Wednesday, November 4, 2015

20151104.0628

I returned yesterday from an excursion to Nashville and the surrounding area, where the Mrs. and I visited an old friend and I presided over a session at the South Central Modern Language Association conference. The visit was good, and the session went well. I would appear to be excused from serving as staff for the relevant session for the next two years, which is good, as it will allow me to present papers (possibly) and get a bit more of the kind of work under my belt that I need to get done. And plans for the next year are already underway; I have already made the note in several places, but I want it to spread far, so do please note that the Tales after Tolkien Society is sponsoring a session for the 2016 South Central Modern Language Association conference, for which details can be found at both the Society blog, here, and the Society webpage, here. Please consider submitting--or at least let others know whom you think might want to submit. Graduate students and independent scholars are welcome.

For now, however, work continues. I do not have a freelance piece lined up; I told my client that I would be away and would return to availability tomorrow. The classroom still calls me, however; students had an exercise to do while I was away, but there are things to discuss about their fourth paper, assigned before I left and due in its first version come Monday next. Too, that exercise needs grading, as does the paper that came in at the end of last month. Consequently, I expect to be quite busy over the next few days. The Mrs. may well be working this afternoon, though, and Ms. 8 tends to sleep for much of that time, so I should have some few working hours to spend on the tasks, and I am not scheduled to teach tomorrow, in any event. The search for a permanent position continues, as well, and any number of other projects and writing tasks continue to call out to me, as they ever do; of all the things I suffer and have suffered, a lack of things to attend to is not one.

If I am to do many things, though, I am happy to do them from Sherwood Cottage, having slept in my own bed and not having to cross states and back and forth across the breadth of the Father of Waters. (Is it cultural appropriation to make such a reference or to intone the phrase of paean I do every time I cross the Mississippi River? For I do such things, but I do them reverently, at the least.) I am glad to have seen the people I saw on my trip away, but the comfort of home and of sleeping in my own bed again is not to be undervalued. The next few days will see a return to what passes for normal here, as the effects of the trip wear away, and I will be glad to be back to that normal--for a while, at least, as I will be happy to go out and see a few people again.

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