090112 - actual blog post

Some of this I've mentioned here before.

We did an unusual amount of traveling this year. In March we went to the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, in Orlando, partly because I was invited to participate in the poetry program. Then spouse's mother died unexpectedly and we went to Kansas. daughter1's best friend from high school decided to get married near San Francisco and d1 was in the wedding. We went, because we wouldn't have been able to visit with d1 this year otherwise. And because, given that reason for going, none of us had been to San Francisco (except me, for part of a day, when I was in high school). Then we went back to Kansas, because there was a memorial service for spouse's mother and because d2 was transferring from the University of Kansas to Tulane. So then we went to New Orleans, but just for a couple of days, to take d2 to college there. And right after that, Hurricane Isaac arrived, the school was closed for nearly a week, and d2 came home for an extended holiday weekend as a result. But all of these trips, not to mention paying for college, means that I haven't been buying science-fiction for myself lately (Except three used paperbacks at Borderlands bookstore, including Cenotaph Road by Bob Vardeman. It wasn't too bad, although I don't intend to buy the sequels. It made me wonder what happened to him, and it turns out he has written an incredible number of books, mostly outside the genre. So it's good to see that he was successful. But I digress.). I have been reading things that spouse bought over the past 30 years to see if I like them. At the moment I am reading Starmother by Sydney J. Van Scyoc. So far it's good. (Ammonite, Nicola Griffith, was last, & very good.)

Geology is keeping me busy, and for the first time in my life I am simultaneously working on seven different publications. Fortunately, none of them are single-author projects. During the past week I 1) turned over to my supervisor for review (and he is also the third author) a paper about sponge-microbial mounds in the subsurface Mississippian; 2) turned over to a different co-author the manuscript of a paper about an Eocene coral reef exposed at the surface in south Alabama; 3) turned over to a different co-author the manuscript of a paper about microcoprolites in the subsurface Jurassic of South Alabama; 4) did only a small amount of work on a trace fossil book; 5) did not work at all on another trace fossil manuscript for which it is not yet my turn (thank goodness); 6) Did not work at all on a very brief guidebook about Cambrian carbonates that I and yet another co-author need to write more or less de novo; and 7) slightly revised another guidebook that needed to be reprinted.

Item number one is actually my primary current project, which is almost finished. My secondary current project, helping describe an oil-field reservoir rock unit, is not at the “writing a report” stage.

I realized today that I don't communicate much with people at long distance anymore. For the most part, I limit it to twitter, and to weekly letters to my family. To think that HP Lovecraft and others of his generation had the time to write hundreds of long personal letters and yet also accomplished everything else they are known for. I suppose their inability to waste time watching television or doing things on the Internet might have something to do with it. They actually had to go somewhere, like to a bar or a billiard parlor or a race track, to waste time!