I'm back in England after a month at home. During that time, I found a very pleasant routine within which to work on the clump of items all due very soon. I worked at my desk, reading and writing by the light of my courtyard-facing window, I did something to exercise around five o'clock, and then I'd have fun in the evening. I also spent a week visiting my brother's family in Boise, during which I was more or less the official entertainer of my three-year-old nephew Jack while my parents helped with five-week-old niece Grace. What can I say? They're adorable, and I adore them. And kids are tiring and demand all your attention. I wasn't too sad to get back to my own affairs, but a mere three days saw me back on the plane to London.So here I am under the British clouds once again. It's a drizzly day, which I don't mind in itself -- in fact, it makes it a rather cozy job to scuttle around the library chasing citations. It's still warm, and it's actually quite lovely autumnal weather. But it's AUGUST. This is not okay. But, well, I'm not sick of it yet, so I'll shrug and bear it for now.
Having moved from the university library to the deserted college library -- seriously, I could sing at the top of my lungs, no problem -- I now find myself in a curious predicament. I really don't want to slog through adding more text to my Sherlock Holmes paper or edit my summary of Victorian philology into something resembling a narrative with shape and structure. So instead, I've become uncharacteristically productive at other things. My school email inbox will soon fit onto one page for the first time in about three years; I've ordered a new raincoat and a copy of the choir photo from June; I've read most of the articles in the links my mom sends me; I'm mostly caught up on friends' blogs. I also came up with an idea for a conference paper, which has the potential to turn into a much bigger project, post-PhD. In my efforts to avoid my current papers, I reviewed the call for papers for the annual conference of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA). The conference theme is 'senses', and I want to investigate the function of the tongue twister in Victorian times. I'll spare you all the reasons this could be a really cool idea, but it's also intriguing that I can't find anything on the history of tongue twisters, much less Victorian ones, and I know from my doctoral research that they fit into some very interesting intellectual movements at that time. This is the first project I've come up with that I can imagine having real legs, apart from a biography of my favorite Anglo-Saxonist, J.M. Kemble -- and that's a tougher sell to postdoc committees, though I still intend to do it at some point.
Unfortunately, none of this will help me meet a deadline. Back to the grindstone.
