The past weeks have, again, accelerated. I know that I should have written all about election day, and the day after—but I didn’t. It’s been a busy time.

Belatedly, though, I will note that on election day I:

- first tutored at Duke Ellington (no students, but I got the crossword done…)
- had coffee at Baked and Wired, chatting with the Baked Girls. (Nathan falls into this category too… I don’t think I’ve told him that yet.)
- then C picked me up to go drive around North Virginia for a while. The idea? To find some polling places for him to photograph, and me to make whatever notes I felt like making. The method? Cross a bridge from DC to Rosslyn and get lost. The theory? After getting lost, something interesting will happen. The outcome? Didn’t find the polling places, but instead found an “Oriental Supermarket” that, among other things, sold Milo. So I’ve had a week of excellent chocolate milk… and now the Milo is all gone.
- Back to C’s place before heading toward Meg’s for the special election edition meeting of the Baked and Wired Knitting Society… except then Meg had to cancel at the last minute.
- Impromptu invitation (after assurances that I would not be intruding) to the house of one of C’s friends. Me, glued to CNN and MSNBC electoral maps for 4 hours.
- Obama! Obama!
- Joining the spontaneous crowd gathered outside the White House between midnight and 2.30am. Wow.

I slept in the next morning. You’re shocked.

Since then, there’s been more stuff to get done. I presented papers at two conferences last weekend. I feel like I am living in the aftermath of Friday, when I flew to New Hampshire and back on the same day, in order to present a paper at the Milton conference at the lovely St Anselm’s College. The day itself was a little hellish—I got up at 3am to get the shuttle to BWI airport and didn’t get back home until midnight. Still, I met some lovely people, including a Benedictine monk who was knitting a brightly coloured hat.

Oh, and knitting has been treating me very nicely. Such fun! Such madness! Let’s have a caucus race!

This week has been a bit of a marathon. I’m still going to work for another hour or so tonight… of that’s the plan. If sleep takes over, I won’t object…

I had a paper accepted for a conference at University of Virginia - UVA is a great university, so I feel like this is a great opportunity. The conference is on 13-14 March, so I'd better get cracking and write a new version of this paper soon - most likely that'll happen over Spring Break. The paper is, broadly, on intersections between "thing theory" and travel theory. (Yes, I think the first has a preposterous enough title to warrant the would-be air-quotes-on-the-page.) I wrote about Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland at the end of last year - for this paper I'll be cutting that in half, and adding a little comparison to how Samuel Johnson's traveller compares to Bruce Chatwin's in The Songlines. Yes, I realise that sounds a little crazy, but I have ideas...

Speaking of Spring Break, I was having a Spring Break breakdown over the weekend - trying to decide where on earth to go. I was dreaming of New Mexico and El Paso, Texas, but it's just not going to happen. It's too extravagant - and there are two conferences I'm going to in March, so I'll need to save a little to get to both of these. Instead it looks like it will be West Virginia: Harper's Ferry, which is very pretty. I'm thinking however of hiring a car for a few days, and driving around West Virginia a little bit - I found a list of ghost towns in the state, and thought that could be interesting. Hopefully a plan will crystallise in the next few days...