I expect over the coming months new corners of the library will get to be quite familiar. I’m glad I’ve started to isolate the work I’m interested in for my final projects so early in the semester—I can chip away at those essays as I go from now, trying to figure out how I’m going to move around the texts I’m interested in. I was surprised when I went into the library that the Maria Edgeworth section was so small. It seems people are only starting to get interested in her now.

After spending this morning completing my list of world Independence Days, and their equivalent celebrations, I found that the initial information I’d found on Nepal’s national holiday was wrong, and this in fact took place yesterday, on 19 February. With any luck, now that I’ve got it sorted, delay in posting should be minimal from now on.

Speaking of the Independence Day Project, I’m looking hard for a poem by a poet from Brunei. It’s proving to be my most difficult search so far. (That said, initially I thought from searching on the internet that finding a good translation of a good Nepali poet was going to be difficult—and then I found a beautiful anthology.) I’m hoping that, as time goes on, some more people might get involved and send suggestions. Or am I in dreamland?

I sometimes am amazed that I’ve found time to keep juggling all these things—but at the moment all the balls are still staying up in the air. It makes me think of a juggler I used to know, Brian, who was studying at NICA. He was practising juggling seven balls when I met him. One falls, they all fall.

Not that I’m anticipating a crash! I have a lot of practice at this.

I have a few other interesting bits to catch up on here, but I think they might have to wait a few days—I’ve seen three very interesting writers speak this week.

I wanted, too, as a kind of reminder to myself to record the list I made at the start of this year as to the things I wanted to get done this year. I make these lists every year, and there are always a few that fall by the wayside, but a lot of things that I manage to fit in. This year’s list is as follows:

• Apply for PhD Programs
• Write 20 poems
• Give 4 conference papers
• Visit 10 or more states in the US
• Go rock climbing
• Blog at least once a week
• Visit all the Smithsonian museums
• Take dance lessons again
• Start taking photographs again
• Cook more

Obviously some of these are more prosaic than others (yes, on the day-to-day front, I’ve been cooking a lot. And glad of it too.) Overall, though, it seems like a list that is fairly rounded—it encompasses all the types of things I love. And I’m pleased to say, since the start of the year I’ve written about 5 poems—they’re not all finished (far from it) but they all have something happening in them. I’m looking forward to some time to work through them. Time? I’ll find it someday, somewhere.

I'm giving two conference papers in March (one, as already mentioned, at the University of Virginia, the second at the University of Rhode Island) and then I'll wait until next semester - I'll probably try to do one in then. I've been chipping away at most of these things...