Welcome!

Hi everyone (assuming that one person, let alone several, will read this =D)!

Welcome to my blog!  Rather than typing long and varied versions of e-mails to people keeping them updated, I've decided to create this blog as a one-stop-shop for anyone who wants to know what I'm up to.

Some of "what I'm up to" isn't that exciting, but this coming week definitely is.  It's SPRING BREAK!  And I will be spending this particular Spring Break doing archival research for my M.A. thesis in Pamplona, Spain!

Okay, so blogging may or may not be a condition of the grant that's supporting my trip.  But there are also several reasons I wanted to do this anyway.

First, as I mentioned above, it's more economical than sending out differing versions of a long e-mail each day describing my findings.  Different people are interested in hearing about different things.  My friend Amanda and my undergraduate advisor Lu Ann might want to hear about a unique handwriting problem I was able to solve or strange word I was able to translate or how our friends in Pamplona are doing.  My parents might want to hear about exactly what this trip is doing for my thesis and why it's important.  My friend Ben will want to know what the food's like, and whether or not (as of Wednesday) I'll actually be able to abstain from eating meat for Lent!

Second, I have found myself going back to my archived e-mails from my first trip to the Pamplona archives a year ago.  It's been useful for me as I begin writing the actual text of this M.A. thesis to go back and actually recall what I was thinking about these sources at the time I was immersed in them.  Even I don't have that good a memory that I can just call up the emotions I felt and ideas I was getting then-- it's good to have something other than dead transcriptions to go back to.

Finally, there's a chance that some people I wouldn't even think to e-mail might be interested in this ongoing problem: not only about early modern Spanish attitudes toward clockmakers, but the problem of actually doing archival research, the problem of actually writing a Master's thesis, the problem of actually convincing people (even sympathetic people in the same field) that my work means something.  With this blog available to anyone who cares to look, that information can reach more people than it would if I was directly targeting e-mails.

Some of the goals of this trip (and of the project it's supporting) are quite heady.  I am, after all, trying to get a sense of the mentalités of people who lived over 300 years ago.  But the goals of this blog are pretty straightforward: keep people informed, get my thoughts out of my head and into a reviewable medium, and pontificate endlessly (in the literal sense of "building bridges").

I hope to post at least once a day, and judging by the fact that this entry has taken a paltry fifteen minutes to compose gives me high hopes for the meeting of this goal.

Thank you, everyone, for reading!  To you unsuspecting people who stumbled into this cloud of the blogosphere expecting to breathe the sweet fragrance of coherence or drink the sweet nectar of profundity, my apologies for the crushing disappointment this must be.

Dominus vobiscum!
-A