Update

I have had a wonderfully productive day today.  Since classes have yet to start, my schedule has been mostly unstructured--meaning more blocks of time to work and get stuff done.  This is good!  The danger is that I have not partitioned off sacred time for my scholarship/research, but at least today, I managed to devote the entire afternoon to achieving two concrete goals: I wrote proposals for two different spring conferences: (1) Music Theory Midwest, which will be in Ann Arbor, Michigan and (2) the 14th Meeting of Dutch-Flemish Society which will be held in Antwerp, Belgium.

I feel really good about the prospects of the second proposal I sent because I think it fits the requirements for a special pedagogy session they are hosting really well, and it is a project I have been working on for years.

The first proposal I wrote is fine, but it may not be wholly appropriate for the nature of the conference.  It is less narrowly analytical/music-theoretical and more interdisciplinary.  At any rate, if it isn't accepted, it won't be the end of the world, and I don't have my hopes set on it.

At any rate, I am very pleased with what I was able to accomplish today, and I hope to finish my final goal for this month--preparing an essay I have already written for possible publication in a peer-reviewed journal--before classes start.