Via Chicago

I'm coming home, I'm coming home, via Chicago.*

Actually, I'm already home, but I did get here via Chicago, after a whirlwind tour that took me from Rust Belt on December 19th to the land of Robber Baron mansions for the Pastry Pirate's graduation from cookin' school (detailed here, complete with pictures from my camera) and lots of fine dining, to Cowtown for a few days including Christmas Eve (which in the Virago family is the traditional time of present-opening), then to Chicago's suburbs on Christmas day to meet up with Bullock and his family, and then into the city on the 27th by way of O'Hare to pick up my bestest grad school friend D. and to eat at Frontera Grill and catch up for a few hours before heading off for the fabulous MLA blogger meet-up (thanks Dr. Crazy for organizing it!), and then back to Rust Belt the next day -- whew! (Yes, that was all one sentence. That's how it felt to me, too.)

I am exhausted. I'm also way behind on all things bloggy -- indeed, Dr. Crazy chastised me for falling down on the blogging job! Ack! -- as I had internet access only once in those 10 days, and that was on Christmas day in the Cowtown airport. I purposely got there early to use the free wifi and check my e-mail (how sad am I?) but didn't have time to blog or read blogs.

But one of my goals for the coming semester is to better organize my time, or at the very least to take control of it a little bit, and to build in more time for blogging (including reading yours). I'm going to do a little blog maintenance and get rid of some of the sillier posts from the early days, and then in a few days I'll start back in with some quality posts, which have been sorely lacking around here lately.

Our semester starts up pretty quickly and already I feel busy, so I might not be the most prolific poster, but I'm going to make my posts count more (I hope, anyway). This is all in a lead-up to my plan to move from a pseudonymous blog to a persona-based blog (where my real life identity will be known, but "Dr. Virago" will still be the author of the blog) after my tenure process is complete. (Quick update on that: all that's left in the process are the approvals of the Provost, President, and Trustees, and around here that's really just a rubber-stamp process. Knock wood, of course.) But for the rest of today all I'm doing is unpacking, straightening up for our New Year's party, and playing with my Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS-enabled trainer and heart-rate monitor (my Xmas present from Bullock) and going for a run to try it out.



*For those of you who don't get the reference, the buildings in the picture are featured on the cover of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (as seen here), and "Via Chicago" is a song on their earlier album Summerteeth.