#personal burblage

hey hey tumblr, I have mostly been off trying to figure out how to herd frogs, or spin frogs into gold, or tip over the bucket so that all of the quietly boiling frogs can hop out, or something else that ribbits in metaphor.  Trying to get over burnout and back in gear feels a bit like trying to climb into the hamster wheel when a much faster hamster is already using it (sometimes this fast hamster is my past self). I don’t think I’m ready to make burnout hamsters a thing though, have a video instead. I have to write annual reports and am very disappointed that I cannot just link this video and say “see 2:30″.

So I mostly lurk these days and, though I miss having the spare energy to like. actually have conversations real-time., it is usually fine since you all are lovely people who don’t mind when I occasionally heave myself up from the depths like a rather confused squid in order to spit something out and vanish again.

so apparently what it takes to get me writing again is ludicrous levels of behindness on my to do list and the vague whiffs of despair emanating from the -- ok I am censoring that sentence, before it knocks the trash can lid off of our shared pit of yuck.

I probably shouldn’t contemplate buying another recording of a piece I already own on disc (I am one of the holdouts who still buys CDs) but I really like this version.  What makes the temptation worse is that I share a household with someone who has accreted like six different versions of his own favorite pieces - his usual “you what now” reaction to my CD library involves my forays into the more arcane corners of the repertoire - so. there’s precedent

It can, believe it or not, be inconvenient to have specific dates for premodern events, insofar as it implies a certain degree of definiteness that is then undermined by a slow sinking feeling once you realize that some sources may possibly have applied a correction to map Julian to would-be Gregorian dates, some haven’t, and there isn’t enough information on the online Hijri calendar converters to figure out what their margin of error would be 1000 years ago, but you are 100% sure there is no Julian-to-Gregorian correction factor.

me, with sheaf of papers and a pencil behind my ear: so, as you know, we're in the middle of an unusually busy couple of weeks here, so I have prepared a carefully drawn up schedule for how to best make use of our time this weekend while maintaining compliance with our previously negotiated agreement on designated rest periods, as you'll see in section C below --