Preview of stuff I hope to write about this week

Here's what I hope to write about in the coming week, as I take breaks from writing letters of recommendation and working on the big, fat editing project that's due in a month:

• NCS Siena and how and why it was a very different experience for me from NCS Swansea, and not just because of the gelato (a post that will be one of my usual meditations on 'professional identity,' among other things)
• A more lucid extension on my babbling comment at the end of the NCS blogging panel, originally about what personal blogs like mine can do for the profession and the sub-field of medieval studies, but expanded/modified to talk about why I've had such a blogging lull the past two years and why I want and need to pick up the pace again
• Meditations on visiting a part of Italy that wasn't Rome (for once), and how it made me think about the relation of the medieval to the modern, about historical and present space and geography, and about my relation to both medieval Christianity and my own Catholic upbringing in an assimilating, WASPy world
  
• Relics, sacred and secular. Yes, that's right: secular relics. You'll see.
• The nearly three weeks I spent in England before NCS Siena, including stuff about the London Rare Books School; tales of overcoming my fear of the London bus system (seriously); thoughts on my changing relationship to big cities; and pictures of the ridiculously cute Yorkshire town of Knaresborough
  

See, if write all this out here, its public presence will hold me to the plans for writing that I have. But today, I'm going to lie around reading Entertainment Weekly and pulp detective fiction -- something I haven't done in a long time.