[London] Twilight time.
It's twilight here now, which to me is the very best part of the day to be outside and to think. I'm not outside, unfortunately, but I'm sitting in the downstairs bedroom with the window open into the garden, and that's almost as good.
I've fallen so dreadfully behind on everything personal. We can only get the internet if we balance my laptop on a knee in a particular spot on this bed, so I either have to write short things with one finger (if the laptop moves, the connection goes) or write longer things while offline (like now). The trouble of it all makes us put off anything we need to do online. And getting to the post office is another chore entirely, especially given work hours and the post office's hours and the dreadful lines. But, you know, aren't these small problems? If I have to have problems, these are pretty good ones to have.
I still go to the V&A a lot and stand in their transported rooms -- I found a Gothic Revival room and an Aesthetic room yesterday, amongst others -- and try to position myself so that I feel as though I'm in the house itself, not in the museum. Sometimes there are benches in the rooms, so you can sit down and think and imagine and be productive, and often I'm the only one there. It's the sort of thing that makes me furious that I have to go back to Texas. And it's so hard to understand why some of those houses were demolished. The rooms are extraordinary, and by some wonderful stroke of luck they were saved and donated to the V&A, but it's very sad that you can't go visit the houses.
But today it was work, and we petted Trash Cat (with the smoker's meow) and spotted Crispin sleeping underneath a tall, grassy bush in the sun. Trash Cat seems like some sort of urban hero, and Andy and I like to make up little histories about him. He's Trash Cat, yes, but there's also something rather rakish and devil-may-care about him that's irresistible.
The rain has gone away for the present, so tomorrow we're all going to Kew Gardens for the first time this year. All of us are excited about it. Andy and I like to go off on our own, but we all meet up again for lunch at the Pavilion Cafe and again when we leave to have dinner.
AALT is really taking off in a kind of amazing way, and I have to admit that once we put up our recent acquisitions in August, we'll have an astounding collection of documents. Someone said to Bob the other day that it was revolutionizing the field, and it really is! I've done Chancery records now from the final year of Henry VIII's reign until 1608. It has taken me two summers to do, and I still have the duplicate volumes to complete (someday), but that alone is massive. I'll probably be able to get up to 1613 or so before I leave. I'm really pleased about it, and I'm pleased that Andy is involved and (almost unexpectedly) so interested in it. Anyway, we have three new people now who will work on acquiring images when we leave, so the project should keep expanding constantly until next summer. I have a few projects I want to complete in August, like the watermark collection and improved guides for new users, and the trick will be to find time between recovering from the Dickens Project and preparing to teach my very own rhetoric class. The immigration book (The Devil's Highway) that we're supposed to be using for part of the class is supposed to be good -- it has pages of reviews at the front to convince you -- but I felt so irritated in the first five pages that I put it down and returned to George Eliot. It's not the subject at all -- it's the writing that I can't stand. But of course I have to read it sooner or later.
I've fallen so dreadfully behind on everything personal. We can only get the internet if we balance my laptop on a knee in a particular spot on this bed, so I either have to write short things with one finger (if the laptop moves, the connection goes) or write longer things while offline (like now). The trouble of it all makes us put off anything we need to do online. And getting to the post office is another chore entirely, especially given work hours and the post office's hours and the dreadful lines. But, you know, aren't these small problems? If I have to have problems, these are pretty good ones to have.
I still go to the V&A a lot and stand in their transported rooms -- I found a Gothic Revival room and an Aesthetic room yesterday, amongst others -- and try to position myself so that I feel as though I'm in the house itself, not in the museum. Sometimes there are benches in the rooms, so you can sit down and think and imagine and be productive, and often I'm the only one there. It's the sort of thing that makes me furious that I have to go back to Texas. And it's so hard to understand why some of those houses were demolished. The rooms are extraordinary, and by some wonderful stroke of luck they were saved and donated to the V&A, but it's very sad that you can't go visit the houses.
But today it was work, and we petted Trash Cat (with the smoker's meow) and spotted Crispin sleeping underneath a tall, grassy bush in the sun. Trash Cat seems like some sort of urban hero, and Andy and I like to make up little histories about him. He's Trash Cat, yes, but there's also something rather rakish and devil-may-care about him that's irresistible.
The rain has gone away for the present, so tomorrow we're all going to Kew Gardens for the first time this year. All of us are excited about it. Andy and I like to go off on our own, but we all meet up again for lunch at the Pavilion Cafe and again when we leave to have dinner.
AALT is really taking off in a kind of amazing way, and I have to admit that once we put up our recent acquisitions in August, we'll have an astounding collection of documents. Someone said to Bob the other day that it was revolutionizing the field, and it really is! I've done Chancery records now from the final year of Henry VIII's reign until 1608. It has taken me two summers to do, and I still have the duplicate volumes to complete (someday), but that alone is massive. I'll probably be able to get up to 1613 or so before I leave. I'm really pleased about it, and I'm pleased that Andy is involved and (almost unexpectedly) so interested in it. Anyway, we have three new people now who will work on acquiring images when we leave, so the project should keep expanding constantly until next summer. I have a few projects I want to complete in August, like the watermark collection and improved guides for new users, and the trick will be to find time between recovering from the Dickens Project and preparing to teach my very own rhetoric class. The immigration book (The Devil's Highway) that we're supposed to be using for part of the class is supposed to be good -- it has pages of reviews at the front to convince you -- but I felt so irritated in the first five pages that I put it down and returned to George Eliot. It's not the subject at all -- it's the writing that I can't stand. But of course I have to read it sooner or later.