Well, my ruse worked yesterday. Once I'd allowed myself to type in/rewrite Chapter Twenty-Seven, I managed to read four articles on Haydn opera and attend the Eighteenth-Century Study Group at the university. So it was a productive day after all. Today I took care of TA admin stuff in the morning, and I'm now focusing on finishing the fascinating but long and dense PhD thesis that I struggled with all last week (managing about 50 pages a day, with a couple hundred left!).

I'm feeling ridiculously nostalgic for Vienna this week. I'm not sure why...maybe it's just the Bavarian Christmas market downtown, which reminds me so clearly of what I loved about Vienna. It makes me want to hop on a plane and just go... Oh well. With luck and a successful grant application, I might be heading back to Vienna in three or four months to do research at the National Library's music collection. Of course, it'll be just in time for the gray, rainy spring...but what the heck. There's still the gorgeous Stefansdom, the wonderful winding little pedestrian-only streets of the First District, and on my last trip there (thirteen months ago), I discovered a wonderful and relatively cheap cafe only two blocks from the music collection. So I can still fantasize...

In the meantime, BBC3 has been keeping me company while I work during the day. The selection's been wonderful lately--lots of Debussy orchestral music, Dvorak symphonies and string quartets, and bits from Berlioz's opera Beatrice et Benedict, which I'd never heard before. Now I want all of those pieces on CD! I've loved listening to them. (It's really best for the BBC to avoid playing eighteenth-century Viennese music, because I just get distracted by their historical intros, which I always seem to disagree with...far better for them to talk about other periods that I don't know as much about!)

And now it's time for Nika's walk...