The good news is that I’ve gotten my exercise today: after dragging the suitcase to the train station, and up and down the various flights of stairs between its entrance and the entrance to the airport, I was sent by the monitors to the far end of the airport to check in, only to find that in fact I needed the near end of the airport after all. And then, after the appointed wait, I walked the half-mile to the gate, only to find that my flight’s been delayed by an hour and a half, so I’ve now walked the half-mile back to the lounge.

The other good news is that my 4.5 hour layover in Houston is now something more like a 3 hour layover. (Though bizarrely the Continental website is saying we’ll only be 15 minutes late, which will be something of a feat!) And the other other good news is that I’ve still got room to spare, in the event of further delays.

And there’s plenty of coffee, and hot and cold running internet. So I guess it’s all good news from here.

I’m standing in the airport, after the usual delirious experience of waking up at 3.30 am to be ready for my 4.30 am cab. The flight I’m about to board, as usual, will take me to Houston, but then from there, I’m on first to Amsterdam and then to Trondheim, Norway, where I’m serving as first opponent on a dissertation defense. Last night, I went back into Jill’s archives to remind myself of what this process is like; it sounds like it ought to be a fascinating experience.

And that’s aside from the fact that it’s taking place in Norway. Unfortunately, given the time and the distance, I won’t be able to pop in on folks I know there, but I hope to see a little bit of the place.

And to relax some. Given that I just wrapped the draft of the book up on Friday, this trip is pretty much what constitutes my summer vacation, and I intend to make the most of it. I have a tiny bit of work with me, but 80% of the reading I have with me is for nothing but fun.

More from the other side.

Soon, at least.

It’s been a heck of a week: long flight into Boston on Monday, followed by looooong cab ride out to Norwood just after midnight Tuesday morning; phenomenal symposium on the future of everything Tuesday; train back up to Boston, followed by lunch with an editor, a glass of wine with a colleague, and dinner with a former student on Wednesday; the American Literature Association (which I’d link to, but man, they really need a new website, as this one doesn’t so much load as download — literally, it’s a bunch of Word documents) starting Thursday, including my own panel yesterday, sponsored by the Digital Americanists, on the peer review of digital scholarship. And, of course, a round of dinners and such with old friends.

It’s been amazing, but I’m exhausted, and looking forward to today’s long flights home, during which I hope to get the summer started, for real. Here’s wishing all of you a lovely Memorial Day weekend, and hoping that your summers begin well, as well…

Today marks the first time I’ve sat in the terminal waiting two and a half hours for the sun to melt the ice off the wings of my airplane, because my Southern California airport doesn’t need de-icing equipment.

I offered to go out there with a hairdryer, but they wouldn’t take me up on it.

And, of course, by the time we landed I had nine minutes to make my connection. On which the gate agent closed the door just as I ran up, and wouldn’t reopen it.

So now I’m in Houston, waiting for the next flight, which thank god and Fiorello LaGuardia is only an hour and a half later.

The whole thing makes me super happy that I woke R. up at 4 am to make sure I got to the airport on time.

Our twelve weeks in Paris have slid by alarmingly fast, and we’re deep in the thick of packing up for Thursday’s trip back to California. I’ve gotten myself past the initial dread, which was mostly about not wanting the utter freedom of being here to end, and am now really looking forward to a bunch of things about being home.

The process of getting there, perhaps, not so much. We’ve got a couple of days of packing and rearranging stuff to do here, followed by the usual joys of the trip itself. But on the other end of it, there will be our wonderful apartment, and our great friends, and space, and light.

And two pretty cool classes, I think. The start of the fall semester is likely to be pretty crazy — it usually is, and this year’s further crazified by a major committee I’m serving on, all of whose work needs to be done by mid-October (god help us) — so I’m hoping to get as much set up in the next couple of weeks as I can. Which means, to some extent, walking away from my project. But I’m hoping to arrange my schedule for the fall such that I touch base with it for at least a few minutes each day, just to remember where I am in it and what I’m up to.

For now, though, there’s just packing stuff, hauling stuff, saying our various goodbyes, and getting on the road. I’ll hope that there’s nothing of interest to report until we’re safely in California.

There are some things that I’m just not getting used to negotiating in French. The telephone, for instance, still gives me shivers when it rings, and not (or not just) due to my usual phonaphobia; without the visual cues of face-to-face conversation, it’s not only a lot harder for me to be sure I’m understanding what’s being said, but I’m also more certain that I sound like a dolt in the lulls when I try to remember the word I’m looking for.

But I just ran into a new, pretty unexpected one at the gym. R. and I joined a small gym a block and a half from here, determined to go home in better shape than we arrived (which, given the utter slugliness of my spring, wouldn’t be that hard). And we’ve been going quite regularly, which has been great both for sleep and for general morale.

Today, I climbed up onto the elliptical machine, and rather than just starting and letting the calorie calculator assume I’m whatever average weight is programmed into it, I thought I’d actually set up a program, so that the calorie count might be something a little closer to accurate. And though the machine is a brand that I haven’t used much, all was going well — up until the moment at which it asked me to input my weight in kilograms.

Suffice it to say that my dividing-by-2.2 skillz aren’t what they should be; I checked what I’d keyed into the machine once I got home, only to discover that I’d input a number that I haven’t seen on the scale since at least my mid-twenties, a number that falls entirely outside the realm of wishful thinking, bordering instead on downright unhealthy. I wish the machine had taken the opportunity to encourage me to go get a baguette or something.

I do like, however, that it asked me to enter the “puissance” with which I wanted to proceed.

The most amazing thing thus far about our return to Paris is the immediacy of our immersion; having landed yesterday at CDG, taxied to the apartment we’re renting this summer, unpacked, and ventured out for our first bière, we both felt as if the nine months since we were last here had simply evaporated. We’ve always been here. We never really left.

That said, we’re both a bit groggy with jet lag and general exhaustion. It’s now 3.12 am in California, and I’m not at all sure where my brain is. I’m trying to get back into the chapter that I spent the early part of the spring drafting, but I’m having a hard time right now telling whether the sentences make any sense.

The apartment, however, is fantastic, and the neighborhood amazing, and the arm and/or leg that it’s costing for us to be here will no doubt be worth it.

Now to stay awake for another ten hours.

That summer is here is pretty undeniable — in fact, unseasonably so: as we venture into graduation weekend, we’re beset by severe heat advisories and a serious fire in the mountains just to our north. All of that’s far more August than May, which might help explain some of the mild panic I feel; how can the summer feel this close to over even before it’s gotten started?

The rest of the panic, though, is pretty easily explicable: we’re leaving town for the entirety of the summer in six days, and the list of stuff I have to do before we go just keeps growing. I’m at the point now where I’m fairly confident it’ll all get done, but also beset by that peripheral sense that I’m forgetting something, that there’s some key thing that I’ll remember nine days from now, something only I can do, and in person at that.

Which is the point at which I tell myself to draw a deep breath, to burn that bridge when I come to it, and to keep my gaze fixed on what’s ahead: twelve weeks of writing in Paris. With that as a prospect, nothing else the summer can dish out can really be all that bad.

A nine-hour time zone change in one direction, followed two days later by a three-hour change back the other direction.

One apparently lost, and then merely destroyed suitcase. One two-and-a-half-hour airport delay.

Two days, fourteen interviews. Nine more tomorrow.

Ass? Kicked, thanks.

We left the flat this morning at 9, headed into the various queues that make up pretty much the entirety of the CDG experience. The taxi was fine, the airport was fine, the boarding was fine. And the first flight was fine: 10 hours, CDG to IAH, during which I ate some and read some and dozed some and generally pouted a lot.

The flight, it turns out, was our pilot’s last; upon his arrival at IAH, he was officially retired, after 29 years of flying for Continental (and some unspecified number of years in the USAF before that). It was really quite sweet — there were “a salute to your pilot!” flyers on each seat as we boarded, detailing his career, the flight service manager made an announcement early on congratulating the pilot on beginning his last flight (producing round of applause number one), and the pilot himself, as we began our descent, in addition to the usual weather and time of arrival announcements, thanked the Continental customers, the crew and the rest of his colleagues, and his family, several members of whom were on the flight (prompting round of applause number two). Just before touchdown, the flight service manager fired up the P.A. again to say, “okay, folks, here comes the captain’s final landing as the pilot of a commercial airliner,” which was followed by the absolute gentlest touch-down I think I’ve experienced (followed by round of applause number three). And then there was the end: it’s apparently an IAH tradition that, when a pilot retires, the plane is flanked and hosed down by two Houston firetrucks as it pulls into the gate. This, of course, produced the last round of applause, which rolled gradually down the length of the plane. It was pretty cool, and quite dramatic, and I did my best to squelch my kneejerk SoCal “my god, the water!” response.

We’ve got three more hours to kill in IAH, alas, and by the time we get to ONT, it’ll be after eight in the morning in Paris, almost a full 24 hours since heading out. The worst of it, though, is that just now, sitting here, I got the “TripNotes” email from Continental about the flight that I’m taking on Friday, the very thought of which just makes me want to curl up in a small ball and exercise every ounce of my earthly rights as a being protected by the law of gravity.