No maps for these territories

I have been editing so long that I may have forgotten how to write.

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My weekend, so far, has been lovely. It’s a warm day outside, nearly perfect, deep blue sky; inside it’s cool with the A/C cranked up and rice cooking on the stove. I’ve been having productive mornings since I got back, waking up at six (but going to bed at 8!) and working until 9 or so, when I start puttering around the house. Today, copyediting for a few hours, a long bath whilst reading the New Yorker, a big breakfast of blackberries and coffee and toast and eggs (all gotten at the farmer’s market yesterday), a lazy walk to the grocery store. This is the way weekends should be.

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Sometimes when I come home from long or culturally jarring trips I am excited about leaving again almost immediately; the experience only fuels my desire to be somewhere else. That long summer I spent in Eastern Europe a couple of years ago, it only took a week or two before I felt like traveling again. This time, not so much; I am happy to be home, really happy, in an appreciative way of being able to dress the way I like and not be beset upon by tour operators, in a way that is mostly new to me. Perhaps I have done this to myself, though; the conference work was hanging over my head and I am happy to be done with it, and I have also been promising myself this upcoming month at home as a chance to rest and catch up and do things all summer now. Perhaps I have simply talked myself into the joys of domesticity, and am now enjoying the result.

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I am feeling intensely relaxed, with the kind of energy that you only get from recovering from sickness, with the added boost of energy at odd times from the jetlag. I still have plenty of work to do; big projects aren’t done and new ones are looming; there is work I’d like to do with some big ideas about libraries and how we work with collaborative peer-production systems, not least my favorite project. Wikimania 2010 needs to be planned, and I have managed to volunteer myself to write a report about this one. There are other things as well; this summer at work promises to be the Summer of Collection Development (aka weeding my collections), and there’s some outreach ideas I want to poke at. Not to mention the bigger things, that I have been persistently putting off: getting involved in this community; exercising, for once (I want a new bike!); etc. etc.

And then there’s the writing: perhaps you want to hear what the Biblioteca Alexandrina is like, or how the Sphinx is surprisingly small compared to everything around it, or my ill-informed observations on kids in libraries.

Not to mention, I’ve been promising myself some time to work on the “house and grounds” (my three-room apartment and postage stamp yard still still seem to get the better of me on a regular basis); I have visitors next weekend and possibly in the future; and so on and so forth. Life is good, though; I’m going to try to hang on to this energy and this appreciation as long as I can.