Countdown

I'm sorry it's been so long.  It has been a busy couple months, but at last I'm on the straightaway for ending an academic year that has been -- well, let's go with stressful.

When last term ended, I stayed in Cambridge for an extra week for some bonus choir rehearsals with a French school choir we'll be visiting in August.  Then I had a very hurried two-week visit home, during which I worked on a conference paper for the Northeast Victorian Studies Association in Boston.  That conference was really the best experience I've yet had.  I was in the only panel on the first day, which was followed by drinks and dinner, so people knew who I was and had an instant topic of conversation.  I met some really fun fellow Victorianists, and the theme -- simply the year 1874 -- brought out a wonderfully eclectic mix of paper topics.  Plus, I've gone to enough conferences now that I'm starting to recognize some people, and vice versa.

Once all that was done, with an extra day to visit a couple Cambridge friends now at Harvard, I returned to England for a week of rowing training camp in Henley!  In case you don't know, that's the site of one of the most famous regattas in the UK if not the world.  Here's a scene from the film 'The Social Network' that's set at Henley Royal Regatta.  The training camp was a major accomplishment, because a series of obstacles crept up, which I had to sort over email with a time difference as I was trying to prep and do the conference.  It looked dead in the water several times over, so I'm very proud that it happened.  There's a picture of us on the last day, after slogging through the unceasing headwind for the last time, and having pre-dinner drinks in Leander club, home to a lot of Olympians and generally amazing rowers.

I left straight from Henley to London, where I stayed just long enough to see the band Fun in concert (awesome!) and catch a few hours' sleep before flying to a conference in West Virginia.  Yes, I had miscalculated the timing when I applied to that one, but it turned out to be really good for connecting with some people.

Since then I've been navigating Easter term with a surprising amount of free time every day that nonetheless hasn't been terribly productive.  I blame the undergrads, who are crammed into the college library, making it very tempting to try and "work" in the MCR.  You can guess how effective that is...

In any case, there are just under two weeks until Bumps start.  Four days after that, I will be a free woman.  So all I have to do is make it through 16 more days of captaining and I will be able to step back and recover my love of the sport and humanity.  Sorry if that sounds melodramatic.  It's been a bumpy ride.