Special offer!

As you may have guessed, from the trickle of recent posts, the sledding's been - well, not exactly difficult, but certainly busy, in recent weeks. A small mountain of papers to be graded, a happy weekend with my brother's family, a birthday party for one of Cleo's fellow Bluebirds, a bit of yard maintenance, research for a talk at February's CAA conference... rather rare, it seems, are the unplanned 30-minute blocks that can result in blog entries.

But now the grading's all done, and the meditative quiet of Fall Break has arrived, I've got 65 pages of notes toward the talk, and my fantasy football team has elbowed its way into a tie for first - and so it's time to get back, if only briefly, to the blog. So here, dear readers, is my offer to you: as a means of trying to reward or win back your steady readership, I'll post at least an image of Cleo each morning of this workweek. Obscure musical references and openly strained analogies may, in some cases, accompany the images. But you can simply ignore those, if you'd rather simply know what the girl looks like.

Above, that's Cleo with her friend Susanna at the B&O Railroad Museum.