Yesterday (as this posts) was my fourteenth wedding anniversary. It having been a Tuesday, my wife and I knew that we’d not be able to do anything to commemorate the occasion on the day, itself. Both of us work, after all, and neither of us can afford to take the day right at that time. What we did, then, was to go out on the Saturday before. For a while, we had been looking at going out to check out some of the local wineries (the Texas Hill Country abounds in them) and breweries; on Saturday, we took the opportunity to do the latter, stopping off at a few places along Fitzhugh Road west of Austin.

The first stop along our short tour was Jester King Brewery. The approach to it was a bit rough, and the facility shows that it was assembled in stages. Still, the wood-fired pizza looked and smelled good (we ate before heading out), and the beers I had were tasty. Too, there was something of a festival atmosphere about the place, with its open fields, goats, and such, and we were advised by staff of an upcoming event to which we are like to go–taking our daughter with us, weather and circumstances permitting, since it sounds like something she might enjoy. (There were a number of kids of various ages running about the place and petting the goats, as well, so I think there’ll be enough to catch her interest.) It was well worth going to, and I do hope things work out such that we can find our way back over to the place.

The second stop was not far up the road: Beerburg. Getting to it from Jester King was fairly easy, and we decided to eat while we were on site. I’m glad we did; the food was excellent. The beans and rice that accompanied our meals were quite good, the former solid and the latter finely spiced. My wife had a quesadilla she described as the best she’d had, and I very much appreciated my shrimp tacos. The beers were a bit quirky (the mugwort brew, in particular), although, in the brewery’s defense, they had been advertised as being such. I can appreciate experimentation when I know it’s coming, and I’d be willing to taste some of their other trials–as long as I can get more of those tacos!

Afterward, we put in at Fitzhugh Brewing. If Jester King is a festival and Beerburg a wonky local pub, Fitzhugh Brewing is an HGTV home makeover. My wife identified it as evoking the Gaines’s Magnolia in Waco in terms of aesthetic, and she notes it as catering to a demographic in which neither she nor I partake. The beers were decent enough, as was the pretzel we split between us, but none of them were exceptional. It was something of a letdown after the earlier experiences; perhaps if we’d done things in a different order or visited at a different time, we’d’ve enjoyed it more fully.

The last stop on our tour wasn’t on Fitzhugh Road, as such, but the road it becomes as a driver follows it west; it turns to Pedernales Falls Road and then becomes FM 2766. Just off of the intersection of FMs 2766 and 3232, hard by Pedernales Falls State Park, is the Pedernales Falls Trading Post. My wife had long noted wanting to check it out, and I was happy to oblige her (if later than ought to have been the case). The venue offers a vanishingly small indoor space. There is ample outdoor seating, however, and a grill that gives off the most succulent smells as it cooks burgers to go along with pulls from a scant few taps worked by a singularly jovial barman. It’s a hole-in-the-wall kind of place, perfect for a quiet couple of beers of an evening, and perfect for us to have closed out our day on. I think we’ll be going back there, too.

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This last week, my wife, my daughter, and I took a bit of a vacation. I was nervous about doing so, to be certain. For one, the last time we thought to take one–spring break for my daughter’s Kindergarten year–happened right as the shutdowns and lockdowns from the novel coronavirus started hitting in earnest in our part of the world. For another, I have…challenges…having fun, as I’ve noted. But I am happy to report that things went well, overall; there are always issues, of course, but they were minor, and the family had a good time.

Heading out from where we live, we went first to Houston, where we spend a couple of days. We traveled by way of Shiner, allowing us to see not only a couple of interesting historical markers, but also to tour the Spoetzl Brewery and sample some of the products of which my wife and I are fond as we sat for a picnic lunch under cloudy skies. And we drove the rest of the way to Houston along surface roads rather than the interstate, which made for a far more pleasant drive, even if it was a longer one. I think I’ll do so much again.

In Houston, we spent a fair bit of time touring around. My wife had grown up in the area and had lived not far from where we stayed, so we had a chance to check out her old stomping grounds, and I was gratified to learn a little bit more about her. We’ve been together for years, and I’m happy about it, and any chance I get to know her better is a welcome thing. Too, our daughter, Ms. 8, getting a sense of her parents’ background is a good thing; we live in the town where I grew up (for a little longer, anyway), so my history is clear enough, and getting the chance to expand on my wife’s for our daughter was good. So was going to Galveston, where we visited a confectioner and went to the beach; both were good for us!

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From Houston, we headed to Lafayette, where my wife and I had attended graduate school. We stayed at a bed-and-breakfast there, the Duchess Downtown, where we received excellent treatment; we felt welcomed and appreciated and at home there, and I recommend it highly. And we revisited a number of the places we’d been together, including the office where we got to know one another while in graduate school and working on translating Beowulf. It was good to go back and find our bricks–UL Lafayette paves its walkways with the names of those who have graduated, so that we symbolically speed current students along their way as we remain part of the institution–as well as to go into the Edith Garland Dupré Library and find both my master’s thesis and my dissertation. Even better, both showed that they’d been checked out, and more than once!

We did some of the touristy stuff, too, of course. Chief among them was heading down to New Iberia, where we called at the Konriko Rice Mill and Museum before heading to Avery Island. At the former, we got some tasty treats that will soon grace our table; at the latter, we toured the Jungle Gardens and the Tabasco factory–as well as making a few purchases for ourselves and our loved ones.

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We also took a little excursion to Breaux Bridge and Henderson, where we got to check out some attractions. Ms. 8 enjoyed walking amid dinosaur models and reconstructions (while her parents needed the exercise!), and the lot of us enjoyed mini golf, go-karting, laser-tag, and the like next door to it. Ms. 8 was especially fond of the karting; I drove her, and she got to learn that, while I drive with restraint on the roads, I don’t have to do so. Little speed junkie that she is, she thrilled in it..

Again, in all, it was a good vacation. We saw and did neat stuff. We ate good food (perhaps more than we should have.) We bonded. And we look forward to doing as much again in the future.

Help me give my daughter more such experiences?

It’s not exactly a secret that I do a fair bit of writing. I’ve been pretty good about keeping pace in this webspace, posting thrice weekly, and even if a fair bit of my writing is working through a re-read of novels, novellas, and stories I love, it’s still writing–and not all of the writing I do here is on that project. Nor yet is this the only place where I present my writing, as this and this attest, as well as the conference presentations I still occasionally do. And my mostly-online roleplaying games involve no small amount of writing, too, both in the actual play and in the chatter that surrounds it.

I have tended to struggle, however, with writing narratives of one sort or another. I may be able to put together the occasional vignette taken from my daily life–like this, this, this, this, or this–but longer works have tended to elude me. Too, I do tend more toward a poetic voice than a narrative one, working with sound rather than story, even though I know prose fares better with more people than verse. “Poetry’s hard,” after all, and more people are lazy than aren’t. (For the record, I include myself among that group.)

For the record, I don’t intend on giving up the work I’m already doing. I’ll keep moving forward with the Robin Hobb Reread, which I am flattered to note is getting a fair bit of attention from folks. I’ll also doubtlessly keep going with the other blogging I do, here and elsewhere. I have responsibilities with one of the other blogs, at least, and I try not to let people down. (It still happens, and far more than I like, but I try, dammit.) But I think I will try to address the deficiency in composing an extended narrative–I think I’m going to try to do NaNoWriMo. Kind of.

I know it shows up in my biographical information that I’ve put in a fair bit of time on medieval studies. A lot of it has been more “medievalism studies,” to be fair, looking at how the medieval gets mis/used, but there’s no way to do that work without having a solid grounding in the traditional medieval; one has to understand the references to get the jokes. As such, I’m fairly steeped in the idea of narrative poetry–and, as noted above, I do better with poetry than with narrative prose. So I mean to spend my NaNoWriMo trying to put together a narrative poem.

By the usual standards, I’d have to write something like 1,667 words each day across the thirty days of November to make the 50,000-word expectation. There will be a few days, at least, that I cannot guarantee being able to sit down and write the equivalent of a five-page paper, although I remember being able to knock out five to ten pages with ease when I was appropriately motivated. I’ve got a decent chance at getting the work done, and I think it’s worth a try to do so.

We’ll see how it goes!

I could use your encouragement as I try to make this happen.

Were this year a normal year, I would be posting now about my experience at the International Congress on Medieval Studies on the campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I’ve done so once or twice before, I know, and I’ve commented about papers I’ve delivered there, such as this one. The Congress has its problems, as I think I’ve noted and as I know many others have written about far more eloquently and at greater length than I have it in me do do, but it also remains one of the few places where I can be part of a broader scholarly discourse, having sharply limited access to journals and the other paraphernalia of contemporary scholarly work.

This year, due to COVID-19, the Congress did not meet. I am fortunate in that I was able to get most of the money I’d laid out to attend back; the rest is bound up in other things, and I do not expect to see it again. I am fortunate that the business meeting I was to chair was able to move online and do what needed doing. I suppose that I am fortunate in that I ended up not needing to write the papers I was going to have to write for the event and that I had not started when I needed to get them going; my sloth will not out in quite the same way as would have been the case had I tried to talk once again. (Obviously, I am admitting to it here, but telling doesn’t have nearly the same impact as showing, right?) Too, I was home for my mother’s birthday and for Mothers’ Day for the first time in many years, which is the kind of thing that should be celebrated.

But–and it should have been clear that a “but” was coming–I do miss the opportunity to hear new ideas pushed forward by people who have not yet been so ground down by the drudgery of academe that they cannot see farther than a single step in front of them. I miss getting to see friends I’ve known for ten years and more, now, and to enjoying their company again. I do miss getting to get up and advance my own ideas and see them taken up for consideration by others, to hear them discussed and debated; I miss feeling like I still matter in some small way inside the ivory tower I so long sought to enter and from which I had to make an escape because I knew I would never be let out of its basement. And I miss the power I felt in pulling together ideas, in making new knowledge–even about so small a thing as a series of fantasy novels or a particular kind of bullshit in something Spenser wrote–and, in so doing, pushing back against the boundaries of human ignorance, clearing out just a little bit more room for what we know against what we still have to learn.

I still have the chance, of course. I can use this blog to that end, and it is expected that the Congress will happen in 2021–and that I might well be able to attend it. But that good things are still to come does not mean it is wrong to sorrow for such good as was lost.

Help me save up for next year?