I finished up the looming-deadline project a full two days early, I’m happy to report, and am now turning to other phases of my summer work. I’ve got a zillion things I hope to accomplish, ranging from lots of MediaCommons stuff (with the goal of a fall launch!) to getting the new writing project that I began tinkering with over winter break up and running.

But there’s something else major that I need to accomplish, and PDQ: I need to start blogging again. I miss it terribly, but I was really only half-kidding when I suggested a few weeks ago that I’ve forgotten how to do this. I had a conversation about this yesterday with a blogging pal, who argued, as I’ve also said of myself before, that she looks at the world differently when she’s blogging actively—that so many more small things present themselves to her as worthy of being written about.

I’ve gotten far enough out of the habit that I don’t look at the world that way at all; nothing appears particularly worth posting. So for the next couple of weeks, I’m challenging myself simply to get back in the groove, by blogging the reading I’m doing, for instance, anything that will get the words flowing again.

Today, somebody figured out how to overcome my trackback URL randomization and leave me 20-plus spam trackbacks. All from different IP addresses.

Here marks the (hopefully temporary) end of trackbacks on Planned Obsolescence.

A big fat reward, however, of a type to be negotiated later, to whomever can devise a properly secure trackback technology.

Major editorial project due June 1. Approximately 50% of work on project remains ahead of me. I hate deadlines.

We’ve made it back to Claremont, a little less than a week after I set off for Louisiana. The trip was a whirlwind: I arrived there Monday night, R.’s movers showed up Tuesday morning, we finished last details there (and I spent some time with my mother) on Wednesday, and headed westward on Thursday morning. Three and a half days later, we rolled back into town and directly to our favorite taco place for lunch.

The drive went fairly well, and included a couple of spur-of-the-moment changes of course: day 1 took us from Baton Rouge to Oklahoma City, day 2 from OKC to Albuquerque, NM, day 3 from Albuquerque to Las Vegas, and day 4 the rest of the way home. Hotels were good, as were meals. Traffic wasn’t bad, except at the overly plentiful highway construction sites. Weather was fine. The only thing that was really not pleasant was the price of gas, and even that wasn’t that big a surprise.

What was odd—what’s always odd to me, about that drive—is the sense of spending so long out in the middle of nowhere, until suddenly, with no real notice, we were home. It’s disorienting, in a strange way, precisely because it’s actually orienting; “home” suddenly becomes radically situated, embedded in the geography that it’s otherwise so easy to forget. To some extent that’s a result of the peculiar location of this place—one minute, we’re screaming through the uninhabitable desert; the next, we’re eating tacos in a very familiar spot, from which all memory of the desert has been erased—but to some extent I think it highlights the odd boundaries that our usual modes of travel allow us to draw around places, the parts of their context that we get to ignore.

The best moment, in any case, was walking into the condo: some pals of mine had broken in while I was gone, hanging a banner reading “Welcome Home, R.!” and leaving a lovely bottle of champagne beneath it. A wonderful homecoming, indeed.

It’s graduation day here in Claremont, and for the first time ever we’re holding the ceremony outside, where it promises to be 75 and sunny and breezy, rather than in the big auditorium, where it is invariably non-airconditioned, stuffy, crowded, and what my grandmother would have called “close.” Should be a glorious day, once I get myself dressed and out there into it.

And then tomorrow—tomorrow, I’m on a plane, headed to Louisiana to get R.

I’ve looked forward to this summer for sixteen years. And it’s finally here.

(This post brought to you by my new summer-based determination to return to blogging. This is going to require some stumbling initial steps, I think, as I’m pretty sure I’ve entirely forgotten how to do this. But I promise more in the coming days, and even a return to actual intellectual content.

Happy Mother’s Day, in the meantime.)

Just grading. Classes ended Wednesday, senior grades are due today, and graduation’s in a little over a week. I’ve been completely buried under a big pile of end of semester work for the last several weeks, and I’m just now beginning to see a bit of daylight around the edges. Unfortunately, once I emerge from the grading, I’ve got two desperately pressing projects that have to be attended to—one due June 1, which I’ve only barely begun—before I can really return to the kind of thinking and writing I want to be doing.

Soon, though. That much, I’m feeling optimistic about.