Journal of a Sabbatical

October 12, 1999

pinch me

Bring on the Yankees!

Today's Reading: Danube by Claudio Magris, Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

It's morning, the sky is still blue, and the Red Sox really did win the division series last night. Pinch me. I must be dreaming.

Despite not having had enough sleep the past few nights, I was amazingly productive today. I fixed my dishwasher - a really simple problem that I'd been putting off. I threw out a whole pile of magazines. I paid bills. I balanced my check book. I got so many chores done that I almost made it to buying a new cord for the weed whacker and cutting the lawn, but not quite. I updated the MRFRS volunteer database and made a new schedule, which of course will be out of date by tomorrow but I keep trying.

Stacy has this way of catching me at awkward times. I had some leftover ziti in the microwave reheating for supper when she called to give me names, addresses, phone numbers and rabies vaccination status for a whole mess of new people. Then we went over the whole list and weeded out the people who are no longer volunteering there or don't need to get the volunteer newsletter. I wrote all this down with a pencil on the backs of pieces of paper I was about to throw away. After reheating the ziti a second time, I entered all the changes. In doing so, I found a number of questions I needed to ask Kendra about Monday thru Friday morning people, which she's in charge of. I wrote all those down and sent a long e-mail to Kendra so she can have time to look up or track down answers before I go in to work tomorrow.

My other big project for the day was to track down a copy of Volume 1 of A.C. Bent's Life Histories of North American Wild Fowl: Ducks, Geese, and Swans to go with my Volume 2. This is harder than it might seem because almost everything I turned up on my favorite search services was unbreakable sets of both volumes and first editions at that. I want a reading copy - all my old books are to be read and used heavily in my never ending quest to understand the lives of ducks (or the Merrimack River, or John Marquand, or sewage treatment in Narragansett Bay :-) ). I also want the same edition as my Volume 2, the 1951 Dover reprint. Finally I found one on alibris.com and ordered it immediately.

Somehow doing actual work for Hungarian botanists during this spurt of energy never occurred to me. But I did read huge chunks of Danube.:-) That's at least vaguely related to Hungarians...