How forlorn a front page full of links looks. This blogging lark will never catch on.

I’ve been meaning to write, of course, but have been caught in that vicious cycle where if I write to explain why I’m not here I’ll actually have to write here, and then you’ll start expecting me to write here, and then I’ll have to write to explain why I’m not writing here.

Then when people like Bill and Kathleen and Shauna and Stavros write so eloquently about not writing, I feel like it’s already been written, even though I haven’t actually written it here. I know, I know... still, that instinct not to go where others have boldly gone did stop me from writing off the place completely in July, when Graham wrote his farewells right at the moment I was thinking about doing the same.

The real explanation is more mundane than that, though, and best illustrated by this graph of Work Activity versus Time (click to enlarge):

At the end of July, two short-term part-time contracts landed in my lap where I’d been getting by on one, with the result that I went from about 60% to 120% overnight. It won’t really settle down until the end of the year, when I’ll be “only” full-time again in a single post. Those who read between the lines of all those inscrutable posts from late 2004/early 2005 when I was looking for work and sweating on grant applications will know what a huge relief that is. This time last year there would have been a lot fewer pings on that graph.

I can’t talk about next year’s project until it’s signed and sealed, but it’s looking really interesting. The stuff I’ve been working on the past few months has been, too, but a bit more work-for-hire. Educational web development, mainly, playing around with Sakai and the OSP and XML; the sort of thing I’ve been doing in bits and pieces all year. There’s half a dozen more websites around the place now with my fingerprints on them.

I’ve also been doing some teaching again this year, for the first time in years. I’d reached the point where I wondered if I still had it in me, but the stage fright passed with the first session in February, and it was fine after that. Then over the summer I was supervising masters dissertations, which was as educational for me as it was for them.

There have been disappointments: jobs I didn’t get that I’d hoped to; having to accept that I may never get an academic position in my home discipline; wondering why I couldn’t write the thing I most wanted to write; testing the patience of those around me; long dark nights of the soul; that sort of thing. At least I’m not haunted by thoughts of never getting tenure, as young American academics seem to be. Tenure? What’s that? I graduated in a year when there were only a dozen posts advertised in my discipline, let alone field, in my entire country. My whole working life has been at the mercy of contracts, which I hate; of course, I’m always grateful to get them, but the end of a contract is a terrible time if you actually have hopes of staying on. You spend most of your time getting established, then have to turn around and look for other possibilities while trying to find ways to keep your current role going (see: November 2003–July 2004). Multiply that by two contracts in one household and you have a recipe for misery.

But I won’t go on about that, because it feels very last-November. The past few months have been better, as a dramatic increase in income usually is. The first thing I did with said increase was spend it all on airfares for an all-stops tour of Australia, to visit the family and friends I haven’t seen for two, four, or in a couple of cases twelve and twenty years. My itinerary is, frankly, insane, yet I’m still wondering how I can squeeze in extra people during my 36 hours in Melbourne or my few days each in Canberra and Tasmania. How about if you’re reading this and you know me, I’ll meet you in Garema Place in three weeks’ time... No? I’ll call you, then. No, I will. Honest. Cross my heart and hope to contract bird flu on the stopover at KL.

Before the Oz trip there’s more work, and afterwards it’s more work, and then it’s away for Christmas (more on that anon), and then it’s back here for more new work.

But even all this isn’t the main explanation for the silence at Chez Escargot. For a few months, at least, I stopped thinking of this site as The Project. The project shifted elsewhere, to some of my other web haunts and diversions; and, more importantly, to writing the thing I’ve most wanted to write, which I don’t want to jinx by talking about it here. Because if I don’t finish that thing, I’ll never get to the next thing.

So, anyway. Now that I’m back (sort of, and not for long, and then a bit more, and then who knows), I might as well post a few more actual posts. That’s enough linking. Ed.

4 November 2005 · Journal

Added by BT on 7 November 2005.

Added by Rory on 7 November 2005.