One of the whole ideas behind coming home was that I would have peace and tranquility to focus on work, in addition to just being very happy to come. I don't come home nearly often enough. Consequently, I'm back to the urgent need to set goals, but am still feeling fuzzy as to what those goals should be. I've been feeling this way for weeks now, so I need to ignore it and just get on with everything. Today's goals: read/skim 3 chapters in basic Art 100 textbook on history of art to remind me what and where everything is. Hopefully this will go quickly because odds are most of it will be extremely familiar to me. It's just been a while since I've had to seriously think about the artistic and temporal divisions within the Middle Ages. Then, write at least a paragraph. I'm desperate enough to get some work out of myself that I don't want to limit what it is I'm writing: another "where I am thus far" would suffice. So would "what I got out of the reading I just did" or "what I suspect my prelimary conclusions may be in the future based on the highly inadequate amount of information collected thus far." Any or all of those would suffice.

My desire to be able to sort all my information tidbits into piles reminds me of C.'s timeline software, which was still in the early phases of development last I knew. I wonder if I could get a hold of it, or perhaps somehow adapt my database software to serve. Sometime timeliney I could use conveniently.

I was thinking last week that it might be both convenient and fun to obtain a handheld OCR scanner. However, what market research I did seems to show that - unexpectedly - the handheld scanner market is still in its early phases. I first saw an advertisement for one about 4 years ago. I'd figured that in four years the market might develop, but no, it seems as if it's going very slowly. For my machine, I saw a grand total of 1 usable handheld scanner. Surely there must be more! C. reckons its because they're only really useful to academics and not enough academics are buying them. I might give in and try helping the market along with my paltry contribution.

Today is my mother's birthday, and thanks to the skating pads which I had to bring with me anyways if I was going to do any skating while home, her present arrived intact. We'll do gift-giving tonight, but it's a very sweet little sculpture, if I do say so myself, and one I managed to plan ahead enought to buy 3 months ago or thereabouts.

One of the twists to being on dialup is that I need to be sparing with my daytime connections. This isn't a problem at all, but it does mean I need to wait to reply to LJ entries which catch my eye. It's hard to act on the spur of the moment, when the moment's spur is then put into storage and must be reactivated later on.

Followup on last Friday's Serial Diners front (which I did not attend). They were not, in fact, able to get into the very very nice restaurant they were trying for. Ah well.