Cwino, Cwino, Cwino

I'm feeling much better today, thank you for asking. As of Friday, I can remove my own boots! Another example: As of Friday, I don't need to be picked up out of bed "like a little rag doll" (Kilt Boy's words, not mine). (Technically, I've been able to get myself out of bed every day except the day I fell, but it was, and still is, much less painful to have help.) Today, however, is the first day that I haven't had the pain in the back of my mind all the time. Trying to get comfortable in bed remains one of the most difficult things (really, it's a lost cause), as does opening heavy doors and picking things off the ground, but today is the first day since Friday that I've seen real improvement.

The cold of winter, however, is always hard on my back as my muscles tense up in a sad attempt to stay warm, so being outside is quite difficult, as my poor bruised* muscles will start having little spasms. Today's low is supposed to be -13C, and with yesterday's rain having frozen on the sidewalks, I was told that even if I had wanted to go into campus from where I'm catsitting, I would have been strictly forbidden from doing so. This means that today's attempt at productivity involves going through bibliographies from the few sources I have for my Social History paper, looking them up on the library catalog, and then noting their call numbers for reference when I return to campus.

This may be the most mind-numbing task I have yet performed under the guise of Humanities research. It's mindless data entry, as (this is really good news and I shouldn't be complaining) so far every compilation of British charters I have wanted to look at has, indeed, been in the library system... so I haven't even had the excitement of the Inter Library Loan! (It will come, however, with the secondary sources, which are far more specifically Welsh in scope.)

I am, of course, doing all this because I am assiduously procrastinating on the next task for my other paper, which is to read The Book of Margery Kempe. I do not think that Margery Kempe is a transgressive,** proto-feminist laywoman. I think that, were she living today, she would be one of those little church ladies with sixteen pamphlets on Our Lady of Fatima and a rosary in a ziploc bag*** who write twenty-paged single-spaced letters to the archbishop about liturgical discrepancies. She'd probably pass out monthly handouts about the latest from Medjugorje.****

Other bad news: KB got a phone call from his credit card company yesterday, saying that they'd flagged some unusual activity. We rolled our eyes and assumed it was our tickets to Chicago, although it had been some time since that purchase. No such luck, however; it was indeed credit card fraud, which is unnerving even if the company is removing those purchases from his balance.

In entirely different news, for Nemo and Caelius: On Sunday, when fraternizing with the Anglicans (including the one I date) at Smokey Tom's, I heard a sermon from, and shook the hand of, Victoria Matthews, former Bishop of Edmonton and the first female bishop in Canada.

Finally, you know you're over-educated when:
Our resident ex-Marine ABD student: "I love you. Platonically! Oh, shoot, no, I've read too much Plato to say that."

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* On the "adding insult to injury" front, even though there's bruising somewhere down there, it is so far below the skin it is entirely invisible.
** KB would like a twenty-year moratorium on the use of Margery Kempe as a source for studies on lay piety. Personally, I just want a moratorium on the use of the word "transgressive".
*** There is a little old woman at the Oratory, where I attend mass, who has a mantilla depicting OLOF appearing to the children IN THE LACE. Every time I think of it, I think of John Zmirak, author of The Bad Catholic's Guide to Good Living: "if it were classy, we'd suspect something Anglican was going on."
**** *shudder*