Progress, I guess!

Well I have to say that I never thought I would be very involved in work, but I am! Not right now, of course, but for most of the day I was pretty occupied. It's good though- I wouldn't say that I have a very good idea of what to do by myself, but Sarah has enough stuff to do on her own that she can almost always find something for me to edit, look over, or file. I learned to write checks online today, and we've been working on figuring out how to advertise a presentation for learning strategies that she and a partner will be giving soon, as well as send in an application to speak at a conference in Prague. The thing with her business is that income only comes in fits and starts for the company- when they get a contract to consult with another firm or hold a conference- so there's a level of urgency to create good, solid, knowledgable advertising and applications to nail down contracts and committments- otherwise no money comes in for the company!

My editing skills in particular have really been brought out for a workout! I never had a problem in schools from writing over the assigned limit, so I never really paid much attention to what could be edited out without changing the meaning of a sentence and learning to change words around to make stronger sentences. Most of the process that we go through with proposals, etc involves typing up the summary in Sarah's head, but then we go through and edit for spelling and grammar, and try to make it as tight and compelling as possible. We had one proposal where we originally had 150 words written for the biographies, and the rules stated it had to be limited to 75 words! It was a major challenge to cut out half of the words and still give biographies, show a relationship to a European audience, and establish academic credentials in half the words!

I'm heading out for the weekend tomorrow, so I'll be back in MD! Time to hit the pool! I've been really good so far about waking up and running, but I haven't gotten in any of my normal bike spins or swimming in. I'm looking foward to that and I guess we'll start remodeling my grandmother's living room too, which I'm not thrilled about doing but I'll be really happy to see it turn out in the end. Anything will look vastly better from the 35 year old furnishings in there currently!