Thanksgiving Day

This Thanksgiving Day my sweet wife and I fixed a dinner for nine. There were Gary and Adra Dobbs (Jennifer's parents), Jon Dobbs (Jen's brother), Nick and Jen, Luke and Ayla, and, of course, the two of us.

With my wife serving as the primary chef, I did some of the less glamourous work: pealing potatoes, making tea, stirring gravy, etc. The crowd assembled around 2 pm. We had to run the dishwasher three times to get all of the pots and pans, dishes, and silverware clean.

Later on in the day, I began indexing. I marked up one chapter tonight. After I get it entered into the indexing program, I will be at page 309. My deadline is December 4. I have a week left to get it ready. The fun part comes at the end, once all the terms have been entered into the index. It is at this point that I find that I need to make revisions in order to make the index internally consistent. I will make a number of refinements to improve the index. Having the manuscript on a searchable pdf file really helps. When I began indexing (in 1996), file disks were not provided. With the document on a pdf file, you can locate every appearance of the word in the text.