Moment of silence for Armistice Day, first.
Both darkforge and I were sick enough residually to stay home yesterday—he to catch up on dayjob without people coming in to talk with him, I to rest. It was very strange to be home without Reason, who was well and spent the usual hours at daycare. I found myself running around to tidy corners of our small condo that I can’t usually address while an interested toddler is following me around and pulling up on things or me to see what I’m doing. My filing cabinet is in Reason’s room because it was formerly our study and we had tetris-space to move only our desks into the front roo. Several fat inches of photocopied articles and book sections, previously stacked up or stuck into a box (yes, some of these were last used before we moved in 2006), have been filed alphabetically; stray pieces have been scanned on my slow, inexpensive A4 flatbed. O frabjous day.
This is at least faintly ridiculous.
I’ve now begun the slow process of wading through those file folders to add citations to Zotero so that I know exactly what I have. (Much was accumulated before I used any citation manager app; I began using Endnote at version 3, but a few of the photocopies predate Endnote’s existence, tyvm. I used to Just Know…and I am the sort of person who finds it quicker and more accurate to type up the bibliography and note citations for a piece than to prod a cit mgr app into producing them, which decreases incentive to put everything into a cit mgr.) It’ll be useful also to weed out the printouts and photocopies available via institutional site license in PDF form, and to grab those PDFs and recycle the paper, since I tend not to take notes on photocopied articles directly. I used to print PDFs because I had more drawer space than hard drive space, but no longer. And both those sorting tasks can be done with an awake toddler, fortunately. Then there’ll be room in the drawers again for photocopied book sections, which can stay paper, given the flatbed-ness of my scanner. (The feeder tends to mangle sheets and is best ignored.)
I am building momentum slowly again towards working on my own stuff, rather than frittering away time on various volunteer projects, because the pendulum has swung towards faint irritation about cost/benefit ratios. So far I’m not resigning from anything, but going through my old papers—especially dissertation notes and draft-fragments—has shown me usefully that I’ve long since outgrown my temporary dissertation-topic allergy. You know, the sense of ennui and nothing-to-say that kicks in sometimes after one has focused upon something and tried hard to squeeze words out of it for multiple consecutive years. That, coupled with the irritation, means I ought to let myself be a bit selfish intentionally when I sit down to work. Some of what I work on should be mine, ever again, eh? I say this periodically, and this time I mean it.
Excellent decision!