Now, where was I?

I submitted grades for my fourth and final fall semester course on December 31, just before year’s end and the start of a six-month sabbatical. Dreams of a research trip to Israel have given way to an “undisclosed location” closer to home:

Academic sabbaticals are more about uninterrupted research time than they are about rest, and I actually expect to get more writing done without the disruption that travel brings. I do look forward to being free of meetings, marking, and administrative responsibilities for the next several months, and I dearly hope finally to be able to see through to publication a few of the essays I have drafted over the last few years—beginning with the paper on Josephus's ethnonyms that I shelved at the start of the fall semester. 

Other goals include finally completing a reading of the Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek—just Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Lamentations, and part of the minor prophets to go!—making my way through some of the major books in Biblical Studies that I have purchased and not read; and, yes, some rest and time with family.

I hope to avoid the curriculum the Mock Turtle lays out in Alice in Wonderland, though parts of it seem all too familiar: 

“Reeling and Writhing ... to begin with ... and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”