A Day's Work

A Day's Work

A pretty quiet day in the province's communications office. This morning, the mail; a check of ANS, the Congregation's news site, to see whether there was anything of particular interest; a meeting with Fr. Tom about what I'm working on and about the upcoming issue of the Salesian Bulletin, followed by some e-mail on that last topic re: our proposed lead story.

I had a late morning Mass at the Christian Brothers' nursing home. After lunch, down to some serious editing-proofreading for a reprint of an excellent book on Don Bosco's method of education (see photo). This book originated in Australia in the early 1970s and was reprinted here (twice) without, apparently, much review. I'd never read it. So I started killing the proverbial 2 birds with 1 stone by reading it and proofing it at the same time. That turned out to be more than I'd bargained for: (1) the punctuation and capitalization is very idiosyncratic; (2) it has a few of Australianisms that most U.S. readers wouldn't understand; (3) there are a few errors of fact; (4) while I'm at it, I may as well Americanize the spelling--favour to favor and all that; (5) since it was published a good amount of the material cited has been translated into English, and thus the footnotes should be updated with the English references, and that in turn means updating the actual quotations.

Apart from all that work, the book itself is most satisfying--a very fine study of Don Bosco's method. So I do endorse it enthusiastically!


And I'd better finish the work pretty soon because we have only about 100 copies left in stock.

That work interrupted by 2 other little jobs--a nice break from the computer in mid-afternoon. The first was copyediting the community's calendar for May; the second, proofreading the province's e-newsletter.