Random bullets of checking in

• Travel + intense work = blog neglect. I've missed reading blogs and missed writing in this one, so I hope to get back to both.
• Some nice professional affirmation recently, which is about as specific as I can be here.  But you know how good it feels when you are keeping your head down and slogging away for a long period of time, and then you lift your head up to tell someone your ideas, and that person thinks they're good? It was exactly that. 
• The admin stuff has been intensely stressful at times but overall tolerable and even satisfying, now that I'm getting the hang of it.  A bonus lesson: if person X wants something but chooses to express it not to me but to a third party, who then tells me, I completely ignore it.  If you're not talking to me, I'm not listening. If you don't want to ask me to fix it, go be unhappy someplace else.
• I'm on the trail of an "undiscovered" author whose work fits perfectly with a writing project. Searching, reading, learning more, and writing is so exciting that I barely want to quit to eat, teach, or do other work.
• Still working on the Laocoon manuscript, which--not to mix metaphors or anything--I am convinced unravels itself at night like Penelope's weaving. 
• Oh, and I've been following with intense interest the negotiation nightmare that Flavia writes about.  The sum total of one of my job negotiations was this: "Here is what we can pay, and we can't go above it." Me. "Okay." Obviously, I want and need to know how negotiations really work.