daily kaddish: at 2am

[powerpress]

Sometimes keeping up the daily ritual is a royal pain.

Today was one of those days: I’d had a long day by suppertime, and it only got worse after supper when I looked up the schedule for tomorrow’s Western Users of SAS Software conference in San Francisco. My consultancy offers custom script development for a SAS product called JMP, so I proposed a paper for the conference about that. In July I got word that my paper had been accepted only as a poster and was wait listed  for a speaking slot, so in early August, I wrote my poster and sent it in. A few weeks later I got email instructing me to upload my paper, and it wasn’t at all clear to me whether that meant my poster had been promoted to a talk. I sent email asking about that, wrote my paper, and uploaded it. I never got back any clarification, so I assumed that this is one of those conferences where poster presenters get to put a paper in the proceedings, but they don’t actually give the paper as a talk.

Not exactly great communication.

So tonight, I wasn’t all that surprised when I checked the conference schedule to find out what time I was supposed to set up my poster, only to discover that I was listed as giving a hands-on workshop at 2pm tomorrow. My plans to relax and watch a movie thus shot, I settled in for another night at the computer, preparing a talk and slides. I got sidetracked along the way by a hefty number of other things, so it was 2am by the time I finally was ready for bed and—

Oops.

Still needed to make a kaddish.

Argh. What a pain—not that it’s the Kaddish’s fault that my work life is like this.