monitorkitty

Sigh.

The weekend is about to end. And it’s been a particularly nice one. Actually, it’s been a pretty good week despite the fact that I don’t think I slept at all.

I had forty ‘leven million presentations this week, including a sunrise lecture at a golf club in Suffolk that was worth getting up before dawn for. The folks were so nice and genuinely interested in the ickle cheesebox and the sunrise over the Nansemond was glorious.

My boss let me go home early on Friday (since I had effectively been at work since 6:15 a.m.) and a good thing it was, because we had folks coming over the next day and the carpets simply had to be cleaned.

JMU was in the playoffs, and lots of Jim’s college buddies, their girlfirends, wives, and kids would be converging on our house to see the game and one simply cannot have ooky carpets. Problem was, I only had a handheld carpet cleaning device, so it took awhile. But the job got done, and the house was passable.

So the next day, I left.

I had already RSVP’d for another party that afternoon, and so off I went, back across the river to a fellow curator’s house which was incredible in the extreme. The food was exquisite and the company wonderful and I was able to do that and still get back to our house in time to see most of the game.

They won, by the way.

Next week is my last full week in the office for quite some time. They’re finally giving me a sabbatical to finish the dissertation. I don’t deny that the prospect is frightening since I have to wrench myself out of the world of ironclads and columbiads and go flailing back into the realm of wooden walls – broadsides, portolans, the smell of Stockholm tar, and life before the mast.

It should be a remarkable time.

yowza.

So much has been going on that I hardly know where to start. I guess I’ll hit the highlights.

I had the honor to attend Martin and Erin’s wedding the weekend before last. Here’s Martin – courtesy of ABC

He was on “Who Wants to Be a Quarter Millionaire” – well, you know what I mean. But that was only after he had been on the show once before and had the distinction of winning exactly $0.

Not to be cute or anything – but Martin didn’t just win the big bucks. He also lucked out in finding the most wonderful person – Erin. And he didn’t have to ask the audience, use a 50/50 or phone a friend to know how awesome she is (though we all ended every conversation with him – no matter what it was – with the phrase “you need to marry this woman.”)

It was nice in that I also got to spend some time with Melody and Rich – who I almost never get to see – and Lexy and Mike, who I see only slightly more often. Lexy taught me how to polka (which to tell you the truth was something that I always felt lacking in and now I can do it – and so naturally I have forced poor Jim into polka-ing all over the living room, which is very likely illegal in Virginia….)

Then it was back to work for my first real week as a curator. I’m loving it. I spent hours in the library thanks to Cathy and Lester who showed me all the treasures they had unearthed. It’s all quite amazing.

The holiday weekend was lovely in that we had nowhere to be (though we spent a lovely evening with Dan and Rachel at their house eating crawfish etoufee and playing movie trivia.)

But I guess the highlight of the weekend was that we *think* we’ve bought a boat.

I know – how do you not know that you’ve bought a boat? Well – we put in the credit app, but being a holiday weekend, nothing was working very fast, so we only found out today.

We are boat owners.

Now everyone assumes that we would naturally want a sailboat. But they would be sorely mistaken.

See – we’re used to square-riggers. And until we can afford one of those, we’ll stick to our little center-console. These fore-aft sails are like a foreign language to me – maybe Captain Ron can teach me…

So anyway – that was pretty great news!

Right now I’m in the fanciest hotel I’ve ever stayed in (yes – even fancier than the Waldorf-Astoria…)awaiting a press conference in the morning about the USS Monitor.

Keep your eyes posted for the AP story…

Taking a few minutes out of my workday (and yes, I’m still up working at 11:30 at night – such is my existence….) to play a bit here. I’ve already noticed in the few days I’ve been posting again I’m actually much calmer and relaxed – so I’ll take that as I sign that this is a good thing.

We’re in the final stretch of creating the new temporary exhibit on the Monitor at Ye Olde Boat Museum and I’m editing the label copy. I need to get it back to our designers tomorrow, but apparently the server is down at work and I can’t access my compooter there. So it looks as though I’ll be up at 0-dark-thirty tomorrow frantically pecking away in my office (with the door most decidedly closed to keep free range members of other departments from alighting in one of my dead admiral chairs (they’re chairs, and they once belonged to an admiral who is now dead – hence the highly technical designation).

It’s been rather nice, though, doing research and writing rather than paper pushing and random acts of administration. And tonight, it’s all been done to the sound of the ship’s clock that my dad built for our Christmas gift! My dad is a whiz at making little brown wooden things, and this clock is absolutely beautiful. It rings the bells every half-hour to correspond with the appropriate ship’s watch (though at this moment I don’t know whether I’m a larbowline or a starbowline…..wait – I sleep on the larboard side of the bed…..) Anyway – it was 7 bells when I began this entry.

When I first moved to the Old Dominion my roommates David and Kathy had a brass ship’s clock that hung right outside my room. I loved it and missed it something awful when I moved. But those things are so blame expensive that I could never justify buying one. Then – out of the blue – my dad up and builds one (he found the innards of it in a clock kit catalogue). What an incredible gift.

By the way – I’ve sent him a thank you email – but I wanted to let everyone out there in cyberville know what an absolutely godlike creature Richard is. Again, quite out of the blue (like the clock) I received a veritable cornucopia of tweeness in the form of Belle and Sebastian merchandise. It was such a wonderful thing and quite what I needed to raise my spirits (which had been trampled and spat upon by the flu and other nasties).

Well – almost eight bells now. And miles to type before I sleep…. A pleasant 11th Night to you all!