I have been away on a working vacation from February 17 until today. I attended the annual conference of the International Erosion Control Association, where I delivered three papers, met a lot of the leadership, and attended my first meeting as a member of the Professional Development Committee. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday were all business. The other days were driving and vacation.

Before leaving, I took time to write a few posts for the blog, and scheduled them to post about every two days. I also wrote one from there and posted it for later appearance. I like that feature of Blogspot, something I never used before, and which turned out to be incredibly easy. It lets me keep the blog fresh while being unable to write and post.

During the trip I had a fair amount of reading material with me, but found less time for reading than expected. I had volume 4 of the Annals of America, which is my first source for documents for Documenting America. I read the first item in the book, a report from 1797 by Moses Austin, father of Stephen F. Austin, of a trip he made from Virginia to the Ohio River valley and even to St. Louis and a little beyond. The document was fascinating, and I have written two chapters from it, one during the trip and one today, typing both of them this evening. The book is now up to 29, 275 words, so is still coming along.

I also had a notebook with various writings of John Wesley in it. I read some in that, both on the trip and today, but found it more difficult reading. Still, I have pretty well identified some material that will form the basis of a chapter in my Wesley small group study, so the reading, if limited, was profitable.

The week ahead looks very busy from a writing perspective. I have to prepare and send an invoice for some writing I did, the first of those I’ve had to do. That’s a tomorrow noon thing. The editor for Buildipedia asked me to try to move forward an article I thought I could take till next week to do. That’s a tomorrow evening thing. Despite some new troubles at Suite101 concerning changes Google recently made in their search engine algorithms, I’d like to write at least two articles this week for Suite. They will be Tuesday and Friday things.

And, while away on the trip I learned from Facebook posts that a woman in our church is a writer, excited about recently having sold some of her writing. I contacted her, and she is interested in seeing a writers group formed at church. I know of five others who in one way or another have either written things or have expressed an interest in doing so. This will be a Wednesday thing, I think, to see what can be done about organizing this group, with an eye to begin meeting maybe in April.

So the week looks full, and I hope on Saturday I can make a report of incredible productivity. Of course, I’ll be writing here before then.