Hot
Monday. Um, isn’t the weather here supposed to be cool and rainy? It’s not happening like that - it was in the 80s Fahrenheit today. *phew* SO jokes that we do summer research in the UK to avoid the heat in Oklahoma; well, not this year. Anyone who still doesn’t believe in global warming is living under a rock (where presumably it’s cooler?).
Long chat with my mother on the phone last night, but won’t talk to her again for 4 weeks as she and my aunt are going on vacation together to New England shortly. They travel together pretty much every year, often abroad; they’ve been to Greece, the UK, Italy, and Uzbekistan, as I recall, and I may be forgetting some. This is a relatively local one but they’re also planning a week in London this December, when there are some very good deals, so I’m also commissioned to find some must-sees for them.
SO is supposed to call tonight, in an hour or so, and hopefully will do so this time! ;-) Later - he did, as advertised. We don’t ever get to talk long enough though - stupid expensive payphones. I’m going to try writing him a letter and doing approximately what I do with this - that is, save it onto the flash drive and then send it via email.
[research stuff follows]
Research chugs along. The present batch of court records I’m looking through is the King’s Bench, and I’m not finding anything very useful for my purposes, but will nevertheless slog through the sample that I decided upon. Should take another two days or so. I’ve found that there may be some proofs of age in a set of court records for Cheshire that are separate from the ones I’d intended to use at the beginning (before I found out that many of them have been calendared aka summarized in published volumes) so that’s my next set to look at. I could go through the uncalendared years of the other Inquisitions Post Mortem, but I fear that it would take far too long. I’m also considering whether I should go to the Guildhall Library and/or the Corporation of London Record Office, both of which archives I’ve been to on previous trips, to see if there’s anything I can turn up there that would help shed light on identity and self-presentation, which is the basic theme I’m working on.
[Addendum Tuesday: I finished with the King’s Bench stuff today, much faster than I’d expected! Go me!]
As a small aside, an ever-increasing proportion of researchers use laptops - the archive has very sensibly gotten itself set up for this, with electrical sockets easily accessible on every table. So in the first hour or two there’s a regular musical interlude as the little Windows theme plays when folks boot up. I’ve muted my volume, myself, and most of them are fairly quiet, but every once in a while there’s someone who has his volume quite high. Then there’s those who not only have the startup sounds, but keep making errors so that there are various chords and beeps and so on - the typing itself is easy to tune out, but the other noises sometimes become annoying, I have to say. Hauling the laptop through security is slightly tedious, and I have to bring a notebook as well as that’s the easiest way to jot down the things I want to look at and keep a running list to take over to the ordering computers, but I’ve tried transcribing longhand and I find I’m rather quicker when typing. Not surprising really when I’ve been typing more than writing longhand for the last dozen years!
Tuesday. One of the more interesting things, for me, is the names I run across. I should try to remember to tell Eledhwen about one “John Sparow de Northstede”, in Yorkshire - perhaps an ancestor of Jack? ;-) And when I was looking at manorial rolls from Montgomeryshire, I found a “Gwenhwyvar” who was most definitely not a queen, as she was paying leyrwite (a fee paid to the lord of the manor by marriageable girls of unfree status). Figuring out surnames can be somewhat tricky, as the capital letters are often very similar - T, C, G, B, E, and O being my particular curses. So is it, say, “Tugwell” or “Bugwell”? Echo answereth not. I also came across a “Thomas Sawyer” today. Names are so much fun!
[/end research stuff]
Tuesday. This morning it was shaping up to be a scorcher again, but at some point matters changed, thankfully, and when I emerged from the archive at about 6:45 it was much cooler than when I’d gone in. Some breeze and clouds, though it’s now cleared mostly it’s still cooler. Hope it stays this way! Not that it will, but I can hope.
I am pondering this potential HP fic. It could almost be just straight historical fic except that I do rather like the idea of having it deal with the incoming Malfoys, not yet called that necessarily. I have Ideas of how they got that name, which I’m giving a (spurious) etymology from Old French meaning “bad faith.” And I’m quite certain that what will ultimately become Malfoy Manor in Wiltshire originally included the lord’s hall by a village called Swynford, or something similar - which meaning “place by the river with pigs” is not going to be something that delights the new possessor. (This is, of course, not a real place in that county.)
Also had thoughts last night about the totally unpublished WIP on Maen in Imladris (during and after the Council of Elrond). At the moment it contradicts the published “Shadows of the Past,” in which among other things Legolas claims not to have even been sure that it was Maen at the council, whereas the WIP has them having some extended conversations at Rivendell. But I’ve figured out a way around that, I think, though it will require some extensive rewriting of the new story. Luckily I have a printout of the story-so-far, since I have great difficulty doing that kind of editing directly on the screen. I’m much better with hard copy and a red pen.
I’ve been reading quite a lot of historical stuff out of my period, as well as the 19th-c. lit - some 19th-c. history, some earlier, and I just finished a book that is an oral history of World War I on the British home front, which was very interesting. I’d like to find something that’s a social history of the interwar years and/or WWII and its aftermath here. The political stuff I’m less keen on, and in any case I have a nice solid political tome at home that I’ve actually used in teaching a course on modern Britain. But I don’t have a good social history.
Anglophile? Me? Just a little bit...
Wednesday. Warmer again, though not so bad as Monday. Traffic today was abominable - it took 31 minutes on the bus to go what usually takes 11. Bleah. But I got here at last and am dutifully ploughing through all my various email accounts. I expect to be in on Saturday again in the AM.
Long chat with my mother on the phone last night, but won’t talk to her again for 4 weeks as she and my aunt are going on vacation together to New England shortly. They travel together pretty much every year, often abroad; they’ve been to Greece, the UK, Italy, and Uzbekistan, as I recall, and I may be forgetting some. This is a relatively local one but they’re also planning a week in London this December, when there are some very good deals, so I’m also commissioned to find some must-sees for them.
SO is supposed to call tonight, in an hour or so, and hopefully will do so this time! ;-) Later - he did, as advertised. We don’t ever get to talk long enough though - stupid expensive payphones. I’m going to try writing him a letter and doing approximately what I do with this - that is, save it onto the flash drive and then send it via email.
[research stuff follows]
Research chugs along. The present batch of court records I’m looking through is the King’s Bench, and I’m not finding anything very useful for my purposes, but will nevertheless slog through the sample that I decided upon. Should take another two days or so. I’ve found that there may be some proofs of age in a set of court records for Cheshire that are separate from the ones I’d intended to use at the beginning (before I found out that many of them have been calendared aka summarized in published volumes) so that’s my next set to look at. I could go through the uncalendared years of the other Inquisitions Post Mortem, but I fear that it would take far too long. I’m also considering whether I should go to the Guildhall Library and/or the Corporation of London Record Office, both of which archives I’ve been to on previous trips, to see if there’s anything I can turn up there that would help shed light on identity and self-presentation, which is the basic theme I’m working on.
[Addendum Tuesday: I finished with the King’s Bench stuff today, much faster than I’d expected! Go me!]
As a small aside, an ever-increasing proportion of researchers use laptops - the archive has very sensibly gotten itself set up for this, with electrical sockets easily accessible on every table. So in the first hour or two there’s a regular musical interlude as the little Windows theme plays when folks boot up. I’ve muted my volume, myself, and most of them are fairly quiet, but every once in a while there’s someone who has his volume quite high. Then there’s those who not only have the startup sounds, but keep making errors so that there are various chords and beeps and so on - the typing itself is easy to tune out, but the other noises sometimes become annoying, I have to say. Hauling the laptop through security is slightly tedious, and I have to bring a notebook as well as that’s the easiest way to jot down the things I want to look at and keep a running list to take over to the ordering computers, but I’ve tried transcribing longhand and I find I’m rather quicker when typing. Not surprising really when I’ve been typing more than writing longhand for the last dozen years!
Tuesday. One of the more interesting things, for me, is the names I run across. I should try to remember to tell Eledhwen about one “John Sparow de Northstede”, in Yorkshire - perhaps an ancestor of Jack? ;-) And when I was looking at manorial rolls from Montgomeryshire, I found a “Gwenhwyvar” who was most definitely not a queen, as she was paying leyrwite (a fee paid to the lord of the manor by marriageable girls of unfree status). Figuring out surnames can be somewhat tricky, as the capital letters are often very similar - T, C, G, B, E, and O being my particular curses. So is it, say, “Tugwell” or “Bugwell”? Echo answereth not. I also came across a “Thomas Sawyer” today. Names are so much fun!
[/end research stuff]
Tuesday. This morning it was shaping up to be a scorcher again, but at some point matters changed, thankfully, and when I emerged from the archive at about 6:45 it was much cooler than when I’d gone in. Some breeze and clouds, though it’s now cleared mostly it’s still cooler. Hope it stays this way! Not that it will, but I can hope.
I am pondering this potential HP fic. It could almost be just straight historical fic except that I do rather like the idea of having it deal with the incoming Malfoys, not yet called that necessarily. I have Ideas of how they got that name, which I’m giving a (spurious) etymology from Old French meaning “bad faith.” And I’m quite certain that what will ultimately become Malfoy Manor in Wiltshire originally included the lord’s hall by a village called Swynford, or something similar - which meaning “place by the river with pigs” is not going to be something that delights the new possessor. (This is, of course, not a real place in that county.)
Also had thoughts last night about the totally unpublished WIP on Maen in Imladris (during and after the Council of Elrond). At the moment it contradicts the published “Shadows of the Past,” in which among other things Legolas claims not to have even been sure that it was Maen at the council, whereas the WIP has them having some extended conversations at Rivendell. But I’ve figured out a way around that, I think, though it will require some extensive rewriting of the new story. Luckily I have a printout of the story-so-far, since I have great difficulty doing that kind of editing directly on the screen. I’m much better with hard copy and a red pen.
I’ve been reading quite a lot of historical stuff out of my period, as well as the 19th-c. lit - some 19th-c. history, some earlier, and I just finished a book that is an oral history of World War I on the British home front, which was very interesting. I’d like to find something that’s a social history of the interwar years and/or WWII and its aftermath here. The political stuff I’m less keen on, and in any case I have a nice solid political tome at home that I’ve actually used in teaching a course on modern Britain. But I don’t have a good social history.
Anglophile? Me? Just a little bit...
Wednesday. Warmer again, though not so bad as Monday. Traffic today was abominable - it took 31 minutes on the bus to go what usually takes 11. Bleah. But I got here at last and am dutifully ploughing through all my various email accounts. I expect to be in on Saturday again in the AM.