20140415.0816

Happy Tax Day, my US friends! I hope you have done what you have needed to do and that you have actually overpaid, so that you get something back.

Work and the search for more work continue as they ever do. After my adventures yesterday, I have a stack of quizzes to grade, as well as the discussion posts I have my literature students do. Normally, I would have taken care of such things yesterday, but I was otherwise engaged at that time--as I am not now (which I appreciate). So when I go back to the office as scheduled, I will have a fair bit of paperwork that requires attention. It will not be difficult, but it will be a bit tedious--as will the other grading that will crop up tomorrow; my writing students have drafts due for my critique. They join some freelance proofreading work that I have been doing and with which I have been growing more proficient through practice. I could be doing worse in that regard, I think.

Even so, I do look for more permanent employment. The position I have now is not a bad one; I am treated decently for the demands on my time and energy (although I would not argue with a raise). But it is temporary, even if I have been renewed for another year (which, again, I appreciate), and Ms. 8 and her mother deserve a bit more stability than such a position allows. Too, if I am going to make a place a home again, as was the case with Bedfordside Garden, it needs to be a place in which I can be relatively certain I will reside over the long term. Pleasant as Sherwood Cottage is, and much as I continue to work to improve upon it, it is not such a place--and it cannot be as long as I cannot be certain that I will be here for another year. My wife and I will make ourselves comfortable here, since it seems certain we will be here through 2015, but for it to be a home, it needs to be a place where I can remain, and that will demand a continuing line position or something similar.

As part of that, I continue to do my research, my work on The Work. I do have a couple of appointments to keep today, but after they are done, I intend to settle in and work on the next paper that is mine to do, a piece for the 2014 International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I need to get it done so that I can churn out a far more substantial piece that I have to submit by the beginning of June, and I need to do that so I can write a piece for the Evil Incarnate conference at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, by mid-July. And I probably ought to see about finally carrying out the revision of my dissertation for publication as a book as well as compiling and extending some of my conference papers into either journal articles or a collection of essays for publication as another book. And I have creative projects that have been beckoning to me for some time; it would be good to get them done at long last.

So I ought to get back to work, oughtn't I?