the rest of it

 This week (I should do this more often) I am grateful: 1. Bo Burnham's Inside . (Just finished watching. He is rather amazing.) 2. Working in my uni office on Thursday. Taking the train. Getting a latte (or two). Normal stuff. 3. Lunch with Ali on Friday. In a pub garden. My first properly restaurant experience since the airport last summer. 4. Watching The Good Place with G. Crying on the sofa with G. 5. Continued progress on the home-improvement front. 6. Peonies from Phil. (And peonies in general.) 7. Oreo ice cream sandwiches 8. Some very generous help from a DSNA member

I've been working late every night this week, but even though I have so much to do, I'm going to (despite announcement to the contrary on FB yesterday) take a shower and go to bed instead of working after the rest of the family's gone to bed.  But first,   Gratitude category 1: Work 1. The main crazy this week is because I'm busy putting together the first issue of Dictionaries of my editorship . Pictured right, the leftmost columns of my table-of-contents spreadsheet. I won't tell you anything about what the color-coding means, but I will tell you that some of the colors change several times a day. Within all this busyness, I am grateful: (a) For maturity . Had I had a project like this earlier in my career, I would be overwhelmed with impostor syndrome and much harder to work (for myself as well as for others). But maturity has brought me a little relevant experience for tackling a project like this and a LOT of perspective. It's brought me the ability to ta...

Thank goodness we've seen the sun. We had a properly rainy day to keep us from going too crazy about it, but the uplifting feeling of good weather was notable (and predictable). The week was mostly sitting in front of the computer, though. At the start, editing, but from Wednesday, I was mostly sitting listening to talks at the International Society for the Linguistics of English and (on Friday) the Dictionary Society of North America.  Yesterday, Phil and I walked into town to look for lighting fixtures (no luck). We ran into and chatted with five people we/I know, some of whom we've only seen on screens in the past year, one of whom I'd not seen during the pandemic at all. That's something I've long loved about where I live—both that it's a small enough city to feel like you're a part of it and that people are out on foot (or sitting at cafe tables on pedestrianized streets). But some aspects of 'back to normal' were not so welcome, given that we...