This week I had class scheduled for yesterday and today, so I’d planned to fly down to Uppsala on Sunday evening. My plane was supposed to take off at 6:30, which should have gotten me to my hotel around 8:30, giving me plenty of time to settle in and get rested up before my 9:00 class. Instead, some sort of problem with the plane delayed our take-off for four-and-a-half hours, and I didn’t get to bed until nearly two in the morning. That made my 7-o’clock wake-up pretty rough, but after yesterday’s seminar the scheduling gods were on my side and I didn’t have anything more on my calendar until after lunch today. Between the nap I took yesterday afternoon and the long lie-in I had this morning, I’m feeling pretty well rested.

I’ll get home tonight around eleven and I’m hoping to get to bed as soon as possible after that, since I’m right back on mom duty tomorrow morning. I’ve got busy days ahead of me through to the weekend, including another whirlwind trip to Uppsala Friday afternoon. It will be another overnight, but I’m heading home early Saturday morning, which will give me most of the weekend for downtime. Even better, I don’t have another trip scheduled until the first of October. I’ve got plenty of reading to do between now and then, but at least I can do it in the comfort of my own home (maybe not always the best environment for getting schoolwork done, but at least the coffee is cheap and plentiful and the company is good).

In addition to the assigned reading — on the manifestation of power and the cultural development of authority in early modern northern Europe — I’ve got to try to find a good overview of Swedish history to fill in the not-inconsiderable gaps in my knowledge. It turns out that I know little more than Vikings/Lutherans/Socialists, and that’s not going to get me very far in this program. I do know more about the regions outside Scandinavia, but I’m pretty rusty there as well, given the many, many years that have passed since my undergraduate studies. One of my classmates was blown away when I told him I’d completed my bachelor’s degree in 1995; he remembers 1995 as the year he turned eight. Egad.