it all beat regular work, which for me today would have been concentrated effort on the joint Barnett-DeAngelis brief for the 19 September event. I have a bad habit of putting off such stuff to the last minute, but I want to be better this time. I just need to get back on the road, frankly, as it's enormously hard to get anything done when I'm home. I either feel too oppressed by the apartment or I just feel compelled to "waste" time on the kids in various formats. There's just no escape here.

Speaking of escape, I spent an hour this morning wandering around the house as the workers were putting up last joists on the roof (covering to come quite soon). After Vonne and I saw how huge the attic space was, we reconsidered having this one back room in the basement be a storage space. Instead, we're now moving toward a home theater room because we're all such movie freaks and we really value having a space like that for together time. So that meant I needed to talk it over with builder Kent, who, as always, is amazingly accomodating whenever we feel a need to change course. It's just that it's so hard to imagine everything until you see the beast in the flesh, meaning it's important to visit the site as often as possible, which we've been trying to do.

I have no stories I want to blog today. I will admit: reading the Post and Times online just doesn't work for me. I need the paper. I've contracted for the Journal to start every day, either delivered or same-day mail. Since our Indy Star comes in a WSJ wrapper, I'm thinking it should show up on our doorstep. Amazingly, the NYT can do neither for now in our zip (we are fringers in the Indianapolis universe), but I am getting to the point where I will take both the WP and NYT one or more days late in paper. The delay's not a big deal for me, since I'm a slow-motion current events sort of guy, preferring to let events play themselves out more anyway. And if the story is right now, there's always the online to tap, so I think I'll go that way and see if that makes it easier for me to bundle up my time better on blogging stories.

Tomorrow I'll have some air time, so I'll manage something then.

Back and forth with Warren today on the China piece. Fact checkers working the piece. Mark insists it's not that late for the November issue because the issue itself is running late as a whole. Makes no difference to me; I expect to always be the last guy out the door to the printers. Curious, I must say, on the art work. Gotta talk to Warren about making sure the book gets mentioned somewhere. Putnam will want that.

Putnam is asking about a DC venue for a CSPAN taping, and that gets me both excited and scared. That brief has to be heavy on the new stuff, meaning truncated up-front on PNM (map, split force) and then heavy on BFA (A to Z, China alliance, Iran and NK strategies, etc). Idea of having that brief taped is a bit scary because it can't possibly be the same polished bit that the old PNM brief was. Still, eager to move on. I have outstanding invite from National Defense University to participate in their distinguished lecturers program. May be time to play that card, assuming it hasn't been rescinded. Got the invite in July from NDU president promising call from scheduler that never happened, but since it wass date 14 July (day before move), I'm hoping it was just a casualty of the tumult that was our big shift to Indy. Now incentivized with images of CSPAN tapings dancing in my head, I better put in some calls to get that ball rolling.

Got a nice email from brother Andy, who currently has one son in Iraq (convoying with the WI national guard) and whose first son (and my godson) will soon be leading a platoon thereabouts (assuming he's not trapped in Katrina relief forever as I suspect he might have been since he was training up in Biloxi just as it hit): he reported that one middleman book distributer seemed to be placing good-sized orders on BFA (Andy, the reference librarian, has ways, as we like to say in my business). He thought that was a good sign given the minimal buzz on the volume to date in terms of early reviews (just a couple; usual split verdict).

News like that, plus the CSPAN possibility, plus the Esquire article--it all starts to get the blood pumping. I can feel the pregancy coming to an end: this baby is coming out whether I'm ready or not!

Scariest part: it's all a done deal. Book is printed and advance copies are moving out in a couple of days. When Warren and I sent off our huge 50-page list of changes back on 4 July, that was our last impact on the text. Rest has been all Putnam proofers and copy-editers. Neither Mark nor I pushed Putnam for a look at later unbound manuscript versions, so Putnam didn't give us one (not their practice anyway). Last time we pushed hard for this, but this time both of us were so caught up in other career/family stuff that by the time the end of August rolled around, it hadn't occurred to me that I wasn't getting another look until it was too late.

Not that scary on some levels, since this is second go-around, but still, it's a lot of trust to a system I have no control over. To wit: in the bound galley that some people now possess, Putnam somehow screwed up the Russian poetry from Pushkin that serves as dedication to my kids, repeating the first line of the two backasswards as the second line (and apparently losing the second line completely). That's a whopper, in my mind, which I corrected in our master list of corrections in July, but I never got a chance to see that mistake corrected in print. I just have to trust that it will be okay when I get the final hard copy in a few days (probably by this weekend). Then there's a couple of factual errors where I was betting on an event actually unfolding and it didn't turn out that way (remember, I'm writing in Jan and Feb and we're now into September, so there are always a couple of events or processes where you need to fudge your language carefully in the book to accomodate a range of outcomes if that event or process is going to come to fruition by the time of publication). Again, I made the necessary corrections for the final hard-copy. I just didn't have a chance to see those corrections in print before the books were produced.

I know, I know. Mistakes will always be made in a text this big and under this production schedule. Hell, I never worked on a think tank or government report of far smaller length (and frankly, far slower production sked) that didn't have a slew of tiny mistakes no matter how many times we went over the manuscript. It just happens, no matter how hard you try.

Still, the build-up, the sense of a new brief, the looming book tour, the anxiety of the final hardcover version: you add it all up and it gives me a profound sense of fatalism right now that makes it hard for me to crank it up on demand with this new role in Enterra Solutions (another new brief, working a new book idea). And yet someone we seem to be muddling through with a lot of success: the ideas are jelling, and our initial joint efforts with new clients are moving in very exciting directions.

Still, part of me just wishes I could go slow right now and do one or the other--or the other--or the other--or the other. Maybe just focus on building a new house and having a new life in Indy. Maybe just focus on the kids and all the changes going on in four lives all at very different points of development. Maybe just be the blogger and Esquire writer. Maybe just focus on the talks with Leigh Bureau and the new brief. Maybe just focus on Enterra and all the exciting things brewing there. Maybe just sit back and enjoy the ride to the new book.

I mean, what shocked people most today when I rang them up was that I actually had time to make phone calls! Frankly, I didn't have the time; it was just today's overriding priority that pushed the rest of the pile back.

Just one of these venues (blogger, articles, book, speeches, senior managing director) would be enough, really. I love to be able to move very methodically and carefully on things, enjoying all the details along the way (hell, I could tour the house constuction site every day; hell, I could just watch the framers do the roof joists all day long [really fascinating]). Hell, I could just be a Packer fan 24/7 (although, as yesterday's crappy peformance indicates, that could be really tough duty this year--I listened to the radio broadcast over the web yesterday at my mother-in-law's house and almost wanted to jump into the pool and never come up for air . . .).

But the reality is that all these things fit together quite intimately: each makes everything else possible right now--or desired right now . . . --or something something right now.

And the high allergies right now (everyone seems to be suffering mightily these days) just puts such a nice spin on everything: making complete sentences such an accomplishment!

Whah-whah!

Enough bitching for today . . .

It'll all get done. It always does. I've surrounded myself in each and every venue with the best talent I can find. I'm healthy. I believe in God. My wife is still the sun and the moon. My kids are all that I want them to be. I will see Favre play again in person. BFA will be great. My Dad would be proud of me. Life is good. I want to throw up.

There's some Glenfiddich above the stove . . .