← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

Snapshots from Home

UD‘s been having rather trying summers lately.

True, she doesn’t teach during the summer, which means that her reading and writing time is her own. This fact alone makes her summers enviable from the point of view of most people, who have to go to workplaces.

On the other hand, last summer, as she prepared to go to her houselet in the hills of upstate NY, Righthaven came calling. No traditional birthday dinner for UD at Woodstock’s Bear Cafe. She had to stay home and deal with that.

This summer, which was going to involve a variation on the Bear Cafe birthday — an event at Peter Galbraith’s house in Vermont was planned — is also messed up, because she’s having surgery mid-August. Nothing scary, but she’ll need a few weeks recovery, etc.

Mr UD came up with the idea of their taking a little trip the week before the surgery, so today they drive to a bed and breakfast in Luray Virginia, where they will explore caves (this will impress you). UD will of course blog throughout the week.

**********************************

Longtime readers know that Les UDs – for reasons of Soltan family history – own a fifty-acre snail farm in Latgale, Latvia, not far from the town of Rezekne. (“It’s not a snail farm,” Mr UD just said, and indeed no snail farming goes on there; but someone imported snails to the property a long time ago, and they’re crawling all over the place, and someday maybe we’ll farm them, so I call it our Latvian snail farm.)

Time and priorities being what they are, UD has never spent a summer, or any other season, on the snail farm, but there’s a story in today’s news that reminds her she should visit the region.

Vilnius, Lithuania is a couple of hours away from the snails, and its mayor the other day took an armored vehicle and crushed a car illegally parked in a bicycles only lane.

Margaret Soltan, August 3, 2011 6:45AM
Posted in: snapshots from home

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=31797

2 Responses to “Snapshots from Home”

  1. Joseph P. Fisher Says:

    Speaking of breakfast, enjoy the fried eggs in the Luray Caverns. You’ll see what I mean.

  2. University Diaries » As UD mentioned … Says:

    […] here, she goes in for some surgery tomorrow. She thanks her readers for their kind […]

Comment on this Entry

UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte

Archives

Categories