Yes, still recovering, prednisone taper continues. But I’m also able to appreciate what I did achieve over the last year. It’s huge. After repeated harddrive failures, I really do have a good one, it’s stable and so my catalogue of portraits of women of the North Rhine is back under control. I’ve added some categories for broad date ranges, I’ve removed the stained glass window and print depictions (just from the categories) as the art forms have distinctly different aims and so need to be handled separately. It’s excessively difficult in the UI of media to handle these changes so it’s a bit incomplete too. Had my site not been picked up by google for high rankings I’d have totally changed all of it. But we are hear and it is now.

And alongside this of course I have individual inventories as well as research of those who have gone before me.

So what about my paper? I’m trying to work that one out. But I let go some of the stress because while working my way through I translated a nifty two page article that was the first of a two part series except I can’t find the second half. And it was written in the 1950s.

He said what volume it would appear in, but I couldn’t find it.

I don’t think I need that second half, I got the answers I needed, but I’m feeling less stressed about leaving unfinished works up on my sites because I’m far from the first to be heavily invested in the art of this time and place and where my output may not keep up with intent.

I’ve also got multiple sources about the language of 16thC Cologne and as I worked my way through that I was also able to let go of some more stress: even people who study that sum it up as it’s complicated. And it is. I know it is when I hear contemporary spoken word now, but what’s interesting to me is that I found myself almost with the same accent when I started just trying to get different spelling variations to make sense.

I also really pushed my theory. Really hard. That’s what you do of course. You defend it, and the only way you can do that is to follow up every piece of evidence that contradicts you. There is a repeated claim that I only just was able to trace back. This is in part due to the very low quality scans of books that are foundational. Sometimes a bad OCR layer is worse than none.

The claim is important, I’m frustrated I didn’t spot it myself, but it doesn’t change my theory. It just means there were connections lost and gained right up to my focal time. And it means I can happily quote everyone who shared it. And I can do so by starting with the transcription of the founding document, and what each writer has interpreted it to mean, and what it means for my work.

I’m still shattered. Refractive disease means resistant to treatment. All treatment, including diet etc. You still do what you need to do, obviously, it’s just hard to keep going and not just cry.

I’ll write about hat in a separate post. Because I haven’t cried, I’m staying positive, just a bit impatient.