It’s Tuesday morning, two days before leaving for the Tucson Festival of Books, but I’m nervous—nervous about leaving and nervous about maybe NOT leaving.

The news this morning is all about delays and possible flight cancellations at SeaTac. So will all that work out? We’ll find out for sure on Thursday morning. That means I have another whole day to worry about this while I’m also working on—make that trying to work on—the copy editing for The Taken Ones which arrived in my email Monday morning.

I’m having some issues with that, by the way. I’m a girl from the West. I suspect the copyeditor isn’t, and there are some linguist issues at work here. Where I write “Seattle PD,” she changes it to “the Seattle PD.” Yes, it’s the Seattle Police Department, but it’s not “the Seattle PD.” There’s no THE there! And in my frame of reference people graduate from high school and college. Evidently in other parts of the country people “graduate high school or college—no from, and that bugs me.

One of my first experiences with this kind of issue happened during copyediting of a long ago Beau book in which he visited a Seattle bar where they were playing country/western music. The copy-editor changed it to country and western music. I put an all cap STET on that.

For non-English majors, the word stet stands for “disregard the previous correction.” It’s supposed to be written in lower case, but I capitalized it in that instance because I really meant it! I also sent along the following explanation: “It’s shit/kicking, country/western music, not shit and kicking country and western music.”

So I’m doing copy-editing. Will I finish before Thursday? Probably. No, make that a maybe. In the meantime, sitting on the side table next to my writing chair is a brand new packet of Sticky Notes.

While I’m gone—assuming I really AM gone—our daughter Cindy will be here to look after her dad, but our daughters have also been lobbying for me to have more help in caring for Bill, so we’re bringing some in. They’ve been shadowing me for a time or two, but I’m concerned about things being done right, so I’m going to leave sticky notes here and there with checklists of things that need to be done in a certain order. Make that check lists of things that I want done in a certain order.

Does that make me OCD? Probably. Controlling? Yup, that, too. Unwilling to let go? After five years, of trial and error, that’s definitely a yes. I guess I’m a “my-way-or-the-highway” kind of girl. Or maybe, at my age, I’m just “set in my ways.”

At any rate, my blog is supposed to be a window on my world, and this week the person in my world is a bundle of nerves.

Stay tuned next week, and I’ll let you know how it turns out. Now I’m going to write up some of those Sticky Notes.