A good way to start the day:

"It is my pleasure to inform you that your grant application...has been approved for funding."

It's not a HUGE grant (less than $300; most of that is prairie seed) but it means

a. I don't have to buy the stuff out of my own pocket
b. I'm on the administration's radar (the good kind) as being Someone Who Is Scholastically Productive
c. I feel like I achieved something
d. My grad student will feel like she's got a vote of confidence (this is actually her project; it's my design but she's going to do most of the work)


In a bit, I do need to go out and grab the soil arthropod samples for this quarter (I don't know how many I'll get; it's been uncommonly chilly and that usually drives things deeper in the soil - like, below my sampling level). But still, it's good to have something productive to do (I read journal articles when I'm not actively working on research, but frankly, I'd rather be GENERATING data than READING ABOUT it.)

(We have no morning classes today: assessment. I do have a meeting at 11:30 but I figure if I leave here by 8, I should be back in plenty of time. It's a pretty quick day in the field for this type of sampling.)

Oh, and a couple comment-responses:

Lydia, you might try Ngaio Marsh's "Inspector Alleyn" series. I think they are among the best of the Golden Era mysteries. And I don't remember any "woo." I've also heard that the Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy Sayers) is good too but I've not read any yet. (I have a couple of the Hornblower novels on the shelf, never got around to reading them. I tried to read one of the O'Brien novels and found I lacked a lot of the shipboard vocabulary and found that that bugged me).

Charles P, no I don't live in Portland. Powell's does mail order, bless them, and you can even find and order-by-mail used books from them, and in a way that feels more "secure" to me than from Amazon (ie., they do not use third-party sellers)

(I actually live in Oklahoma).