Well, I have had ticking over over the past months various academic things, but I lately cleared off my desk/to-do list a second round of article-reviewing, providing a blurb for a book, and revisions to two things for a web project. And nothing else immediately on hand (presumably there will be proofs of the 2 chapters somewhere in press, some ( Read more... )

However, I have done a little mild addressing certain matters of tidying up (I am coming around to the suspicion that Filing Things is a bit too much like That Work Thing I Have Retired From and I need to approach it in small doses).
I am in particular not entirely sure that this time of year is when to venture out seeking New Friends and Human ( Read more... )

Yet another paean to the 'return' of the physical book and the allure of the bookshelves: My bookshelf says who I am - and a Kindle cannot do that.
Well, that depends whether your bookshelves do say who you are - mine, I depose, say 'I am large, I contain multitudes' - and whether you want this revealed to any casual observer - though I daresay ( Read more... )

Last week I was somewhat irked to run out of something that I thought I had a replacement supply of.
It turned out I didn't.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it makes me joyful, but it induces a placid contentment when I run out of Thing, but do not need to go out in order to purchase more of Thing, or place an online order and wait for delivery, ( Read more... )

Be prepossessed by the argument Why The Seemingly Messy Ones May Be More Intelligent, for as I think I remarked once when somebody asked me about my research methods:
Larfing liek drayne.
And doing that thing which involves going through piles of Stuff to find a particular thing, and finding, if not that, other pertinent things in the process.
Also ( Read more... )

Concur that messy desks are not necessarily a bad thing. (On another prickly paw, is this news? I seem to see quite a lot of claims to the creative potential of the apparently messy flit across my skimming vision.)
Filing, as the wise Katharine Whitehorn remarked: Filing is concerned with the past; anything you actually need to see again has to do ( Read more... )

I also wonder whether there is an observer issue involved similar to the 'Facebook effect', whereby any given individual assumes that most, if not all, other people they know have vibrant social lives, close intimate friendships, fulfilling marriages/romantic/sexual relationships, etc.

I think I noted this heretofore apropos of people thinking that ( Read more... )

I realise it's actually quite a while since I did my original small steps post, how the time does fly by.

The idea of small steps and minor changes is one that seems to have been cropping up around me of late, at least in respect of lifestyle changes.

(There are, after all, sometimes big changes that have to be made, like getting out of a ( Read more... )

While I'm still loving the Veriga City Tracks for walking on snow, ice, slush, etc, I will concede that they are not so great, and even sometimes a liability, on other surfaces. One can remove them on reaching one's destination, but there are interim stages where that's not always practicable.

Still, I got into work today: however, since I was ( Read more... )

Or rather, desk and the adjacent trolley that serves as overspill area.

I've already done serious clearing up this week (in the sense of dumping large amounts of stuff that constitute rubbish in the middle of the room, and removing items of continued usefulness) in the Sorting Room, as a) I have just finished Mammoth Archival Processing Task and ( Read more... )