Closing time, every new beginning is another new beginning's end

1 hour meeting, 1 hour processing data, 1.5 hours researching, 0.5 hours planning, 2 hours buying books, 0.5 hours emailing, page count = 140

In the morning, in addition to beginning to pack for my trip home tomorrow, I continued processing the pictures of data I took in Medellín, and created backups of my data.

Had a good meeting with a professor in the political science department at the Universidad de los Andes. He and I had a class together in ´96 when he was an undergrad and I was in Colombia doing a Fulbright. He did his doctoral work in the States, and now it turns out we're both finishing our dissertations this semester after having had them "in the freezer" for a couple of years, as he aptly put it. Naturally, we had a lot to talk about, and I expect we'll stay in touch.

After my meeting, I went shopping at the temple of bookstores in Bogotá, the downtown Librería Lerner. They have a whole room full of Colombian books, and I did some real damage, as I generally do once on trips to Colombia. I guess a spree every several years isn't the worst thing ever. I was particularly excited about some biographies and memoirs of some of the major political actors during the ´40s and ´50s.

Finally, I went to the Archivo General and identified those files for the ´40s and ´50s that I want Ana María to look into. I put together a list of those, and also wrote up guidelines for the service-records database that we discussed yesterday.

Overall, a good end to a wonderful trip. I have a couple more hours tomorrow morning, and then it's back home.

Thanks to Kapi Kapiszewski for monitoring this week. Next up is Michael Negrón in Connecticut. Have a great weekend!