Slooow Progress. . .

Here's where things stand with the pioneers at the moment.

Things have been slow on the painting front the last month or so thanks largely to lots of student papers, conferences the week before Spring Vacation, and so forth.  You'd be surprised how much time it can take preparing for and conducting these post-Topic Proposal Paper interviews in which I try to coax most students through the process of actually narrowing their proposed topics and deciding what it is they want to say about them.  This particular task should have been accomplished and/or articulated within said papers, and there were explicit written directions circulated well in advance of the assignment due date, but there you are.

However, spurred on by General de Latte's own impressive recent efforts with a fine looking batch of SYW Prussians (???) at The Duchy of Alzheim, I sat myself down at the start of this week to get going again.  Enjoyed a couple of evenings applying oil glazes over my usual white acrylic gesso basecoat, and had visions of getting almost everything finished during this delightfully free week.  All well and good.  Some nice early progress made over two evenings when what do you think happened?

Yep.  First, the flu came on and knocked me for six as they say in Great Britain and, perhaps, elsewhere in the Commonwealth.  None of this should be a surprise, really, since the Young Master has been home from school most of the week with something similar, and I have been the one to care for him.  Sigh.  I'm only up long enough now to drink a glass of fruit juice and send a couple of documents on this computer to the Grand Duchess, who is currently at work in her office on campus.

Speaking of the Grand Duchess. . .   In more exciting news, she has had an incredible offer from a much larger university to assume a full professor/administrator position there in mid-August.  She has not given her decision yet, but the compensation they are offering her to take the position borders on the obscene. Naturally, we are very pleased and still a bit nonplussed.  Ok, dumbfounded even.  

While there is talk of a spousal hire for yours truly, it is not entirely clear what there might be for me to do however.  Looking through the current job postings online has neither yielded anything for which I am remotely qualified, nor anything in which, if I am frank, I am interested.  The examples of spousal hires I have observed from a distance here, with our current employer, so far have not always been ideal, so I must admit to some misgivings as well. 

In any case, it looks very like the Grand Duchess will accept the offer and things will need to be packed up rather quickly here for a June move.  Hopefully, once the influenza subsides, I can finish this current batch of figures and then think about how to pack up everything here in Zum Stollenkeller, so it survives the indignities of a house move two or three states away.  Ok, enough fever-induced prattle.  Back to bed.

-- Stokes