Pleasant Valley Sunday

Well, dear reader, it's midday on Sunday and here I am still in the hotel room, despite considerations about wandering about the hills and dales for the weekend - rain for most of yesterday, and tales of flooding at regular intervals, matched by weather predictions of continued rain, have kept me close to "home" instead.

At one level, it has meant that a lot of work, especially in regard to my journal editorial responsibilities, has been done, but it is hardly the vision of the pleasant valley Sunday that The Monkees had in mind (or maybe it was? - prompted by the song title, I've just "you tubed" a bunch of old Monkee videos in a very pleasant interlude; indeed the sun has just popped out!)

Yesterday I managed to clean up the leftover emails from my personal laptop, although I still need to sort out how I get all addresses, etc on to the University system (and then how I would get them off eventually when I leave in so many years time, but that's not for now). The emailing included a series of exchanges with Professor Joyce Liddle and we ended up at The Bell Inn on Angel Row between 7am and midnight, talking about the School, mutual colleagues and a raft of issues that could broadly be subsumed under the heading of "life, the universe, and everything".

... back to Sunday and still I hesitate to ring my Aunt Nancy, discovered by Kerry's detective work, and more than an ounce of luck in finding a third cousin of mine, Karen, who has been searching the family tree from her side and brought us together (and now I go to the good old standby - Layla with Eric (this is the live version but not the Unplugged version).

a little later at about 1.30pm:

Well, I've done it! Just got off the phone from talking with Nancy and her husband Joe, and I'll visiting them on Tuesday before I get into the BAM conference swing (when I know that the first trip out of Nottingham organised for me is to Harrogate, where Nancy and Joe live, and I match it to all the other examples of synchronicity and serendipity over the last month or so, then it was only the right thing to do!)

I've also subsequently been introduced to Second Life by Beattie Berry who is the overall co-ordinator of the Management Through Collaboration (MTC) textbook project, so while the day/weekend has not unfolded as I might have anticipated, it has still been a very positive, productive one (and it's just started raining again).

and so Sunday proceeds .......