It’s just past four in the morning, a time of day I try never to be awake. I’m not a person who usually has trouble sleeping, like ever, but now and then I get out of whack somehow and find myself tossing and turning all night. I went to bed at eleven-thirty and it felt like I only ever dozed, and fitfully at that, for a couple of hours before waking up for real at three. I stayed in bed for another hour, trying to will myself into slumber, but it just wasn’t happening. Unfortunately I have a long and busy day ahead of me with a trip to Uppsala this afternoon and a meeting of the Historical Association this evening, followed by a dinner, so I won’t be able to take a nap later on. Then tomorrow morning I’m flying back home, so I won’t be able to have a long lie-in then, either. Oh, woe.

Actually, I’m really looking forward to this trip, even if it will be a quick and hectic one. I haven’t been to Uppsala for more than two weeks, which is long enough that it feels like forever. Starting next week, I’ll have a pretty regular schedule of one week home, one week (Monday to Friday) in Uppsala, and it will be good to get into a routine. I’ve been feeling sort of shiftless lately and I really need to snap out of it because I’ve got things to do.

The most pressing of those things, at the moment, is to get some serious work done on writing the paper I’ll be presenting at a conference in Valencia, Spain in a couple of weeks (I still have a hard time believing this is part of my life now; it feels like some sort of Bizarro World). I’ve done all the research and got a reasonably good start on the paper, but I need to spend a few solid hours on getting it all together in a presentable fashion. I honestly had planned to have it finished long ago, but the depressing nature of the topic (social differentiation as illustrated by burial rituals, focusing on the case of the death of a clergyman’s daughter in 1768) has kept me away from it more than I’d like to admit.

What I haven’t been staying away from as much as I should is reading novels. I’m currently reading A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss, and it is SO good. The story is good and the writing is great and I can hardly put it down. The book is set in the eighteenth century and I’ve almost managed to convince myself that it’s work-related. If I were writing about finance in England, and if it weren’t historical fiction, I might be able to make a case for it, but alas, it’s nothing more than pure pleasure.