Well, my semester is over, I submitted my last paper. Now the wait for grades.

Originally I planned on taking a class over the summer. The professor backed out, though, as he was just awarded a fellowship somewhere else. I'm thus at loose ends, somewhat too late to search for an academic summer job.

I could work retail and earn a little spare change. But I'm thinking instead about going to Massachusetts for a few weeks and doing some archival research at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The idea is to get a jump on my master's thesis. Er, master's project. I got corrected about that by the graduate adviser– he said to qualify as a academic thesis, you must defend it before a panel.

The scheduling on hitting the archive is still up in the air. Their archivist recommended coming by when she's not on vacation, but she doesn't know when that'll be. Meanwhile, I'll have to move apartments temporarily at a yet-to-be-determined date, as a contractor is coming in to install a new fire detection system.

The only part of my summer that I am sure about is this upcoming weekend, when Hil and I are going to Atlanta to visit a bunch of her relatives. Maybe I'm unaware of some people, but it seems like my family is spread out all over the country, while hers is heavily concentrated in Buffalo and Atlanta. If I'm not mistaken about her family's spread, it has some advantages. Her parents could take their kids to visit all the cousins in only a single trip!

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So, it seems the villain of our age is dead. As I type this, at almost 1 AM, there are parties in the streets of Washington DC and New York City.

He lost. He failed to achieve his political aims, and there is no sign that his successors will achieve them either.

But we haven't won. We've permitted the government to suppress freedoms in the name of pointless security theater. But all is not lost. We got over the various internments of the Second World War, and we got over Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, and we got over the Alien and Sedition Acts. I have hope for the future.

I also have no hope, as nothing lasts forever. But if we can keep it together for a few more centuries, that's good enough.

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Hil and I like to go biking together. But it is inconvenient to bike between our residences. It works out well, though, because we each own two bicycles. I've got a commuter bike and an unsprung mountain bike. She has a an urban hybrid and a hardtail mountain bike, which is the one I borrow over there. It's got a step-through frame, otherwise known as "ladies' style." Which is funny, as that style is to allow a rider to wear a dress, and I can't think a dress is a good idea when mountain biking.

Yesterday, I remembered with some amusement that the few times I had to borrow one of my sister's bikes in our youth, I was mortified at the idea that someone might see me riding a ladies' bike. Now, I don't give a damn.

The other interesting thing is, as noted, that I'm borrowing a mountain bike. As the front has shock-absorbing suspension, I don't have to steer around potholes. Trust me, there are plenty of potholes to go around in the Buffalo region.

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I've been doing very little blogging, as it is that delightful time of year when students must sacrifice great quantities of paper and ink to Clio, the Muse of History. A Facebook conversation with my fellow students started with a discussion of a near-accident I'd had while biking, and quickly spiraled into a plot to claim that our entire class was in two cars going to an end-of-semester party, and that the two cars collided and injured us all to the extent that we needed due date extensions. The plan was rejected because of (a) implausibility, (b) the Prisoner's Dilemma, (c) ethics.

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I got a stack of my papers back in class yesterday. Re-reading them, I had the strangest sensation– I liked what I was reading. For the longest time, I've been dissatisfied with my prose. After all the rewriting and polishing I could do, I knew it was as good as I could make it, but it never felt good enough. But these recently-written papers? I liked them.

So either my writing is getting better, or my critical facilities are becoming numb. I'm not trying to fish for compliments here, I'm just making an observation about the workings of my mind. Also, as these blog posts are written in haste, they do not reflect the quality of prose that I would turn in for grading.

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Some of you may recall that I was once heavily involved with my university's gaming club. Their biggest event is an annual gaming convention. The most recent version happened two weekends ago.

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I went to an academic conference today. I don't remember what the official topic of the conference was, but the presenters didn't really follow the theme.

Getting there was a bit of a self-imposed challenge, because I had misread the location. I thought it was the CFA (Center For the Arts) but it was actually the CFT (Center For Tomorrow). Need I mention that the two buildings are quite far apart, and I had chosen to ride my bike? As a result, I was a bit late, but no matter. The first scheduled presenter told me he had realized the correct building only the night before, so he was very nearly late to his own session.

Amusingly, the first session in the morning had papers on Robin Hood in 19th century English myth, chivalry in Shakespeare's Richard II, and French political cartoons from the 18th century. Nice, cheerful stuff. The last session, in late afternoon? Papers on the American eugenics movement, the anti-vivisection campaign, and Civil War battlefield medical practices.

Thus everyone was in a good mood when the conference ended. There's an afterparty going on right now, but I'm not attending, as (a) I don't do much drinking, and (b) I have history to write.

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I've been invited to go along with a group of friends to a nearby shooting range. I figure I'll rent an AR-15 and see if I've still got it.

I've been warned that we're going to have a ringer along. One of the attendees will be a female with dyed-pink hair and a very non-military attitude. However, in high school she was a competitive shooter, and is still the most accurate of the bunch.

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As mentioned in my last post, over break I didn't get as much done on one of my papers as I'd hoped. Thus the first half of the paper was done in one or two hour stints over the course of two weeks. The second half was done in a single twelve-hour marathon.

Today the seminar met to critique everyone's first drafts. The consensus was that my second half was better than the first. Go figure.

UPDATE: Another comment that got general agreement was "Your distinctive voice comes across very clearly in your paper." I'm still not sure if that was intended as a compliment.

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Last week was spring break. Despite knowing that grad students don't really get breaks, I chose to visit with my immediate family in New York. Joining me was my GF, who would thus get another chance to socialize with my parents, as well as seeing my old hometown.

We decided to take my car, as Hil's father was taking her car to a dealership while we were away. We made the correct choice, as her car ended up getting its steering column replaced. That would have been mightily expensive, but the car was just barely still under warranty. The downside is that my car has a manual transmission, which Hil doesn't know how to use, so I did all the driving. The trip isn't too long, so the task was not excessively onerous.

The trip down was disappointing, with rain and fog limiting visibility. The route along I-390 is quite scenic, but Hil was probably annoyed by my saying "To the left, behind all that fog is a beautiful valley!" and "Most days you can see a wind farm to the east!" and so forth.

We spent a couple of days with my father. We saw a ballet of Sleeping Beauty, rode bikes around Big Flats, and spent a bit of time at the Corning Museum. We even figured out a better way to load the bike carrier on my car. Hil has a step-through frame, while the carrier was designed for bikes with top-tubes that are parallel to the ground. The original rigging had a very off-center weight distribution, which was suboptimal for a variety of reason. With Dad's advice, we detached the front wheels and mounted Hil's bike on upside-down, which evened out the balance. As a bonus, small children in other cars on the highway stared at the strange-looking arrangement.

On the way to my mother's, we stopped to visit an aunt of Hil's. The aunt lives up a steep dirt road outside of Elmira. It's not on maps and not in the GPS, but we managed to find it, and my car growled up the road in low gear. She was nice, but we spent little time there, as the aunt was on lunch break. We concluded that visit by driving Hil's cousin to her riding stable.

At my mother's we were somewhat less active. We went to the town history museum, which had a new exhibit on the area's clockmakers of the nineteenth century. I had to grit my teeth a couple of times, but perhaps I should be generous to the efforts of the volunteers that work on a local museum. After all, I'm not taking the time to do that. After the museum, we hit up a large local used bookstore, a place that is very dangerous for members of my family. Despite our hopes, we didn't get to bike around Owego, as the weather was nasty for the whole time we were there.

The last stop on the itinerary was my sister's place in Springwater. Their choice to live on a hilltop with a dirt road means I don't take my little car up to visit them until the snow melts! But things were quite pleasant up there. My brother-in-law had a client visiting to work on a hotsaw, so we didn't see him much. My niece, now six, used to be terribly shy. This visit it seemed that someone had flipped a switch to "gregarious" and she happily chatted away and showed off her room and her stuff. The dog seemed disappointed that the humans were spending all their time talking and not nearly enough time throwing balls to be chased.

On the drive back to Buffalo, the weather cleared up. So Hil got to see the valleys and the windmills. The valleys are more attractive when they are green, of course– even in the sunlight, this time of year all the forests and fields are brown and gray. Still, spring officially arrived during the last day of the trip, so I have hopes.

Sadly, I had a lot of research and writing to do over the break, and I got precious little of it done. In fact, my writing this blog post is itself a form of procrastination.

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