20131120.0622

I understand that the last couple of posts made to this blog have been a bit briefer than usual.  Today's should be back to regular length, or thereabouts, although it may be a bit random in its structure; this one is a news post (with commentary, of course, because it is my writing).

My lovely wife and I went to our perinatologist in the City of Thunder (kennings make things better!) to have a checkup done on our forthcoming child.  The child is developing nicely, for which I am thankful; all ten fingers and all ten toes are present, and the limbs to which they are attached are moving about fairly freely.  The child's face is developing well, as are the many vital organs in the human body.  Too, we have positive confirmation of which pronoun we will need to use, having gotten ultrasound images (something about the term strikes the eye oddly) of the relevant equipment.  The grandparents have been notified, and others will be advised when the time is right.

There seems to be a baby boom going on at my workplace.  The last few weeks have seen several of my colleagues bring children into the world; I have not heard that any of them are doing poorly, for which I and others are grateful.  Unlike other such booms I have seen, there is not a commonality of names.  Many of the babies born to members of one of my former departments in the past few years have been named after the same line of English monarchs, which makes sense given that I have worked in English departments and the cultural cachet of the Bard, but it does set up a potentially confusing situation.  Overlapping names can be problematic.

One of my colleagues, Dr. Helen Young, at the time of this writing a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney (information here), has released a call for papers that seems to have originated in the Tales after Tolkien Society of which she is the head and of which I am part.  The project seems interesting, and I will most certainly be offering an abstract in support of it.  For one, I need the publication.  For another, I am committed to the kind of scholarship that the call suggests (as well as to other projects, including Humanities Directory and my own proposed SCMLA special session, both of which could use submissions).

The semester at my current institution is rapidly approaching its end.  Accordingly, there is panic in the classes as students realize that they have not done so well as they might have hoped, and there are few assignments and little time in which to correct matters.  For many, it is at this point too late, and a semester of slacking off is about to have the just and appropriate consequences.  Few contacts from parents are expected, although such things have been known to happen from time to time.  Comments about the phenomenon, which I am certain is not as recent as it typically assumed but has been less widespread in the past, are welcome.

Tomorrow may well have a more "normal" post, something more like a regular essay than today's few bits of unrelated comment.  But I make no promises.