Yet again, my phone has apparently been using up credit all by itself - I texted home with my safe arrival yesterday, and got the usual automessage with my balance, which looked more or less as expected, and then this morning I tried to ring home and was told the balance was zero.
I can't even.
Also, I am so over university campuses which lack any ( Read more... )

The central heating and the hot water went out on Saturday morning.
British Gas HomeCare, with whom we have cover, can't come out until Wednesday, as we have alternative sources of heating and are not an Emergency.
We did call out a local tradesperson to come and look at it, on the grounds that if it was something really simple to fix, it was worth ( Read more... )

Okay, I got to Toronto Pearson in good time and managed to wrastle successfully with the self-check-in machine, except that it printed out the baggage tag from an unanticipated aperture, against which my case was leaning, and this crumpled it to the extent that at bag-drop she printed out another one.

And, oh, it looks so cool to have those free ( Read more... )

Surpriz Waterliliez - I was not hitherto aware that the National Art Museum in Cardiff has some srs Impressionist/post-Impressionist works, mostly from the collection of the Davies sisters, including 3 versions of 'Waterlilies' (which sort of tempts me to the thought 'Waterlilies' 'Return of the Waterlilies', 'Revenge of the Waterlilies'... 'Son of ( Read more... )

Oh dear, French philosopher living right up to the stereotype:
"Hats off for this invented-but-more-real-than-real Kant, whose portrait, whether signed Botul, Pages or John Smith, seems to be in harmony with my idea of a Kant who was tormented by demons that were less theoretical than it seemed".

after falling for easily-detectable hoax. We should ( Read more... )

What was good about the flight was that it was far from full, they moved me to a much better seat than the one at the back by the loo which it said on my ticket, and the food was at least comestible (but I'd eaten beforehand, just in case, as I had loads of time to kill at O'Hare).

They moved me to the front row of the first economy section - ( Read more... )

Am in hotel near O'Hare, travelling on to Madison tomorrow.

Reasonable trip, though American Airlines inflight entertainment was fairly crappy, and as for the food - if one of the two options is cheese ravioli, I'd really appreciate it if the chicken didn't have some kind of melted cheese on it, contaminating the associated rice ane veg - also, ( Read more... )

Message from owner of scholarly list I subscribe to, forwarding a message from another list-member, asking can I 'look into this'.

'This' being a duff link to a paper posted on the list last week, for which ( Read more... )

Grinding out my bit of this bloody chapter.

Okay, I am getting words on the page, and some of them even have proper citations.

But are they words which are going to mesh with what co-author is writing?

Are they, indeed, the words that volume editors really want?

There are subjects about which I know quite a bit, and even have some opinions, but ( Read more... )

Yet again have managed to get myself into the aaargh cascading deadlines situation. Some of this is doubtless due to the Problematic Thesis, which took far longer first to read and then to report on (because I ended up going back and getting nit-picky on the references, some of which weren't there at all) than I had scheduled for.

However, I would ( Read more... )