The time here in Les Houches has been a tonic, with a couple of decent classes held in the overflow / meeting room downstairs (very nice to have them comment on how Shelley's "Mont Blanc, or Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni" made a lot more sense after our expedition to Montenvers / Mer de Glace on Tuesday), and a bunch of kids doing wacky things like paragliding and canyoning and rafting in their good chunks of free time. As I said, I had a fair amount of marking to do before the first class, and then journals and other things after that, but each day I took at least an hour and went for a run around here, with the usual brutal uphills getting off the valley floor. But even in the rain that began in earnest yesterday evening and continued on and off today, I continued to marvel at the play of light and cloud in this valley, and am all the more determined to get back here in a situation when I am not the soi-disant responsable for a bunch of students.
Just spent a bit of time that I probably should have offloaded onto my assistant, but was one of those things that I didn't have completely conceptualized beforehand,and thus would have taken longer to explain how to do than it took to do it myself. A slippery slope, I know. It was taking the oddly grouped reservations for the two legs of our train travel tomorrow (Lausanne-Milan and Milan-Rome) and making sign-ups for students so that they would know which car to try to horse their luggage onto. Last year was a bit chaotic on the platform at Martigny catching only one train, so I am trying to prevent or alleviate chaos right now.
I'll add some pictures and flesh this out when I get a chance, but I think I better turn in now--big travel day tomorrow (bus to Lausanne 10:30, free afternoon roaming Lausanne, then trains, with our luggage reclaimed from the bus), the last real transfer of the trip (I can't forget the little hassles that accompanied our Rome museum expeditions last year--it ain't over til it's over).
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