Putting stuff in order

Now that Christmas is over (and that I am now 34 years old), and a new year has started, I thought I would sign in again and use this blog as a place for me to organize myself and try to get going on work I need to do.

For instance, I've been contacted by a prominent national magazine which focuses on a particular religious fellowship to write a short article (or articles) for possible publication. I've sent one and I've been asked to write another.

I have to rewrite my musical analysis, again for possible publication (I've forgotten about this over the holidays). There is a blog entry from before Christmas that gets into this.

I am developing a proposal for some conferences in the spring; one proposal is due this week and another before the end of the month of January. I'm again going to explore Leslie Feist as a singer, but now as one who successfully employs melody which, for Roland Barthes, seems to be a key to "writing aloud," a bodily "exteriorization of discourse."

I was telling my wife that I mentioned my current research to a couple of my academic mentors, that is, applying Barthes' notions of pleasure of the text to the study of the singing voice in order to try to figure out how to discuss the singing voice and why we like "it." These two profs both said something to the effect of "good luck with that." She laughed.

At me.

In other news, the train has been ordered. My father was kind enough to buy me a couple of VIA train cars circa. 1970s, which I'm happy with. My sister gave me some money for a locomotive, so I bought the one below, and got the nice people at the store to install a DCC chip in it, so that it would be fully compatible with the Hornby DCC set I've ordered. She also thought of getting me an engineer's hat, which made me cry at Christmas.

I am thinking about picking up a Blu-Ray player, now that the format war is pretty much over. I am considering a PS3, simply because it has full Super Audio CD support, and it plays games, all for the same price as (or cheaper than) a BD player. Or a 400 disc DVD player. Or a dSLR. Anyway, it has to be a Sony product. I have Sony points and I've decided that I no longer wish to collect Sony points - I want to get cash back on credit card purchases instead. Now, if there was an Apple card, that would be another matter.

Here's the locomotive: