The weather is beautiful so Sara and I went to Brown County State Park last night with the intention of overnight camping. Unfortunately, it's tourist season in Southern Indiana (believe it or not) and even though they have over 400 campsites, all the non-electric ones were taken. We decided against paying 10 extra dollars and sleeping next to a bunch of RVs, so instead we went way down yonder to the paw-paw patch. For those who are not familiar with this fruit, the ones we were seeing were between about 1 and 4 inches long:



The flesh has a texture somewhere between a mango and an avocado (smooth and creamy, but moist and with some traces of fibers); it tastes very tropical, maybe like a guava or papaya (I forget which is which):



Then we sat for a while at one of the beautiful vistas from the top of the highest point in Southern Indiana. (Between 1000-1100 ft, if you're wondering.) So we had a nice time despite not staying overnight.

The semester has been really busy for me, and lest you call my bluff here, I must point out that I had to work pretty hard to have enough stuff done to go (not) camping. Between last semester and this, I quit the local choir I was in and I quit tutoring, but even with the irregular hours that tutoring required, I'm busier than I've been in the past. For one thing, I now teach five days a week. That's not such a change: last year I was writing four lesson plans a week (two for me and two for AIs) and teaching two hours twice a week, so it's just one more lesson plan a week and one more hour of teaching, but I'm writing most of my lesson plans from scratch this year.

In addition, my other job, working at the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature (CHMTL), takes ten hours a week, while tutoring maxed out at about 5. But it's an interesting job (and much more reliable: I don't have to hope the students actually show up, etc.). It feels kind of peaceful: it's on a remote floor of a building kind of on the edge of campus, and I just go into "my" office (not that they trust me with a key or anything, unfortunately) and go to work. Mostly I'm working on the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML), holding a large cup of tea, hunched over a Latin treatise and its transcription, correcting any errors in the transcription, but I've also started entering treatises into the Traités français sur la musique. It's not exactly packed full of excitement, but it's a good feeling when I figure something out. My best moment was when a Latin treatise said something along the lines of:

"...as Marcus Tullius says in de. re. pu."

(It was a little more obscure than that.) The guy who had transcribed the passage didn't know what this referred to, so he transcribed it literally with a question mark afterwards. But as I'm sure you know, Marcus Tullius Cicero's famous Somnium Scipionis is from Book 6 of his De re publica, and I was able to fill in the gap and expand the abbreviation.

...Okay, well, it was exciting to me.