jliedl.ca

I’m excited to see that Wiley’s released the cover art for the forthcoming Twilight and History volume to which I contributed a chapter. Check it out, hopefully soon in bookstores! I can’t wait to read the rest of it, myself, but I’m glad that it’s not out right now as I have lots on my plate (as always).

Still, whoever says that history can’t appeal to a broader audience just isn’t trying!

Went into the university today to see many workers finally unloading office furniture in the vicinity of my building.

Yes, today appears to be the day that they’re finally giving me my new desk and hopefully getting rid of the old desks & other random bits of office furniture destined for removal. So I couldn’t really work in my office today what with the hallway outside beginning to pile up with pieces of furniture and busy clusters of workers moving in. That’s rather blown the entirety of Reading Week as I cleared everything off the desk surface last Friday since we were warned that they could arrive anytime from the 16th to the 19th. *sigh*

I have nightmares that I’ll come back into work on Monday only to find they’ve just shoved the new stuff in there with the old despite the plenitude of “GO” signs pasted on furniture I’m jettisoning.

My new office furniture will be arriving next week. Perhaps as soon as Tuesday! So this means I’ll need to clear my desk drawers on Friday and try to find some place in the office for the vertical files that reside on my desk top to go and hide for a while. Perhaps perched on top of the one filing cabinet I’ll be keeping.

Must also move former occupant’s PC tower over to the grad students’ office as it is destined for their use but nobody else is actually doing the work to, you know, get it there!

There will be pictures when the new furniture’s all in place, of that you can be sure!

I was over at Historiann’s tonight, checking to see what new delights lurked in her latest blog posts and what new comments had been added to earlier posts. Just the other day, she’d posted a wonderfully skewering critique of a weekend NYT article that raised a horrific social panic about what are all these young college women going to do for dates and boyfriends if girls outnumber boys on campus.

I noticed that a mansplanation had made its way into the comments there. Oh, boy. Because, you know, we weren’t interrogating the problem from the (obviously!) only one important angle: how this feminization of the B.A. would affect educated women in Afghanistan. Silly us! We obviously needed a mansplaining or two, now, didn’t we?

You all know what mansplanations are, don’t you? A mansplanation isn’t any explanation that a man offers, but it’s the particular moment when a man corrects a woman on something about which she has first-hand experience or expertise in, say. Or when he comes in to say “You women, you’re doing this all wrong!”

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As the latest round of the snowpocalypse prepares to hammer the Mid-Atlantic and north-central parts of the U.S., I issue an apology on behalf of any Canadians who, like myself, have experienced a relatively dry and uneventful winter so far this year. Obviously, I can see where all the snow has ended up that we’d normally have here on the ground.

By this point in the winter, I’d usually have spent at least one afternoon up to my thighs in a snowbank about six or eight feet in depth, shovelling some of it to another, slightly less filled-up location. Mike, of course, would be shovelling the lion’s share as he does all the time (although eldest also has to take care of clearing the back decks, a not inconsiderable task). So I can’t say that we’re really missing having all that snow, except for having not enough of a snowbank to block Ozzie from winding his outside lead around the back deck posts.

But I do feel bad for everyone in the snowstorm’s path, especially given the relative lack of snow-removal equipment and experience. Seriously, stay safe, people!

The days are just flying by. . . . Eep!