Pan Boiling on the Hob

Had a great day on Friday at the 'Ancient Languages Taster Day' at the University of Liverpool on Friday. Got there slightly late as the train decided it had to terminate at Manchester Piccadilly rather than continue on to Liverpool Lime Street, which meant an annoying unscheduled half-hour wait until a connecting train could make up the rest of the journey. Arriving at last, I jumped into a taxi and managed to miss only the first few minutes of the Hieroglyphics lecture. After coffee (during which I got chatting to two other mature students) we continued with Sumerian/Akkadian and after lunch I sat in on the talk on Coptic. After a valedictory glass of wine, I walked back down to the town centre, calling in at the RC cathedral and a fabulous bookshop called (I think) Reid's Up the Hill (very much like Shakespeare & Co in Paris, an identification that the owner seemed to like very much indeed!). Once I got over my initial and habitual unease of being out and about, I enjoyed the whole day very much indeed and decided I should really tackle learning Coptic. Having some Greek seemed to make it quite feasible, so I've got a book from Amazon Coptic in 20 Lessons to get me started. As usual, it will be a bit of a problem fitting it in: I generally manage to over-schedule my day, and I've already decided that I need to revisit the consciousness studies and their applicability to linguistics. God knows when I'm going to fit it all in! I find micro-managment the best way - divide the day into 15 minute slots so that at any given moment I can cram in some vocabulary or the reading of a specific article.
However, today has been reasonably successful thus far: by 8.30am I had fed the dog, put on a load of washing and cooked tonight's ragu sauce for the pasta (a big pot of it that can be transformed into pastitsio or lasagne and chilli for two other meals) and was in the pool at the gym where I swam for half an hour and steamed for ten minutes. I washed my hair in the showers, so that's done, and called in at the shops on the way home to pick up salad-y stuff and croissants. At home I turned the laptop on (in my 'satellite' study, in the bedroom, because it's half-term), hung up the laundry, put the guinea-pig out in his hutch, sorted the recycling for putting out and made a skinny latte and grabbed a croissant. I managed to sit down at the computer by half-ten, but various annoying admin tasks (freeing up disk-space in my uni email allotment) meant that I actually didn't get down to work until eleven. I put in a good couple of hours before lunch - I've learnt that I cannot function efficiently without regular food - and after walking the dog, another good couple of hours. It was a bit bitty today, and I didn't quite manage the golden 714 words required.
I spent a lot of time chasing up a reference to a fragmentary piece of text by the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus which apparently only exists embedded in Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, and generally rooting through various etymologies but, all in all, I stopped at a good place to stop, with some reasonable writing under my belt for the day. Tomorrow, I'll probably be equally late in starting as I think that Daughter #2 and the Bouncing Bubba intend meeting me for a coffee after my gym (shoulders and biceps) and swim session.
I decided I'd got a taste for the workshop thing and booked myself on a 'digital researcher' day at Durham just before the Classical Association Conference kicks off. I haven't really looked at train times yet, but I'm guessing it'll be another very early start!

Tea shortly after finishing this post, and there's my Tai Chi class at 7pm.
I had strongly considered kicking this last thing into touch but -hey! - what else'd I be doing. Actually, I'd be watching University Challenge and then The Beauty of Books on BBC4 at nine, but I'll set the recorder.
So when I'm going to fit in some Coptic is anyone's guess...or do some academic reading! Although I do have half an hour before I need to get the pasta on so......