2026 Summer session: Week 14

 Hello everyone!

We’ve reached the inevitable end of the session! It kind of flew by as many of them do… Thank you for joining us here and chatting, and for the empathy, encouragement, commiseration, and joy you’ve shares. Thanks for humouring me with the intentions, I enjoyed that! Thank you for sustaining this community, it is a lovely little corner of the interwebz and I love that you keep coming back!

Picture this week is of local peaches and strawberries, none of which are from anywhere near my garden… I am a terrible gardener who loves the idea of gardening… The total sum of the fruit/vegetable things that came out of the garden this year is as follows: one green pepper (my daughter it); very sparse crop of sour cherries (a big fat happy raccoon ate those, we caught her in the tree a few nights in a row, she just looked at us and I’m pretty sure flipped off the cats who were staring…); zero raspberries (not sure who ate those but maybe next year?); and four pods of sweet peas (I thought of eating them but then picked them too late so now they are seeds I guess?)… But, I did enjoy the process most of the time, so it was worth it. Maybe that is the lesson…  

So, on to enjoying our proverbial harvest we planned at the beginning of the year with our goals and intentions!

 

Last week’s goals below:

DEH

- get back into a routine (for exercise; morning stuff; evening winding down)
- finish the most recently requested set of revisions to W essay & send it off
- one hour each reading for next project and working on M festschrift essay
- probably more editorial stuff b/c co-editor has gone AWOL again
- write to some friends

JaneB

SELF-CARE:
* 4x20 intentional movement, 3 x making, 2 x small things with people, reading every day
* update the tasting menu and do at least one thing a day
* take the time to make nice attractive meals that are not just "the usual" a couple of days
HOME AND ENVIRONMENT:
* 75% of chores
* make more progress on the Living Room Project
* do all the personal finance tasks on the summer list
TEACHING AND ADMIN:
* finalise comments on the timetable release (due this Friday so can't wait til next week)
* one high speed email triage (some missing resits, ongoing student support stuff)
* set up new teaching bullet journal/daily notebook (fun because it involves nice things like washi tape and writing in all the headings in nice writing, NOT working!)
RESEARCH: nothing
Together those things should take no more than 2 hours

 Julie

1. Catch up on emails - lot of teaching prep, urggh.
2. Start on revisions to one article.
3. Try to spend some time on Big Article: get back into writing mode.
4. Teaching prep: write short introductory paragraph for first-year module, set up meeting for first week of September, chase difficult colleagues.
5. House/life admin: post-holiday laundry, financial stuff, thank you gift for friends whose house we borrowed in Toronto, nephew's birthday present, take son for MRI scan (not serious, physio is just trying to figure out why he has shin pain).
6. Self-care/fun: get back to running, be outside in the garden as much as possible, read, carry on the cross stitch I started on holiday.

heu mihi

Beach goals!

Susan

1. Look at manuscripts that might be helpful
2. Start thinking through plenary talk in November
3. Logistics for trip to archive next week
4. Book travel and hotels for research trip at end of month.
5. Enjoy time with friends and colleagues
6. Keep reading

Daisy

Work on dossier and make actual progress
New student chapters
Major grant task
Make a term schedule and plan for research and writing

  

SESSION GOALS

DEH

Intention: divide and conquer!

Complete 2 conference papers and 1 Festschrift essay,

Revise 2 syllabuses for fall classes

Stay in shape

Go on 3 trips with my husband

Take care of necessary house and personal maintenance

Deal with special-issue editing tasks

Urgently finish way overdue essay

 Daisy

Intention: breathe

One new first-author paper ready to submit
One student paper ready to submit
Get reasonable start on new project
Help student finish up thesis work
Regular exercise, and some kayaking
Trip with kid

ADDED GOAL do promotion dossier for full

 JaneB

Intention: life and work kintsugi

SELF-CARE:
regular intentional movement, making, doing small things with other people and reading for pleasure. I want to do all these things an appropriate number of times a week. I also want to explore a wider range of kinds of making over the summer, and I have an aim of having a more habitual practice in all these areas by the time we start back with students.
HOME AND ENVIRONMENT: regular chore habits, plus working on the living room (shelf-box-sofa project), working on clothing storage/management, and working on my finances.

TEACHING AND ADMIN: it is summer, but...
* I need to rewrite my final year honours module to fit into a different trimester (and fit around the honours project drama - modern students canNOT seem to work on anything else around the few weeks before the project is due, and I'm leaning into that because there's no point fighting it any more)
* I have a lot of minor tweaks to do to my other teaching (spread across four modules)
* I WANT to work through the practicals from another colleagues modules - they teach GIS mapping, and I want to be up to date on how they are teaching it so that I can better support my students (and know what I can expect from them so push them to deliver on it in assignments - most assignments should have a map included, and this is one of the tools we can ask them to use).
* I'm on a "task and finish" group (i.e. co-producing a report for Faculty) which might or might not involve a lot of work
* There will be extra work around trying to show we are taking the current recruitment crisis seriously (so much drama and stress and other people not so much dropping balls as yeeting them into orbit or dropping them into random abysses), but I don't know what will be my part. I'll roll that in with getting settled in to my new admin role
* I also want to get one of my MSc by Research students completely done (and working on publishing her work) and the other much closer to submission than they are now
RESEARCH:
As ever, balls in the air!
* contribute to governmental advice reports
* keep up contributions to Big Project (which is doing my head in because, too many people and too little clarity and organisation)
* progress at least three writing projects from a list substantially

 Julie

Intention: be more focused

1. Research/writing
i) Finish 30,000 word chapter asap and get irritating editor off my back. (I have kept to deadlines, he keeps deciding I need to add stuff.)
ii) Have a full draft of Big Article for people to read and comment on. This is top priority.
iii) Make some progress on a grant application, but this is lowest priority.
2. Teaching & teaching-related
i) Preparation for new team-taught module next year.
ii) Sign off final corrections on a PhD.
iii) Meetings with students about final-year dissertations for next year.
3. Life admin/house
i) Finalise summer travel
ii) Get a standing desk & proper adjustable chair.
iii) New chair for reading corner in spare room.
iv) Persuade kids to declutter their rooms?
v) Clear more garage space?
4. Self-care/fun
i) Exercise: run at least 3 x week when at home, find weights and/or pilates class
ii) Travel and meet ups with friends.
iii) Read, preferably in garden.
iv) Journal, also preferably in garden.
v) More creative stuff

 Heu mihi

1. Writing for fun: Get to a point with a (creative?) project where it will be easy-ish to sustain going into the school year. In an ideal world, this would mean about 40k of a messy draft, but I'm not fixing a number on it.
2. New research: Read some primary sources to find another topic for a case study. (I have an idea for a very different kind of book that I might enjoy working on.)
3. Existing research: Complete and submit festschrift, which includes writing the introduction.
4. Home: Annual deep cleaning stuff (garage, windows), clean out computer files, get patch of ceiling fixed, scrub or otherwise deal with the stupid popcorn finish on the bathroom ceiling
5. Crafts: Finish knitting shawl, start sweater, anniversary book, new journal?
6. Italian: Make my way through a substantial part of this rather more difficult (and very long) novel that I've started
7. Habits: Add some actual sitting, maintain exercise
8. TLQ: Check in on Mondays at least 75% of the time!

 Susan

Intention: welcome new adventures
Teaching and admin:
1. Finish my time as graduate chair without leaving too many unfinished tasks
Research:
2. I am expecting to spend much of the summer dealing with copyedits of Big collaboration (a collection of 30 essays on my historical period I am coediting). We have been told that we'll start getting copyedits in early June.
3. Keep up with research on Rest of My Life project, especially preparing for the keynote I'm giving at a major conference in November

 

Have a marvelous few weeks before term starts and we gather for the next iteration! Thank you to Dame Eleanor for offering to host, I got a sneak preview of the planned theme and I’m very much looking forward to the creative possibilities in there!