Spring

Yes, I know, I’m getting ahead of myself.  But on our walk back from nursery, the weather was very different from the rain under which we left the house at 7:30 this morning.  Katherine, my little trooper, did scooter the 1.7 miles to nursery, though she had a conniption when she realized that her socks and trousers had gotten a bit wet at the end, until she thought for a moment: “But that’s why you have extra clothes in the backpack!”  On our lunchtime walk back, we spotted four kinds of flowers in the parks, and I discarded my jacket toward the end (though that may have more to do with my fever and Nathaniel’s recent weight gain than the temperature outside).  It is really lovely out, and I’m thinking that in the next two weeks spring will be officially here.  Given my recent nightmarish experience with the snow (miles to walk in a country where nobody shovels, sands, or salts), I’m ready for it.

Apologies for being a bit quiet on this front.  The kids are lovely, keeping us busy with lots of “why?” questions.  Sydney returned from a recent job fly-out, but then has spent the past two weeks camped out on the couch with first the flu (thank you, US germs!) and a cold that he and I are currently sharing (the kids are definitely getting the upper hand at the moment).

For those of you who have any interest in the academic aspect of what we do, I have a story for you.  It involves two articles: one that I wrote for a graduate course back in, oh, the spring of 2007, and one that I’ve been thinking of off and on but only sat down to write in January of 2012.  The first article went through a number of permutations, becoming the first part of my dissertation, and then revised into an article that I’ve sent out to a couple of journals.  I was getting a bit discouraged, since I was told it was good work by my advisors and encouraged to get it published, but each journal found something wrong with it.  My most recent attempt resulted in its being sent back to me–but accompanied by reader reports and a letter from the editor, who encouraged me to revise and resubmit it.  That’s academia for you: promise nothing, but raise hopes on the condition that you put in a great deal of work.  At any rate, a revise-and-resubmit is considered a victory in my field, so I was excited, if daunted by the revisions.  But the second article, the one I wrote over Christmas, was submitted at the end of December and I just learned that it’s been accepted for publication.  Best of all?  No revisions required.  So much for a standard way of doing things.

Erin