I am not a faithful blogger. I’ve microblogged on Facebook, and posted some photos on my Smugmug page. I’ve written a fair amount of academic prose. But I haven’t updated this blog in nearly five months. In that time, I have:
- Ended the spring semester with no disasters.
- Attended a 65th-birthday celebration for one of my favorite historians, Tony Grafton.
- Finished drafts of two book chapters and one journal article.
- Visited Los Angeles and Pasadena, and participated in a wonderful symposium at the Huntington Library on new directions in the history of early modern science.
- Took a two-week vacation in Iceland with my wife and one of our dear friends. We are still dear friends after two weeks together, which wasn’t a given! I’m still finishing the photos, but a selection from all but the last two days is available here.
- Rode D2R2, the Deerfield Dirt Road Randonnée, for the third year in a row. This time I rode to the start, did the 115K route to the lunch stop, and then did my own variation on the 100K route back to the finish. After a snack, I rode back home. My mix-and-match version had less climbing than the official routes, but I compensated by 28 miles riding from my house to the start/finish and then back again.
- Visited Montreal to see some friends, stopping at Middlebury, Vermont, on the way back to see more friends from the days we lived there.
- Went on long (and short) bike rides, did some hikes, went paddling, ran here and there, sat in the back yard sipping G&Ts, and generally enjoyed summer in western Massachusetts while making some progress on a number of projects, even if I would have liked to have accomplished even more.
It was nice to spend the summer mostly at home, with scarcely a month, in toto, elsewhere. Next summer we’ll be in Zürich in early June, and Oxford in mid-July, with some time in France in between, and perhaps a bike tour in Turkey before Zürich. It will be fun to travel, but I’m sure I’ll look back longingly on a summer spent at home.
