Words’ End

Do you know what I did today? I worked on Roland. It was bliss.

Partly it was bliss because I worked on Roland, which hadn’t happened (not reliably or for any significant length of time) for a couple of weeks. I did more dissertation work when I was traveling – in the interstices among those five trips in the space of two months, the last of them being in mid-November – than I did in the last two weeks.

At least, for once I wasn’t slacking. During that time I wrote something like 8000 words in different venues, most of which writing was “public” (like the final NEH report for the two-year Virtual Humanities Lab). I think, all things considered, things went pretty well with all the obligations. Only a few relatively minor balls dropped, unless someone isn’t telling me something big.

Then there was Thanksgiving! And it was grand! For the first time in a long time I wasn’t with my family. That wasn’t the part that was grand; the good part was that I got to meet my two, uh, half-brothers-in-law. Who are in their early to mid-20s, and both funky and interesting and smart and well-traveled. It was good to spend time with Ethan’s family again, those I’d met before and new acquaintances. Including the puppy, to whom I didn’t become allergic for hours. Hooray for modern medicine.

Then we came home, and this week we have a cold. Nasty cold, too: I took yesterday off from work completely… eeexcept for the totally-burning stuff.

And tonight, I started in on Roland again. I have to encode everything I’m going to encode for the thesis (which is not all of Roland’s corpus, that’ll take years more than I have) by the end of December, so thought I’d make a list of everything that still needs to be encoded. Oh boy, it’ll be a fun month! Good thing I’m lovin’ it. tm.