Last words

"Famous last words", my mother used to say. Probably still does. Perhaps she just doesn't tend to say it via email or on the phone, cause I haven't heard it said in a while. Anyway, some of mine a while ago were, “Whatever I do, I'm hoping to get it off again to a new journal quickly.” You can find them here. I was writing, on the 10th of September last year, about my paper that had been returned (unpublished) from a journal. Their recommendation: our paper was too clinical for their particular focus, and it should be submitted to another journal. I knew there needed to be some further work done on the paper first though, as it was too long for the second journal's word limit, and hadn't been formatted using their document template. (Manuscript submission is all-electronic now – a change since I was doing this kind of thing before, a couple of years ago. This makes it easier, yet more complicated too.) Well, I'm pleased to say a mere four months later I've finally submitted the article today. I'm frankly stunned to discover it has been that long. I knew it was way overdue, but would have thought it was November not September that I got it back. In the end, I didn't shorten the article, as I decided we'd already done that all we could. I asked the editors to be nice to us instead, to consider it on its merits, and to let me know where it could be shortened if they felt it was too long. We'll see.

Another milestone yesterday was booking flights to Prague. I've been talking about going to Prague since 2001 (Bronwyn seems to have tolerated this), about the oldest of our travel plans. When we passed through London in July of that year one plan had been to go to Prague for the weekend. Our tickets gave us one additional stopover in Europe and we'd decided Prague would be the place. Subsequently we realised our time in London was too limited already, and we ditched the plan. I ended up simply not using the flight, while as Bronwyn didn't (officially) stop in LA either she had two spare flights and was able to downgrade her ticket for a discount. All this meant however we had a residual Prague plan niggling to be re-activated. Once you've committed to an idea they can be remarkably persistent. Well, friend Jenny from Palmerston North used to live in Prague and once told us Easter was a good time to go there. Before we left New Zealand I'd been saying we'd go there at Easter last year. As I wrote then we realised soon after we got here in March that April was going to be too soon for an overseas trip for us. Looks like it'll actually be happening.

Before all that happens though, there's a couple of other trips. This weekend we have hired a car for the exorbitant fee of £2.58/day (plus £5/day insurance) from easycar.com and are going to stay in Salisbury. We will be visiting Stonehenge which is in the near vicinity, though we know with the A303 motorway now passing close by and not being able to walk freely among the stones it is nowhere near as impressive as it used to be. However... We also hope to do some hiking in the area and just have a good weekend away. Following that, in the second half of February, is the school half-term break. We're hoping to go somewhere warm, perhaps Mediterranean, and may simply wait till, well, the last minute, and then book via lastminute.com. What fun.