Monday, December 31, 2018

the annual year-end post

Some days I'm up early because of sleeping poorly. Today I'm up early because B. awoke me. The tire pressure light had gone on on her car, and since refilling it isn't in her skill set and she wouldn't have time on the way to work anyway, she needed me to clean out anything I needed from my car before she took that to work. Really, I'm going to have to start taking the cars in to the air station regularly, since tires need reflating long before they get to the warning-light stage.

So, visit to the gas station with free air is on my list of errands for the day, once the big light in the sky turns on. That's not enough of a trip to merit inclusion in my annual list of cities I've stayed in away from home:

Los Angeles, CA
Great Falls, MT
Dillon, MT
Salmon, ID
Missoula, MT
Butte, MT
Hillingdon, England
Oxford, England
Ashland, OR
Atlanta, GA
San Jose, CA
San Diego, CA
Seattle, WA

That comes to two conventions (Mythcon and Worldcon, both with B.), one convention planning session, two trips for concerts or plays (both also with B.), one trip for a museum exhibit (in England!), and two vacations for the heck of it. All my stays were in hotels except for Oxford, where I stayed in a rental house with a fiberglass shark embedded in the roof.

In writings, I co-edited another volume of the journal Tolkien Studies, and contributed a bibliography and part of "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies" therein. Elsewhere, I wrote a memorial appreciation of the work of Ursula K. Le Guin for Mythlore at the request of the editor, and published an essay on Tolkien's Smith of Wootton Major in a festschrift for Verlyn Flieger.

I had 38 concert reviews professionally published this year, probably a record, not counting two musical articles in the same venues and one CD review.

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