All the Frills: Workspace

I surprisingly don’t often work at an actual desk. I’d say on average I spend about 3-4 hours a day pursuing research, working on my article or book project, and pursuing other history-based endeavours. But I usually just grab my laptop and set up shop wherever seems coziest and most conducive to work in the moment. Sometimes the couch, sometimes the kitchen counter. But I have set up a little functional work space for myself in our new house – it’s big advantages are lots of natural light and a very large table (which becomes pretty essential because I’m usually dealing with about 20+ books, photo copies of articles, and digital reproduction print outs of primary sources at the same time.

And when I say “digital reproductions”, I mean the image below. Basically photographs I took, page by painstaking page, of books and papers from my last research trip to the archives. Things I wasn’t directly interested in studying at the time but that I thought I might want to have a look at later. And this doesn’t even include the stuff I had professionally copied for me which all now lives in a very overstuffed filing cabinet. Basically I definitely need this larger workspace!

Weekend Reading:

• In honour of Thanksgiving, have you ever read Awkward Family Photos' "Marney Letter"? I highly recommend you check it out. And this year they've posted a video interview with her in which she explains her "beef with tinfoil."
  
  
• So apparently there are a fair number of bags of vomit littering the moon.
  
  
• This lady was awesome. Who doesn’t love a Spanish grandee? And she had some Stuart blood (“pretenders” to the British throne dating from the 1688 Glorious Revolution). That makes me love her all the more.
  
  
• The headline to this story really makes me giggle. And the story itself is pretty good.
  
  
• Ah, the seedy word of academic publishing. I get emails asking me to “publish” with various journals pretty frequently and so I really love this.
  
  
• Disney characters who are terrible, terrible beings. Some of these are pretty humourous.
  
  
• This is a really delightful (and funny) piece about one woman’s letters to celebrities…and those who responded.