Saturday, September 30, 2006

Missed a day - ah, crap.

Ok, I went out last night, I was meant to be 'popping' in to see some friends, and ended up staying til midnight and drinking far too much wine. Sarah and Phil, it's all your fault my blog wasn't written. As penance, I'm saying three Hail Mary's and writing the blog twice today. This will never happen again, the very saying of which means, of course, that it will.

Thanks to the brilliant Colleen for her post recommending Nancy Springer's The Case of the Missing Marquess, featuring Sherlock Holmes younger sister, Enola Holmes. I've looked for it at my library and on Hampshire's library catalogue, but neither of them have it - soooooooooooo, my paying it forward for today is that I've bought the book from Amazon and I'll donate it to the library when I've read it. I feel better already.

I've added Colleen's blog, 'Chasing Ray' (she means Bradbury) to my list of links to the right so have a look at her blog for some great book reviews and articles not only on all things reading and writing, but for some reluctant postings on politics, too. I was heartened in lots of sense by Colleen's response to the changes going through in American law right now , in relation to the so-called war on terror (I mean, if they were serious about it, they'd stop Hollywood releasing movies like Saw and Creep and bang Stephen King up for starters. No. Wait. That's horror. Sorry, my mistake). The site is well worth adding to your Favourites.

My plans for the day have been firmly shafted, and not in the good way. I think I have to face the facts that:

i) The plans I make are unrealistic
ii) I procrastinate wildly about any work that takes place in my own home
iii) It is utterly unacceptable to spend an hour playing Snake II on my mobile phone instead of doing real work

It's 5 o'clock. The only thing that I've achieved so far has been this blog, which I am very pleased with. Next on my list is two hours of data entry for my work on the Naval Museum exhibition, Chasing Freedom (what a great name that is) - transferring descriptions of all the material that I've identified in the Parliamentary Papers so far onto a database and identifying which parts of the exhibition that the material will be most relevant to. Not the most riveting of tasks, but a great way to become familiar with the subject and the material itself.

After that, I'm going to check out a couple of websites that my boss at the Naval Museum has recommended on the slave trade past and present and maybe do some more reading around the subject from some library books borrowed specifically for the purpose. Then I'm back here for the next thrilling installment of The Daily! Tonight, I plan to treat myself to a little downtime watching The Man Who Loved Sherlock Holmes, a documentary by the BBC about Richard Lancelyn Green, who, of course famously bequested the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection to Portsmouth, and which the city accepted after his death in 2004.

If you haven't heard of the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, you still have a couple of weeks to get down to Portsmouth City Museum to view The Case of the Portsmouth Doctor, an exhibition about SirArthur Conan Doyle and his most famous character, and an amazing preview of some of the items in this collection. You can find out more about it at: http://www.portsmouthmuseums.co.uk/
http://www.conandoylecollection.co.uk/

The Exhibition closes on 15th October 2006.

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