jliedl.ca

Based on whether or not the people at Penguin Custom Readers can get their heads out of their you-know-whats and figure out an ISBN that works for Canada, I might not have my lovingly-designed custom reader for my Reformation and Counter-Reformation course. The textbook buyer and I have been frantically working on this folly for most of the past week.

Worried that we won’t be able to fix this problem, I’ve created a fall-back position. If the reader ISBN isn’t conjured up by Friday, the bookstore will order Natalie Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre for my second-year students. I have a really great set of assignments based on various aspects of the story that I can substitute for the almost weekly tutorial assignments. I’ll use some of the time that had been set aside for discussing the readings to screen the movie and tackle the book.

My only worry is that we’ll lose a lot of the back-and-forth that is best established during tutorial discussions, so I’m thinking that I’ll borrow a page from my first-year classes and start each class off with a pre-set question for discussion. As well as probably providing lots of photocopies and URLs of great primary source documents to replace the seemingly-doomed reader. All in all, this is going to require a lot of tinkering, thought and preparation before I even set foot in the classroom come September! All for the want of one book!

WOMEN’S HISTORY – The Department of History at Laurentian University invites applications for a ten-month limited-term appointment in Women’s and Gender History at the Assistant Professor level, beginning September 1, 2008. The preferred candidate will have a Ph.D. and teaching experience. The position will be open until filled, and applications will be reviewed commencing August 6, 2008. Interested individuals should submit a curriculum vitae and at least three letters of reference addressed to: Dr. Harley d’Entremont, Laurentian University, 935 Ramsey Lake Road, Sudbury, ON P3E 2C6 or by e-mail to asr@laurentian.ca. Information can be found at www.laurentian.ca. LU faculty are part of the LUFA (Laurentian University Faculty Association); information and the Collective Agreement can be found at www.lufapul.ca.

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Please pass word of this around if you know of anyone who might be interested!

There are loons that nest by the lake near our house and they often fly by. Just now I heard the laughing loon call doppler by as one flew over to Lake St. Charles for a late night landing. It’s always unexpected and always a pleasure.

I’m healing pretty well from yesterday’s fall. Thanks for the many kind words! All the bandages are off right now to let the wounds get some air. Which I think is good for healing, or is that just an old wives’ tale? In any case, I’ll need at least one back on in order to sleep comfortably tonight.

Eldest kept me company watching a couple episodes of Restaurant Makeover which is exactly what it sounds — a show that offers makeovers for the dining area as well as the menu of various restaurants. Some say that the show is a curse for the restaurants involved. I hope not! A lot of the recipes look great as have the final results. At least we know the show’s a lot of fun. Combining cooking and renovation in one show is a surefire way to get the two of us interested.

Because I’m using a heck of a lot of their products today. I tripped when walking a dog this morning and ended up doing a face-plant on the sidewalk.

I have scrapes on my right brow and cheek, my right shoulder, both palms and, worst of all, my right knee. I had to visit the optometrist’s office to get my frames straightened (at least the lenses were tough enough not to scratch!). Now I’m just ensconced on the couch, taking regular doses of ibuprofen and cursing that combination of a rough patch of sidewalk and over-eager dog.

Youngest’s one week of summer camp began this morning. This is my one week of the summer with only one bored kid hanging around the house wondering what mom’s doing.

Of course, I’m spending the morning sleepily sorting out my virtual filing system when I should be working on something a little bit more high-intensity.

I’ve walked the dogs twice, cycled the longest distance yet since I got my new bike and I also painted the trim around the garage doors.

That’s a lot of sweat equity invested in my weekend.

That’s another “to-do” that got done did: my revised chapter is off to the volume editors. I’ll revel in a well-deserved weekend break (maybe get back on my bike!) before resuming productive duties on Monday. Time to polish off that list of entries for the upcoming encyclopedia project and, just maybe, spend a little time turning last fall’s conference paper into an article.

In the meanwhile, I’ll advise everyone who has a weakness for SF/genre television and/or musical comedy to check out Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along-Blog — a three-act web production that’s available online only through the weekend!

Nope, this week I’ve been blog-silent, revising a chapter that’s been accepting for a forthcoming anthology. The editors’ comments were helpful and succinct but this still is a bit of work and I want to be done tomorrow (turnaround is for Saturday).

Throw in a bit of meeting with students and catching up with other faculty members for pleasure, in between bouts of accepting changes or rewording confusing passages, and you have a pretty full schedule for the week.

Then, when I’m not doing that, I’m wrestling with the bookstore over more textbook-ordering trauma.

Ah, the joys of summer? I think not!

As I suspected, I regret not attending the conference in person. We had such an interesting session on teaching with Old Bailey Online that I wanted to follow everyone out for tea at the end of it all. Still, I was able to follow along with and participate fully in the session, thanks to the efforts of the IT people here and there as well as our session chair and organizer, Chris A. Williams who opened things off with a discussion of the general reception of the website ranging from idle interest and sensation-seeking to the academic treatments of teachers and researchers. Read more »

The Metropolis on Trial opens tomorrow at the Open University. I’ll be speaking in the first session, beginning at 12:30 GMT, 8:30 EDT. My subject? Trials and Calculations: Teaching Quantitative History with Old Bailey Online.

Sad to say, I won’t be at the conference in person. Family responsibilities mean that I’ll be speaking from our IT-enabled conference room on campus. I envy those who’re attending in person.