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It’s been a very tiring couple of months. The scorecard since September:

• One month with Mom in the hospital.
• One hellish week getting her situated in a new part of her assisted living facility.
• An average of three exhausting phone calls a day…every day…from my dad, most of them repetitions of earlier calls (or worse, repetitions within the same call.)
• One friend and coworker dead after a three-month illness.
• Three big HR issues.
• One two-month delay in a major aspect of my grant project.
• One fun but not very restful road trip.
• And, oh yeah. One reappointment package (the first baby step toward tenure) due in December, which is not quite as labor-intensive as a thesis but is pretty damned close.

So…

I’ve decided that if I can get all my paperwork done before Christmas (and if I still have my sanity) I’m going to do something terribly out of character the week after. I’m going to take an actual relaxing vacation. One where I sit in a nice oceanfront room by a freezing cold beach and just watch TV and read all those books I brought back from Canada. One where I feel no compulsion to cover lots of exciting new ground nor take lots of pictures of old supermarkets. And one where I will accept phone calls and email on my own terms.

I’ll probably hate it, but I will at least have tried it once.

Three part series on the Toronto area’s lakeshore motels, the last of which was torn down this week.

At least they don’t say “Now you know how to speak ‘Bear’.”

I think I mentioned once before in this space how much it used to bug me when fags of a certain persuasion would come up to me and say “woof” in an effort to tell me they thought I was attractive. I was never able to find it particularly flattering to be barked at. And I don’t think I would be able to do so now either.

Not that it’s been much of an issue lately anyway.

OK. Back to work.

I once had an attention span. Now I just publish bullet lists:

• So the News & Record, which used to be the daily newspaper in my hometown, has finally manged to degrade their web experience so significantly that, after fifteen years or so, I no longer even bother. Looking past the fact that much of their content was no longer was accessible online to most folks anyway, they now seem to have stripped the site of RSS feeds, eliminating a primary access point to what content still was available. Thus I no longer click through and see any of their work nor any of their ads–an astonishingly high proportion of which seem to line to their own religion portal (which doesn’t even seem to be a working link for me as of this morning). They’re not getting any click-throughs from aggregrators, either. I understand the debate about how much content newspapers should make freely available but it seems to me that what content they do make available shouldn’t be such a hassle to access.
• I’m really trying to feel sympathetic about this, but it sounds like the developer really has gone above and beyond the call of duty here, even though some of the altruism may have been legislative in nature. I’d like to see a low-cost enclave like this preserved in Santa Monica as well, but come on…
• The cartoon-like antics of Toronto mayor buffoon Rob Ford and his idiot brother continue to amuse me but also make me feel a bit embarrassed for my adopted hometown, which deserves better.

As for me, I finally finished the first draft of my reappointment portfolio last week. After one last proofing tomorrow, I’ll submit it on Monday and then will have a free week or two before I have to do anything else to it. Now that I’m done with what has pretty much been two solid months of composing very dry prose (between that and another pair of projects), I’ll be able to contribute something here again. Or at least have some weekend time to take care of some pressing projects at home. We’ll see.