I did real work yesterday! Two of my shelves of books are currently classified as unsorted. Thus, it came as some surprise and a real delight yesterday to realize that at least four of those same unsorted books all dealt with the subject I wanted to work on yesterday - and all four of them just happened to be sitting next to each other on one of the shelves! How obligingly self-sorting of them. I hadn't even un-plastic-wrapped one of the books yet, and I've had it for two years. Now I know this comes out sounding very neglectful of me, but it's not nearly as bad as you think! The well-wrapped book was a free, randomly-assigned benefit of volunteering to work at an Eighteenth Century Studies conference a few years ago. The organizers gave each volunteer one of the books the publishers had sent for display at the conference. This book, The Autonomy of History, has a few relevant chapters right at the very beginning. So I started off by reading through the introduction and acknowledgements, and noticed something... both of the people writing recommendations for the book on the back of the dust jacket were also thanked in the acknowledgements for their assistant along the way with other things. Mind you, they're all well known scholars, but this does say something, perhaps, about how small academic fields can be sometimes. Or something like that.
I made my first improvised casserole yesterday and it turned out very well: acorn squash, sour cream, onions, and macaroni. This was a culinary accomplishment to follow up having made my own apple sauce the day before (and it was very good!) I was inspired by my mother having done so during my trip home to go with the latkes. On the subject of latkes, yesterday I learned that my uncle has a good reputation as a latke maker - he ended up cooking them for 60 people last year, and they were all eaten up.
I think more people I know on LJ posted entries yesterday alone than they did for the entirety of last week put together.
