My adviser wants me to flesh out my project with a few more details, so it's back to the archive for me. Someday, Google will succeed in digitizing all the world's information, and I can do this from my comfortable chair; but for now, I have to go over to Massachusetts and peer at faded ink with my fallible eyeballs.

I left Tuesday morning, drove eight hours, and arrived at my cousin Bill & Jenn's house, where I will spend the night. They live just over two hours away from the archive, so I can't use them as a free hotel, but I figured that as long as I was in the neighborhood, it would be nice to see them. Uncharacteristically, I left Buffalo earlier in the morning than I had been planning, so I got to New Hampshire with plenty of daylight left. There was some delay, in that I assumed that the "A" condo would be the one with the front door. I was wrong, "B" and "C" share the front door, "A" has an entry on the side. That worked out, I got to meet the cats, then we drove over to UNH for a quick visit. That's one of the schools I am interested in, and it didn't occur to me that Bill & Jenn live right next to it. (When they bought this condo, Jenn was still attending classes there.) The history building isn't particularly attractive, and all the faculty had gone home for the day by the time we arrived. Ah well. If I haven't overstayed my welcome this time, I can come up for a scheduled visit in a few weeks.

After a delicious dinner, we're now all lounging around using our electronic devices. I don't have to get a really early start tomorrow, because I have to get to the opposite side of Boston. If I leave early, I'll just spend more time trapped in rush-hour traffic. Even so, I should get to bed sometime soon, I suppose.

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Well, I need to go back out to an archive in Massachusetts to do a little more research. (Note- I really hate writing "Massachusetts". That state needs a new name.) I considered flying, because I'm not the sort of person that enjoys doing an 8-10 hour drive, but after consulting airfares, it's road-trip time! The side benefit of driving is that I get to visit with cousins Bill & Jen on the way out, and see my best friend Paul on the drive home. How cool is being a historian? Next week, I get to do a business trip where my "business" is looking at very old documents.

Although, maybe that's just the sign that I'm a history nerd. I think it'll be fun to transcribe lists of names that were written with lousy handwriting a hundred and fifty years ago in badly faded ink.

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Today my roommate got a letter from the Selective Service, that contained his draft card. This seems downright unfair, as he's already been drafted once before, so drafting him again is double jeopardy! He served two years in the Army of the Republic of Korea before coming to attend university in America.

The letter did include a paragraph explaining that he could mail the letter along with a copy of his visa to a specific address to get removed from the list, but he's planning to keep the letter based on how hilarious it is, as in the unlikely event that Congress re-institutes the draft, he'll be able to apply for exemption then.

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Due to scheduling issues, it looks like my GF and I will not be doing the Ride for Roswell this year. To make up the lack, I might be doing the "100 Miles to Nowhere" instead.

100MtN is another cancer fundraiser, invented and run by the blogger behind FatCyclist.com. The idea is that a century is the distance that "separates the men from the boys" if you will: you don't have to be a pro to finish, but if you're not, it'll hurt. There are lots of scheduled century rides, all over the country. The schtick behind 100MtN is in two parts: first, it can be done anywhere; second, that it has to be done in the most boring manner possible.

So no rides through the beautiful rolling countryside, admiring the forests and fields. No rides along scenic mountain ridges. No rides through beautiful historic cities. It's got to be somewhere boring.

Pretty much anything is exciting when you see it for the first time, so the ride is to be done in laps. The recommended maximum lap distance is two or two and a half miles, if memory serves, so you're going to be seeing the same scenery many times. The truly hardcore do it on an exercise bike or on bicycle rollers.

This year's edition of the 100MtN is scheduled for June 2nd. I'm not sure where I'll be that day, so I don't know where I'll be riding. It could be a short loop on campus, or maybe around the block at the GF's place. Either way, it should be a good time! Or, rather, not a good time, which is kind of the point.

Being an individual-effort race does have perks, of course. You can take rest breaks when you want, and don't have to line up at porta-potties. Instead of munching Clif Bars, you can have a grill cooking burgers somewhere along your loop. And every rider gets to define which division they are riding in, with the intent that everyone gets to win their division. I'm thinking I have a strong chance of winning the "Marine/History Grad Student/30-40" bracket.

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The post title is already obsolete; after typing it in, I realized that I was sitting at a device that can provide me a staggering quantity of information. Turns out, Milton Plesur was an influential professor.

Today was an annual conference named in his honor. It's a grad student conference; just about every university has one. The idea is that it's a practice conference, where grad students can present papers with low pressure, giving us practice for presenting at more serious professional conferences.

Plesur talks are only 15 minutes long, with three or four students in a panel. Two panels meet simultaneously, so you have to pick which talks you want to attend. The majority of papers were just summaries of the presenter's thesis work, but I joined with about 30% of people in doing something that was kind of peripheral to the main project.

I was a little under-rehearsed, and was about to go over on time, so I cut off the last two minutes, which was unfortunate, as those two minutes contains a song totally chock-full of innuendos. So it goes. I was first on my panel (of four), which is the second-best slot, in my opinion. (Last is best, but the middle slots are the worst.) I got some very intelligent questions, which is always nice, and some compliments as well.

Right after lunch, there is an hour talk by an invited guest speaker, invariably a professor from some other university. It's also invariably a friend of a professor at our school, as that means we can often skip the hotel, and even if not, we can usually get away with offering a smaller honorarium because they are partly just traveling out to Buffalo to visit their friend.

Our guest speaker presented a paper on changing displays of masculine beauty in Britain, 1950-1980. One of my friends that is somewhat of a shrinking violet slipped out of the room as soon as she saw the first slide. I am amused but can't blame her, because about half the talk was about British pornography marketed for gay men. There were lots of oiled-up torsos, and a couple of erect penises too. When I mentioned this to my girlfriend, she was surprised, but it didn't shock me– historians have been looking at pornography (academically, that is) for several decades now. It's an excellent source of "revealed preference" about standards of attractiveness.

In prior years, some attendees just leave after their presentations, depriving their fellow students of an audience. To discourage that, this year there was a free dinner at a local pizzeria after the last panels had concluded. I went, but I was going to stay for the whole thing anyway. I had to- my computer was the designated PowerPoint machine in one of the rooms. That wasn't part of the original plan, but I hadn't put my presentation on a thumb-drive, because I was playing a bunch of short video clips, and that can be iffy to play on another computer, because if the other computer doesn't have the correct video codecs installed, the videos won't play. So I plugged my machine in, and at the end they asked me to leave it there for the day, because my laptop came with a cool little remote control to advance slides and whatnot. It's much more convenient if you can present without being tied to the computer, especially as that room didn't have a real podium.

Anyway, good times, but I'm really tired now, because I was up later than was wise, fiddling with the exact timing of my clips. But all's well that ends well.

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One of my cadre of MA students is in ROTC, she's getting commissioned in March. And she asked me to give her first salute! I'm unreasonably flattered.

The downside is, I need to take my dress blues to an alterations shop. Somehow the trousers have shrunk a little while on a hanger. It's the strangest thing.

(For the curious: It's a tradition that when a person gets commissioned as an officer and becomes entitled to receive salutes from the enlisted, they have an enlisted person that they respect be the first one to salute them.)

She asked me because she really doesn't know many enlisted people personally. Her brother is also a ROTC cadet and thus could do it, but she said she'd rather have one from an actual veteran.

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Some people spend today drinking beer that has been colored green for stupid reasons. Me, I was on campus for twelve hours, drinking nothing but water. I'm living the dream!

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Check out this time-lapse video from the ISS. I think it might be the coolest thing I have ever seen.

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Sadly, just before noon today, my girlfriend's last remaining grandparent passed away. I didn't know Betty all that well, but she was always kind and friendly to me. She had a brush with death by pneumonia a few months ago, and while she surprised the hospital staff that time, it clearly did some damage. She just wasn't the same afterwards.

Last spring, my GF, her sister and brother-in-law, and Grandma Betty went to the finest BBQ joint in Buffalo. That's how I choose to remember Betty: smiling, laughing, full of joie de vivre.

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