Absenteeism

I have been in the midst of a rather unplanned blogging hiatus lately. It has everything to do with just finishing my comps. The written ones, anyway. My oral exam still awaits me at the end of this month.

It is a testament to just how insanely I worked over the month of October that in the week after finishing the exams, both my body and my computer decided they could go on no further.

I continued with some pretty fantastic back pain for a week or more after the last exam. The remnants of this pain are still with me. I am not entirely free of it. So I proceed cautiously.

Meanwhile, my computer stopped communicating with its power cord and refused, utterly refused, to believe it was plugged into the socket. After about a week of feeling lost and disenfranchised, I managed to get it back up and running with the simplest and least expensive solution (a new cord was needed, not a new port).

Despite the pain I was experiencing and the loss of my computer for a week, all I could do was thank God that these things happened after the exams were written and not in the midst of them. And as for the pain itself, I felt I had to absorb it, mind it, and apologize to myself for taking such poor care of my body in the midst of my work.

I expect my postings will still be sporadic as I prepare to leave for the American Academy of Religion conference happening in Washington DC at the end of this week. I hope I'll be able to get some blogging done from there, but we'll have to see how the schedule goes.

I do hope, though, to be back up and running consistently very soon. I've missed this space and the relationships I've experienced here.

Peace and love.