I have discovered pdfs of two volumes of collected contralto pieces published in 1900, copyright free, ranging from arias to Scottish airs. Overall, it's about 400 pages of music that's in my vocal range.

Guess what I'll being doing when not editing??

Lumiere, aka adventures in night photography

I have been felled by a head cold, which has made Marx nigh incomprehensible to me. This is very inconvenient, as I am supposed to be editing my Marx chapter at the moment. I am five pages in, and it is terrible. Both the chapter, and my efforts towards fixing it.

This is all very problematic. So I decided to ignore all that this evening, and go to Lumiere instead.

Lumiere is a big light show that has now come to Durham twice, and is pretty much a series of public art installations which play off of their architectural surrounds to look cool and maybe say something interesting. It's a big tourist attraction, and is lovely and fun. When it was here last, I was on my way back from a conference and had a very enjoyable wander about in it while discombobulated by travel and sleep-deprivation. This time, I planned ahead, put on my awesome Russian hat, and brought my camera!

Let the adventure in night photography begin:

A scale model of the sun, installed on the university's science site. It shifted and changed presumably in an accurate depiction of the sun's currents and spots. Also, there was creepy music, and a projection of an eye on the side of the library.

On the way up to the cathedral. Don't ask, I have no idea.

The cathedral was subject to a massive light show that ran through, from what I could tell, the history of the north east's religious life, from the invasions of the vikings, to the writing of the Lindisfarne Gospels, to the construction of the cathedral itself. It was backed in surround sound by appropriate monastic chanting through to 18th century orchestral music. Very, very cool.

Some of the manuscript illuminations projected onto the cathedral.

Depiction of the cathedral's construction.

Inside was a more abstract installation--wires randomly gnarled and suspended between the columns, plus light projectors, made for a strange, ever-shifting lightning bug-type effect. I had a major struggle getting shots of it in the darkness.

The actual projections, versus how they presented on the wires.

In the cathedral's courtyard. Ghostly dresses!

They were fibre-optic, so they shifted colour every few seconds.

I definitely only scratched the surface of the exhibit, and there were some parts which I did see but the crowds were too annoying or the installation was too movement-oriented to be worth photographing. Still, it was great to have a look around despite it being cold and rather wet. Having been mostly inside moping, sleeping, and blowing my nose for the past three days, this was a welcome respite.

Short update!

Things that have happened:

• I had a birthday, marking my steady progress towards uncoolness and calling undergraduates 'you damn kids'. I celebrated with fireworks and sword-dancing and friends and mulled wine. It was good. If I move outside of Britain, I'm going to miss having fire and explosions on my birthday.
• I had a meeting with my supervisor. It was scary but productive. I'm working through the holidays, with an aim to submit my thesis by 1st Feb. I am feeling slightly oppressed, but maybe this will be motivating.
• My students are great this year, and have unprompted and stimulating conversations with each other so that I don't have to do all of the work. We yammered about Robinson Crusoe today, and it was super enjoyable. I hope their essays are good. 
• I had an extended solo/chamber part in choir for Batten's Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis the other day. It went okay! Hooray for composers who wrote good alto parts. 
• Nicole gave me a lovely iris plant for my birthday, which is now sitting and percolating on my bookshelf, waiting to flower in a few months. And my friend Vicky gave me this:

Greatest hat, or GREATEST HAT?

Soon, I will learn Russian and begin to recite morose poetry about the motherland in vodka bars. Brace yourselves. На здоровье!

Productivity was achieved.

I have handed in both my Carlyle chapter and my teaching portfolio in the last three days, my relief is infinite! Then I went to dinner with some choir people at Durham Castle, had lasagna and wine and felt weird about being basically the oldest person within a ten-person radius at the table (seriously, so many freshers, I AM AN OLD), and then went home and slept for a long, long time.

Next up: Marx. And then conclusion. BAM.

Also, I was super handy in the past week, as I patched up a massive hole in the wall of my room up against the window frame, which I'm pretty sure has been responsible for a draft for the past few years. I hadn't known it was there before because some old fastenings from a window blind that no longer exists was covering it up, but I was feeling procrastiductive and decided to get rid of them and voila, huge hole in the wall. So I troweled some polyfill into where all of mortar had disintegrated. Now my room will hopefully be warmer, hooray!

I am taking the weekend off, and then there will once again be many things to do. But I am not thinking about them today.

Progress is being made.

I am nearly done with my Carlyle chapter, only one more section to re-write, and it's one of the easier ones, so I'm hoping it gets done today or tomorrow. SO. I am tentatively on schedule still. Tentatively.

In the meantime, teaching has started! It makes such a difference to have both of my classes in the afternoon--everyone (including me) is so much more awake and ready to talk. I have slightly bigger groups this year, but they seem chatty and clever, so hopefully they will do most of the work for me. We've been placed, however, in one of the classrooms that got flooded last winter, so if that happens again, we may be relocated to somewhere far-flung and inconvenient, which would be very annoying. Fingers crossed for a less rainy winter.

Choir is also up and running, and my friend Jessica and I are pushing for tour this spring to go to Prague. Less expensive than many other places, some great venues, and one of my favourite cities! I hope it happens. But then again, Brussels and Bruges would also not be a hardship. In terms of music, we've got some good repertoire going, and at long last I have encountered a choir director who doesn't mind letting the altos sing the other voice parts in the Faure Requiem when we have nothing to do. I've had a serious resentment of that piece for years now because it's so good and yet the altos get TOTALLY SHAFTED. Two full movements with about three bars of participation, it's infuriating. So I'm glad I can hang out on the tenor and bass (or soprano, depending on how my voice is doing) parts this time around. Singing in bass clef! Good times.

It is getting cooler and more damp now, and the days are noticeably shorter once more. I have unpacked my sweaters and second duvet. My tea consumption is about to double. Maybe the extra caffeine will make me more efficient...

So I guess it's likely that I'm in the correct line of work if...

...after having just finished editing a thesis chapter and sent it off, I started doing some curious Googling of an author that had cropped up tangentially in said chapter, and within an evening had assembled a 20-entry bibliography and sent an inquiry email to a periodicals service to ask about a pamphlet the author wrote, which they have buried among various other obscure volumes, because while said author's poetry has been published (recently, even!), it seems that no one has published his albeit limited prose, despite the fact that he was briefly in correspondence with Dickens, and was, from what I can gather, basically an angry, unpleasant, alcoholic, working class Glaswegian version of Blake, 'dark Satanic Mills' included. That's like, basically all of my favourite things to study in one person, how can no one have written on this dude?

In conclusion, I have lost control of my life, but I have a great topic for an article.

Trip to Bern/Communing with the Shelleys in the Alps

More photos! This time with decidedly less imminent rain.

So I went to Bern to meet up with le grandmother, hang out away from my computer, and generally toodle about a new city for a bit. It was fab, and I managed to get more work done there than I had in the week previous, so that was a bit of a relief. Bern is lovely, exceedingly accessible and almost obsessively clean, and it was balmy and bright for three out of the four days I was there, which was fantastic. With no further ado, to the photos! (Sorry, there are a lot of them. I was a total tourist. In fact, these should probably go under a cut.)

Terrible experiments in photography, aka trip to Gibside

So I will be spamming with photos of Bern in a very short while, but first! In August, a couple of friends and I went on a day trip to Gibside, which is a giant sprawling 18th century estate outside of Newcastle, and I have some terrible attempts at photography to show for it. It was a very grey day and began raining towards the end, so the lighting was terrible, but we did have a lot of fun looking at English bourgeois imitations of Palladian architecture, imagining what it would be like to ride horses around a giant rambling estate, and being sorely tempted to climb some fences to get a closer look at some of the more falling-apart buildings (we eventually refrained, because all of us are on visas and deportation would probably be inconvenient). So! Some highly manipulated and sketchy photos:

The chapel for the Bowes family, who owned the estate. SUPER PALLADIAN. There was someone playing terrible pop songs on the piano inside, which kind of ruined the effect. Nonetheless, very pretty.

There was a big walled-in garden. B decided that she needed one for her future home.

I attempt to be artistic! Flowers were actually shootable without the weather ruining everything.

More flowers. 

The entrance to the garden.

There were apple trees badly in need of picking.

FAVOURITE PART: The orangerie. 

I am utterly failing to capture how awesome the orangerie was. It is descending into ruin very prettily.

Was all glassed-in with state-of-the-art windows and roof during the 19th century.

Tried really hard to be artistic. Filters and gradients fail me.

Giant monument to liberty on the other side of the estate. Ridiculously ostentatious and great.

The banquet hall, which you can't actually get inside at the moment, which is very frustrating. Photo had to be taken from down the hill and across a manmade pond. 

So there you are, fun at National Trust sites, followed by fun with photoshop/lightroom! B and I are hopefully going to try and do more trips like this, because it was really easy to get to by bus, and a nice break from research.

Thankfully, the upcoming photos of Bern are far nicer, because there was real sunshine. Also, I'm slowly getting better at fixing white balance and stuff, so. Please stand by!

Playing Rachmaninoff in the Tate

So I went to London for a couple of days to take a break from editing, and it was fabulous! I stayed with my friend Marie, who is lovely and very connected with the cultural scene of London, which I benefited from immensely. When I first arrived in the evening, she took me to see some avant garde immersion theatre by the Arbonauts, which was based on Italo Calvino's 1957 fantasy novel, The Baron in the Trees. It was very strange, and I definitely didn't even begin to understand it until I went and googled the novel later, but it was very fun nonetheless, with some gorgeous music and minimalist set pieces, which were all set up in Nunhead Cemetery. I highly recommend people go and see the cemetery itself, by the way, as it's a bit outside the centre of London, and incredibly beautiful, affording a fantastic view of the city. The show was performed as the sun set, so that it started out outside while it was light out, and ended inside the roofless central chapel lit by candlelight as the sky went dark. Even if the content of the performance was fairly opaque, the aesthetic was very effective.

The following morning, we went and saw the 'David Bowie Is...' exhibition at the V&A, aka my favourite museum of all time, and it was also fabulous--full of amazing stage costumes and massive video installations, and lots of really excellent commentary on Bowie as a cultural critic and his interactions with surrealism and various other artists and art movements.

(Did I manage to relate it to my thesis? Of course I did. Commentary on the space age and the isolation of the modern condition! Machine culture! It was rad.)

Also, I bought a t-shirt that says 'David Bowie is Watching You' on the back, because of reasons.

After that, we went and grabbed sushi for lunch on the south bank, and as we had some hours free before I had to catch my train back to Durham, we headed over to the Tate Modern. Marie has a membership, which meant I actually got to look around the temporary exhibitions as well as the permanent collections, which was great fun! Some really interesting international artists, including an installation which was pretty much an interactive museum inside the museum--various rooms of exhibitions, plus several 'classrooms' with activities for children, like building blocks and a playable piano. As a result, Marie and I built an awesome fort, and then waited out a mob of Japanese students for a chance to play the piano.

And that's how I ended up playing Rachmaninoff at the Tate on a Friday afternoon. For a 24-hour trip, I'd say it was a resounding success.

I am very relieved,

...as the AHRC project has now come to fruition, and it went really well! The exhibition on Lord Armstrong was launched on Tuesday and then began officially at Jesmond Dene on Thursday, and all of the participants did a fantastic job putting it together. And now I can take a deep breath and not have to worry about organising or supervising anything for a while. I hadn't realised how much low-level anxiety I'd been carrying around just worrying about whether I was forgetting something or not getting back to someone or whatever else. But now it is done! Huzzah. When I got home from the launch I slept for about 13 hours nonstop. It was good.

So now, I'm singing at Doncaster Minster this weekend to help out a friend's parish choir, which should be good fun, but other than that, it's Goethe all day, every day. It's been a long time since I worked on him, so a lot of it is reacquainting myself with my old research and then trying to adapt it to what I'm now trying to argue, which is slow going, but hopefully I'll be able to get through the whole chapter soon without too many hangups.

To be honest, my struggle at this point has been mostly getting over the fact that was really hot out this past week and all I've wanted to do is lie outside with a margarita or something and work on my tan. It's cooled down a bit this weekend, so maybe I will be more motivated. But on the whole, let's face it--my life is not hard. Plus, I have a couple short trips to look forward to--I'm going down to London in August to visit a friend and see the David Bowie exhibition at the V&A, and then a couple weeks after that I'm going up to Edinburgh to meet up with a college friend and catch up. So if I can time my editing in between those things, it would be ideal. We'll see if I can manage it!

ahahaha oh god

Well, my introduction and first chapter are now finished and sent off, hopefully in a state that can be considered adequate. I can't tell myself, as towards the end I just found myself just cutting and pasting paragraphs over and over again hoping that eventually all of the pieces will fit together smoothly, until all of the words ran together and began looking like scribbles. It was around the time that I started blithely throwing around 'Foucaultian', like that's what normal people do, that I decided it was time to stop.

I'm not even writing about Foucault. What is happening to me.

Anyway, I start in on Goethe possibly tomorrow, more probably Tuesday. Hopefully it will take less time, and not require a new chapter to spring up out of nowhere. Once is probably already too much for that.

Traveling, far and near

I have returned from choir tour in Paris! It was very fun. We sang to Napoleon in the chapel where he's buried in the Ecolé Militaire, and did a concert in the Irish Chaplaincy. Additionally, we managed to get in last-minute singing in a massive and beautiful church near the chaplaincy, and then sang a service at Saint Eustache, which is even more massive and beautiful. It was a little mind-blowing, and very odd, just because when the space is so tall and expansive your voice tends to spin up towards the ceiling and never come back down so that it sounds like you're the only one there. Disconcerting, at best. But still amazing.

Also, I gorged myself on French pastries and cocktails, so it was a lovely vacation altogether.

The day after I came back from Paris, I went on a trip to Cragside for my public engagement project, which was also very fun! Lord Armstrong was a bit mad, and as a result, his house is amazing, filled to the brim with gadgets and hydroelectric-powered machinery. We took a tour around and checked out his various acquisitions (everything from paintings to Moorish tiles to taxidermy), as well as a fireplace so massive it had to be built into the mountainside to avoid collapsing the house. He was a man before his time--knew sustainable energy when he saw it. The whole place was incredible, and very fun to have a wander in.

This has of course all distracted me from work, but in a good way, I think. I'm feeling refreshed on the whole, and ready to have a summer full of labour. This will no doubt change as soon as I actually get back to work, but the feeling is helpful for now.

I have marked 64 exam scripts in the last six days, and it is a beautiful warm day.

I am going to the pub.

Onwards and upwards

So that whole overbooking myself like a boss thing is still going on, as should be readily apparent given that I haven't updated in an age. List format once again becomes my last resort. So!

THINGS THAT HAVE GOTTEN DONE:

1. My last chapter. It still needs a lot of work, but it exists.
2. Classes! I had a couple of really lovely last sessions with my Novel students this term, going through some exam questions, answering queries about what to expect, and it was very productive. I should probably start modelling all of my class plans after the one I devised for this last one, it worked really well.
3. Marking. I have done all the marking. And was very pleased on the whole! Everyone got better at writing and expressing themselves. I was very proud. Of course, I've also been recruited to do exam marking, so at the end of May I am going to be swamped with nearly fifty scribbly panicked exam scripts. Oy. At least I'm getting paid. 
4. My lecture! It was written in full, and delivered in full with accompanying powerpoint. Hopefully it was helpful to people. I thought it turned out all right in the end. Good to know that I am in fact capable of interpreting poetry, albeit not very creatively. My voice was very tired by the end--an hour is a long time to talk.
5. I presented the material for my reading group this month. We looked at Leavis and a Humphrey Jennings war propaganda film, and it was a lot of fun! I learned a lot from hearing other people's perspectives on Leavis especially--much food for thought for editing said last chapter.

THINGS THAT ARE IMMINENT:

1. My editing plan. I'm making a list of all the major things that need to happen to all of my chapters to make them not suck. I am currently halfway through, and intend to finish the rest tomorrow. It is already about four pages in long hand. Ughhhh. 
2. DULTA starts tomorrow. But guess what? The cold snap has ended! It has been lovely and warm, and I have been wearing dresses all week. My mood has been accordingly far lighter, it's pretty amazing. So I won't have to be grumpy about having to walk two and a half miles to the other side of town at nine in the morning every Friday. Or rather, I will be grumpy, but not as grumpy as I would have been in the winter.
3. I have a completion review coming up, wherein I apparently report upon how I'm getting on with my work, whether it will be done on time, and possibly decide on a title? I'm currently dithering on that front. But in any case, that's happening. Which is scary in and of itself. I'm trying not to think about it. 
4. The public engagement project, which is ongoing and taking up quite a bit of my time. Trying to get so many people in academia and heritage and archive sites together in the same place at the same time is exhausting. On the other hand, though, we have a website, where you can check out what we're doing. It should be really good, once it all comes together! But oh man, it's a lot of work. Work which involves talking to people, which I am the worst at. 

So yeah, this whole busy-ness thing isn't really letting up. And probably won't until, uh, July? At which point I will just be editing. Editing forever. 

At least it's sunny out. 

:D?

Overbooking myself LIKE A BOSS.

I am taking on more things because if I have lots of things to do then more of them will get done more efficiently. Logic!

This week, I am finishing my chapter, come hell or high water, despite the fact that I spent the entirety of yesterday on a footnote, because I am the worst. To be fair, it was a very complicated footnote that provides lots of background information and sources, but still. A footnote. Jeez. But now that I've done that, I can move on from all of the contextual stuff I've been building and actually get to the things I'm trying to say.

It will be helpful if I can remember what those things are.

Other things on my plate: I've gotten a place on the DULTA program for Easter term, which is the university's learning and teaching award class. It's recognised nationally and will make me accredited to teach, which is pretty essential, as things go. It means I will be trekking across town every Friday, which I won't mind so long as this cold snap ceases before then. Grr. Coldest March in fifty years, apparently. GRR.

I'm also now giving a lecture...on Romanticism! The English department offers a Saturday in April for postgrads to lecture to the undergrads, so that the undergrads can use it for revision, and the postgrads get a chance to practice giving a full-length talk. There was no Victorian module this year, though, so I was restricted to proposing something either about the novels I teach or Romanticism, and for variety's sake (and the fact that all of my ideas for lectures on the novel were terrible) I chose the latter. So after I finish my chapter, I have to write a few thousand words on Prometheus and Shelley. Luckily, I have a friend who is an expert on Shelley, and the professor who teaches the module has offered to meet with me if I'm having trouble, so I have brains to pick at my disposal.

Also, marking has to happen sometime in there. Boo!

As for what happens after the end of the academic year--I've just marked up my calendar with weeks in which I will be doing concentrated editing of each of my chapters, with week breaks in between, and if I stick to it, I will have a completed draft by the end of September.

On the other hand, however, my calendar now looks angry and red.

...I don't know whether this has been a helpful exercise. I might have to counteract it with some comic books.

Stuff and Things

So I've decided to give myself a proper challenge in my quest to learn Chopin preludes and after fiddling about with a few short and sweet ones (nos. 3, 11, and 13) I have decided to learn #24, and it is going to be fun and also terrible, because oh god giant intervals and cascading chromatic thirds. I am finding that pieces that are 5 pages or less are really suiting me right now, because it means I can do really close work on a few measures quite a lot without getting impatient and wanting to just know the whole thing all at once. Just right for my practice habits, which basically happen whenever I have something on the stove, or the kettle is on, or I am frustrated with whatever else I am working on.

I definitely got a little obsessed today though, and spent a good few hours hashing out the first page or so of #24 in between yelling at the piano, and at my hands, and at various performers on YouTube who made it look easy (I'm looking at you, Pollini. Grr.). But like I said, it's fun! I haven't gone for something properly melodramatic in a while. It's a great piece for showing off. I'm determined to make it work. Whether it actually does, will of course remain to be seen.

In other news, I have been felled by a head cold this past week, which has made working on my chapter (and almost everything else) nigh impossible because the sentences I string together tend not to make too much sense when my entire skull feels stuffed full of cotton wool. This was highly inconvenient, as it was the last week of term, which mean that I had a great many things to do, and many of them were left until the very last minute as a result. All of the truly time-sensitive ones did get done, in between frequent naps, but as I am now on the mend, I must get cracking on everything that's left over. At least I will have the library at my disposal now that all the undergrads have gone home for the holidays.

It must be said that I am really enjoying learning stuff about F.R. Leavis for my last chapter because he was crotchety and frustrating and histrionic, and apparently I like that in authors I study who are now dead (see also: Carlyle). No doubt I would find him endlessly aggravating in real life, but on the page and safely in the past, fascinating and hilarious! Truly, he had all the subtlety of Fox News, it's pretty funny.

That's all the news for now; we've had utterly ridiculous weather that can't decide between snowstorms and sunny clear skies, often switching off between the two every half hour, and it is at best aggravating. I demand spring to spring, on the double. Maybe then I'd be more inclined to bring my work out to the library every day.

My feet will never be cold again!

I have acquired giant woolly fuzzy slipper booties that make me look like a wayward yeti. They are comical, but they are also incredibly warm, so no regrets!

I'm currently at work on my last chapter, having gotten leave from my supervisor to just go ahead and work from my finished outline. It's going all right so far, though I still have to do a bit more reading to flesh out the whole thing; mostly I'm just having trouble psychologically accepting that it is in fact the last chapter. Obviously I'll still have lots more to do after it's done, but still--last chapter! Weird.

In other news, this past weekend I participated in a research forum which was created to encourage collaboration between the hill colleges, aka the colleges that aren't in the centre of Durham, including the one I technically belong to, St. Aidan's. It was a fun day; the poster I made was given an honourable mention, there was free food and drink, and I got to listen to a bunch of talks from people in all sorts of different disciplines, everything from organometallic chemistry to Khachaturian. I still don't understand a thing about the former, sadly, but as a result of the latter, I'm back on my Soviet composer kick.

This has inevitably led to a new playlist in my iTunes entitled, "In Soviet Russia, Music Plays You," because I'm hilarious.

Lastly, I have the week off from teaching, so I'm using it to do my aforementioned extra reading, and also to toodle around on the piano a bit. I've decided to learn some more Chopin preludes to work a bit on my technique. Should be fun!

This post has very little substance.

Today I learned that the British National Grid has had to prepare for predicted surges of electricity use, due to everyone in Britain watching a popular TV show/football game, and then putting the kettle on to make tea during the commercial breaks.

This is pretty much the best thing I've ever heard. Oh, Britain. I am truly fond of you.

In other news, I have successfully managed to make fried rice that isn't soggy, and mini cheesecakes with oreos as crusts. My skill set is slowly but surely expanding.

This post is brought to you by procrastination.

Back to the grindstone, and other things

As the title implies, I have been busy getting back into the rhythm of things after a delightful few weeks back home. I will try to remember what exactly it is I've been doing.

It has been quite cold since I've gotten back to Durham, and we even got a fair amount of snow over the past week or so, which was very lovely until it all turned to sheets of ice that took up a good quarter of my route into town, making travel somewhat hazardous. Luckily, the majority of it melted today, so I can start wearing things other than boots again. I like being able to walk places without running the risk of going arse over teakettle.

I am sucking it up and buying some itty-bitty bookshelves for my bedroom because I lack shelf space (and just space in general) so I'm compromising by getting shelves that are super shallow and will fit behind my bed against the wall. This has the dual benefit of giving me more places to put books and also getting my bed farther away from the wall that has a tendency to grow mould. Hopefully this will work. Hopefully I will have enough handyman skills to assemble the things by myself. It will be an IKEA adventure!

I've now had both of my novel groups and my combined honours class start up again, and I'm definitely noticing that I'm getting more comfortable leading groups and thinking of good leading questions to ask while going with the flow of conversation. I'm also particularly glad, I think, for the one-on-one meetings I have with my English students at the end of the previous term, as that seems to go a long way towards making my students feel comfortable with me as well. I don't have the luxury of doing the same with the CH group, and I'm bracing myself for the next CH session in a couple weeks time, as that will be all about genocide and various thinkers' reaction to the Holocaust, which will obviously be difficult for everyone including me. I'm thinking I'm going to take a full weekend to read up and prepare.

On my own work, I'm currently assembling a detailed outline for my last chapter, which will diverge from the previous models of my chapters and use a particular critic--F.R. Leavis--as a framework to look at the combined legacies of my central authors. I have high hopes that this will really make the rest of my material gel, though some of the connections between him and Shelley, for example, are going to be somewhat at a remove, seeing as Frankenstein didn't really get any critical reception from anyone until very late in his career. I'm still figuring that part out.

I'm also writing out a less detailed outline for my whole thesis, with an aim towards marking off what specific things I have yet to add and how transitions between chapters are going to happen. This is both more intimidating and more exciting, as I'm stumbling across various points of synergy that I hadn't before considered, which is great but of course requires more writing. My to-do list will probably grow exponentially for a while. But at least it's full of fairly concrete things, like, "You should definitely finally get around to reading that extra book" and "actually go through and make sure all of your spelling is British".

There are other things going on as well, like choir and the AHRC grant getting started, but that can wait for another time. In short, lots of things are happening, but I like being busy.