It has been a productive week! Not only have I nearly completed my paper for the conference, but I have met with several college and university officials about a Junior Year Abroad program for our Scholars. The good news is that on this side of the Atlantic they are more than happy to have high achieving students such as ours. The only “bad” news (and it isn’t so bad) is that I now have to work out the logistics of credit transfer and tuition payments. It will be expensive, the exchange rate is currently 1:2 pounds sterling to the dollar. That makes even a cup of Ribena expensive.
My research has gone fairly well and I am nearly done with my paper. (Don’t we tell our students not to wait until the last minute to write their papers?) I am not sure that my initial concept of a single work surveying all five targumim of the Megillot will work out, but there is still a lot to be said on these texts. It also simply felt very good, after a lot of admin work, to be in a library with few distractions, able to read and write.
Some good and timely news on the computer front came out yesterday. Nisus Software has finally released the shipping version of Nisus Writer Pro. I have been using the public beta over the last month and very pleased. Not least of all because having written my doctoral thesis with the old NisusWriter I was stunned and thrilled when this new version imported the thesis including all my old styles and rules! I find it more intuitive than Mellel and I am very pleased to be using it again. It makes working with right-to-left languages so much easier and it has a very clean, simple interface. Oh! It also opens and saves Word docs. That is handy too.