InBiStWriMo Update

I’m not sure how to count this, but although I sat down to further my standing in the International Biblical Studies Writing Month project, I ended up producing negative results. Shortly after I opened the file I was working on, I got an email message from Chuck Campbell about the lectionary essays I submitted last fall; they needed a final going-over, and would I please trim them by several words each? Since I ordinarily write in a very compact style (the outcome of a writing process that constantly poses the question, “What work is this phrase doing for you?”), there’s rarely any fluff that would make an obvious candidate for omission. Taking out twenty words here, forty words there, fifty words in another essay, requires some reweaving of the fabric of the piece.
 
So I spent my day raveling and reweaving, raveling and reweaving, and ended up a hundred words in the hole. Now, I also put about two hundred words into the sermon file I was working on, but I had written those on scrap paper over the weekend (along with my thank-you notes, which are in the mail now) (the thank-yous aren’t on scrap paper, they’re o nicely printed cards featuring a tinted woodcut of Matthew the Evangelist; making the cards was part of the delay). So I don’t think the sermon-words count for yesterday’s accomplishment total.
 
Today I have to pick up Margaret at the Philadelphia airport after her triumphant appearance at the Society of Christian Ethics meeting and her visit chez Sessum, drop off some clothes to be dry cleaned, push laundry through the washing/drying process, and write and read some (I’ve realized that part of my writing block comes from not reading enough). If I don’t hit max wordcount today, I hope I can at least hit min word-reading.
 
(Judy is having trouble leaving comments; I don’t quite know what’s up with that, as Derek seems to have been able to comment successfully. I’m getting the same security message as Judy this morning. I hope this condition doesn’t persist, since I adopted WordPress largely for the commenting feature. If you have a comment to make, persevere!)
 
Alert! Cool Googlosity Feature! On a hunch, I just typed the carrier name and number of Margaret’s plane flight into the Google search box, and Google correctly parsed that data and offered as the first search result a link to the actual status page for that flight — but on the search results page, it also listed the flight’s origin, destination, scheduled departure and arrival times, and its present status — right there atop Google results page one, no messing with airlines’ arcane “enter this data into that box and click the following agreements, and by the way what’s your credit card number, your flight club number, and an email address at which we can harass you for the rest of the internet’s lifetime.”