Saturday Morning Coffee

Good morning! Come on in and put your feet up; the coffee’s fresh and hot and strong.

So, the big news the week is pretty exciting.

Last weekend one of my friends posted that Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland and coordinating what’s known as The Pratchett Project, an academic endeavor to promote and preserve the work of Terry Pratchett through academic research and writing.

Now I’m an academic nobody in that I have no advanced degrees, no peer-reviewed journal publications, and no connection to a college or university. But the call for expressions of interest said the Project wanted to connect a wide variety of academic fields and disciplines.

So I wrote an application email and sent it off. Two days later I had a response. I was afraid to open it, but then I noticed two things: it was a new email rather than a reply to my email, and there was a file attached. Feeling a tad more confident, I opened it. I’ll spare you the details and jump to the end:

Y’all. I made it! Now I’ve had some trouble explaining to a few folks what this actually means. It’s not a job and I’m not moving to Ireland. It’s not a paid gig, unless I’m able to publish in a journal that pays its contributors.

It does mean that in a year or two I might be asking y’all to help fund my first overseas trip to a conference (assuming my paper is accepted). It does mean that I’m going to up my academic writing game and start pitching more articles. This also means I’ll be getting more rejection letters. Ah well.

But still, I was so happy I started crying into my afternoon coffee.

Those weren’t the only tears shed this week. As you probably know/heard, it’s the 75th anniversary of the D-Day Landings. I’m missing Mr Tom more than ever, but one of my friends sent me a message that he was in England for the commemoration and would take some time at Omaha Beach to remember Mr Tom for me.

He routinely leads WWI/WWII trips and has asked me to go. Unfortunately, I just don’t have a slew couple of grand just lying around. Maybe one day. Sigh 😔

Here’s your reminder that I wrote a book about Mr Tom!

Cooking continues to go swimmingly. For the second straight week I planned meals and bought groceries for a week. This week’s highlight was the Summer Squash Pizza:

Running this week has been interesting. I decided to follow the intermediate runner’s marathon training schedule. I also started running with an hydration pack. The humidity’s also been over 90% most days.

All this means that my times are a bit slower, which can be demoralizing, but I know it’ll help in the long run.

Pun definitely intended.

What have you been up to?