As of now, on a probationary basis, I am officially among the ranks of the Kubuntu faithful. I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 this weekend, and I found their break with the Gnome UI so distressing that I ... broke with Gnome myself. For KDE. And though it is weird, and though there are certain things I don't like, what I do like is the sense of relative stability -- the fact that for better or worse, KDE is KDE is KDE, and the folks at Canonical / Ubuntu aren't likely to make me choose between Gnome Shell 3 (which I find unintuitive) and Ubuntu Unity (which doesn't really actually work very well. At all). So among other things, you may consider this a test post for KDE's blogging utility, Blogilo, which seems to support Livejournal, but only just.
This weekend was also the first real grilling weather of the season. There were pork chops, brined in something resembling jerk seasoning, and served with home-made guacamole and mango salsa. I'm excited to get back to cooking outdoors. This might be the summer of experimenting with, say, making pies on the grill, or even perhaps baking bread.
After a longer hiatus than I intended, the dissertation word-counter will soon be making its return. It is not that I haven't been working on my dissertation. But I have been back in research and planning mode. A bit more than a month ago, I had a sort of moment of clarity about my dissertation, and why it didn't seem to be working. It breaks down to two things: problems with structure, and problems with focus. So I've been working to correct both. I've changed the organization of my dissertation in a way that will allow me to keep most of what I have already written, while also allowing me to keep my focus on what this thing is actually about: a methodology for working with folklore in literature. Right now, I've begun working on an introductory section that identifies, in a nutshell, why literary folkloristics has made itself irrelevant since the 1970s, and how one might go about fixing it. And the rest of the dissertation, including all the nittpicky historical details, *will be in the service of demonstrating my revised methodology.* It couldn't be simpler when put that way. We'll see how the writing goes.
It isn't as though there has been no dis-related writing going on at all. I wrote and delivered a paper at PCA/ACA about the place of nostalgia in understanding Joel Chandler Harris' work, and the folk-group-building that went on around it. It was very well received. And before too long, a version of it will end up somewhere in my newly-rethought manuscript.
And finally, speaking of PCA/ACA: I am undecided whether I am going to go next year when it is in Boston. But if I do, I think that my paper will indeed be titled "The Care and Feeding of Folklorists, or: How to Ensure That Your Folklorist Doesn't Bite." There was enough folklore-ignorance going on in the so-called "Folklore" and "Fairy Tale" tracks that something like that is surely needed.