It's time to say au revoir to la belle France. As always, I'm torn at times like this. I like an awful lot of things about this country, and I've had a very productive trip and a ton of fun while I wasn't working in this or that archive, pawing through dusty files or poring over microfilm. On the other hand, it's been nearly a month since I slept in my own bed. I'm tired of living out of a suitcase, of not being able to keep up with all my favorite television programs (my TiVo is going to be full when I get back!). I even miss my job and my coworkers, to say nothing of my friends and family.
All in all, I'm ready to go home and glad that the day for doing so is nearly here. The cab will pick me up early tomorrow morning, and then I hope to have a safe and uneventful flight home, though the weather forecast for Chicago and vicinity isn't looking terribly good for tomorrow--there's supposed to be a monster storm front moving in late tomorrow evening, which will produce strong gusty winds (in the 50 mph range) all day. That could complicate a landing, so I hope they'll let us take off and that there will be just enough of a window of good weather at the right time to get us down. The last thing I want to do after a 9.5-hour transatlantic flight is get diverted to Milwaukee or Detroit and have to wait for the weather to calm down--which, according to the in-house meteorologist at my university, won't be until Friday.
I will probably have a wrap-up post covering the whole trip, and some more pictures, sometime this weekend. First I've got to get home, fight off the jet lag, take care of the laundry, get the mail service resumed, get reacquainted with friends and family, and then on Monday it's back to the usual routine. Plus, I've got an overdue paper on the Russian Revolution to finish writing this summer, and I've been asked to expand on the paper I presented last October in Minneapolis for consideration for inclusion in the conference proceedings. So no rest for the wicked--or the terminally busy.
Catch you on the flip side.
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