A break from grading.

What was supposed to be a short break away from grading awful papers has turned into a many-houred Siberian sojourn, with stop-offs in Minneapolis and Illinois. In other words, I booked my train ticket to Urbana-Champaign from Chicago, and figured out how to get around Minneapolis and Chicago. As for Siberia, I've been doing dissertation research for the past while, and . . . yay!

Even if I get all my archival and other primary research done by the end of the summer (and let's hope I do), there will be a lot of work ahead of me. A lot. This won't come as any suprise to anyone in my shoes. Though there isn't mounds of secondary literature to go through, there is still a bunch of it, and in a bunch of different areas. I will make my workload even heavier by writing thematic chapters, meaning I have to engage different fields of historiographies in each one, in addition to the more obvious lit. I have to deal with.

In 16 hours a few people are coming over to dinner, so I suppose I best get thinking about going to bed. There's lots of shopping, cleaning, cooking to do tomorrow (er, today). And of course I still have more than 70 essays to grade! And, yes, they are still quite dreadful. It's very depressing and not a little shocking.