The Return

My parents' deck in Missoula, Montana 

March! I last posted in March! That's mind-blowing. So much has happened. I moved into my new apartment and unpacked my gear in my snazzy new home office (pictures forthcoming). I had a lovely fruitful summer captioning classes for medical school, art school, architecture school, a dental school admissions test prep class, and even two action-packed days at the United Nations. I also did a ton of medical journal transcription and captioned a few great plays, like Measure for Measure at Shakespeare in the Park. And, of course, as always, I captioned That Keith Wann Show every Wednesday night at 8:00 p.m. EST. I also spent the summer polishing up my Python programming skills by taking some classes from Codelesson and rallying support behind the scenes for the next exciting phase of The Plover Project. Now it's the end of August, and my regular fall semester CART schedule starts in just a few hours. It was supposed to start yesterday, but the storm postponed it by a day. It's so strange to think that my working-at-home days are done for now, and I'm going to be almost entirely onsite (at two or possibly three different colleges) until December.

There was so much I wanted to get done this summer! Blogging, writing articles for StenoKnight.com, improving my ASL skills (I've been on hiatus since January, but I'm planning to start up again in a month), all sorts of important and improving activities. But when I wasn't working or doing Python homework, I found myself mostly doing fun stuff instead. Hanging out on Turntable.fm (I'm addicted to the "Classical of Any Kind" room); working out with EA Sports Active on my new Wii; having picnics with my partner in Fort Tryon Park; floating down the Clarkfork River in Montana for my brother's birthday; reading tons of ebooks on my Droid 2; and generally having a delightfully mellow and delightful time of it. So I wasn't quite as active on the internet as I might have been, but I'm going back to work feeling happy and refreshed. My schedule still isn't completely nailed down yet -- a common hazard of CART providers, though worse this year than ever -- but once it is, I'm going to go to that list of blog topics I drew up a few weeks ago ("How to CART a Latin class"; "The Guild System versus the Firm System in the Economics of Captioning"; "Why a 4G modem is a Walkaround Captioner's Best Friend"; "What Do You Do With a 2-Pound Roll of Gaffers Tape?"; et cetera) and try to whittle down some of the backlog. The summer can't last forever, y'know. It's time to get down to business.

A bench overlooking the Clarkfork River