I stopped by the bookstore today and saw that half the senior class has not picked up the book assigned for today’s seminar. (It’s not a book you can pick up easily so I can’t imagine anyone got their hands on a copy from other sources.) Matters became worse when I overheard one of the […]
We got our gas bill on Friday after not getting our gas bill for three months.
Turned out that somehow they’d changed the address on our gas bill to an address at which we’d never lived. Somehow the latest bill got to us despite that problem. Thank goodness because, eep! No gas? In cold Northern Canada? […]
The city of Mississauga is governed and run by cowards and buck-passers. A young woman bought a puppy at a flea market and it turns out to be, oh no!, one of those dreaded and outlawed pit bulls. It has not attacked anyone. It has not threatened anyone. Its only crime is to be born […]
Thanks to the wonders of videoconferencing, I’m able to participate in an interesting scholarly conference next summer in the UK, The Metropolis on Trial, that I’d otherwise have to give a miss. Extra bonus points for the opportunity evolving out of a previous post in this blog.
My head hurts (a lot). My stomach is beyond growling (oops, wrong!). I can’t concentrate on anything.
I taught through the lunch hour and failed to grab something to eat after that.
Coincidence? Not!
Repairperson came to fix washing machine. Left after explaining to me it was just a sensor glitch that could be fixed by running the machine on empty with a mix of bleach and dishwasher detergent to clear the machine out.
Ran machine for twenty minutes. Error code reappeared. Rebooted machine, repeated. And once more with feeling.
Phoned […]
Kenneth Branagh’s 2006 adaptation of As You Like It that’s set in Japan? Is full of just so much WTF-ery that I cannot watch it without thinking I’m witnessing some pretentious director’s version of “What if Spartacus had a Piper Cub?”
It’s really nice to have a fireplace when the day starts off at -28 celsius.
Green […]
There’s nothing quite like seeing it in hard copy, is there? You can see proofs and previews but it isn’t until you hold the lovely object in your own hand that you know you’ve got another publication or three. I have three new reference entries on “Childbirth”, “Fatherhood” and “Motherhood” in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of […]
I ran across an excellent blog post, Invisible Computers, at Women in Science (courtesy of Geeky Mom). It’s another wonderful but agonizing story of women who did amazing things — hacked the world’s first programmable computer in order to run important military calculations — only to have their work promptly denigrated, claimed by others or […]
This term my senior seminar tackles the early modern life-cycle in England. We start with childbirth and end with death. Well, actually, we go beyond death, so to speak, and spend the very last week of class on wills (and probate records in general).
Wills are a great research resource for early modern social history. I […]