I had a pretty good, though not at all productive, weekend. Saturday-- got short paper #1 written. Trecked all around the near north side looking for a Crate and Barrel (that turned out to be on Michigan despite the map that said it was on State-- apparently everyone knew this but me). Gave up, took the train up to North and Clybourn and went to that one instead. Then to dinner at Las Pinatas in Old Town. Good Mexican food, but they wouldn't serve Will and me this time... oh well. Back to Will's to drink lemony goodness and white wine.

I got up this morning, finished paper #2, went to the college bowl picnic that ended up being in Susan's apartment (it was raining). Had margaritas and played Mousetrap. Well, I didn't play so much as mess with Susan's cat while Matt tried to analytically deconstruct the game (eg "Why are the mice cooperating to build the trap that will kill most of them? Is there some big super-mouse that is actually controlling the trap? Or who is killing the trapped mice? and so on). Came back home, managed to borrow a car to get my stuff to storage (Thanks, Paul, though I don't think he reads this). So I started packing and such.

It was good. Now, though, I need to get some work done. Time to start thinking about changes in warfare between the sixth and eleventh centuries. Right now, all I can talk about is the results of shortages of manpower, though I suspect there's a paper to be written on the results of the rise to power of local military elites. Maybe not by me.

For those who follow such things, I decided that the Byzantines survived the seventh century because they had generally competent leaders, kickass technology, religious (more or less) uniformity, and the theme system. I also decided that their foreign policy in the ninth century relied on walking a fine line between giving too much influence and pissing the people of Constantinople off and giving too little and pissing the foreign leaders off. But I used bigger words. Neither is exactly a novel view of Byzantine civilisation, but I think both are fine for what are essentially "Did you do the reading?" papers. Not that I did the reading. Sigh.