My morning run began somewhat woodenly, stiff from a day of not having run nor having walked as much as usual on a Friday. I gradually got looser, and then encountered comically direct, firm headwinds. When I got home, though, it turned out that I’d arrived in my second-best time of the year. You can never tell (or perhaps you can, but I can’t). Coffee, hot breakfast, Morning Prayer at home, some time reading John Darnielle’s This Year as I practise building up my focused reading muscles, shower, and here to blog.
Last night I did the necessary and processed The Last Essay through a manuscript submission system. The developers of these systems evidently hate authors, because the process entails such painfully non-academic-writing considerations, and the interface reminds me of the days when the very notion of a graphical user interface was a novelty. Near the end, I encountered a headachey problem that rose from the fact that I do not, and will not, use Microsoft Word (though I am content to export to and submit in Word .docx format). Apparently some editing processes just don’t register when done by LibreOffice, Pages, or Mellel, and the submission interface kept showing me text that had been deleted as strike-through-ed. At that point I decided just to forge ahead and send the final version to the editor themself. But that’s dome now.
The replacement computer is ordered and should arrive Monday. And I registered for this year’s Bannister Mile this morning, trusting that I won’t spend the day before and the day of bedridden (as I did last year, save for the time it took me to get to Oxford, run the mile, and get back to Abingdon). So it goes on and then it goes around again, it goes on again….
[Whoops! It turns out the MBA arrived today, not Monday. Now I’m struggling to figure out how to transfer data from old to new when the old unit’s screen is useless (remembering that Migration Assistant is incompatible with screen sharing to my iPad).]