Serenity now

2 hours researching, 4 hours compiling data, page count = 203

This week's monitor is my lovely wife, Catherine Sumner. Welcome!

Oh my Lord, research can be frustrating sometimes. I'm grateful that the NYPL has lots of historical Latin American sources, but sometimes getting access to those can be mighty difficult. After very efficiently identifying a number of useful offsite sources that will complete the 19th-century budget picture and requesting them this morning, I spent basically the whole afternoon getting two sources. The problem was they were on microfilm, in two different locations, and hopelessly mislabeled in the catalog. In fact, I never really found the first one, which was supposed to be an 1876/77 budget for Venezuela. Instead I found the defense budget for that same period. Fine, that'll do, but I still need to track down the police and overall budget. Anyway, I didn't have anything on Venezuela before, so this is progress. I also gathered information on Peru, though I still need to process it. Happily, the sources I requested this morning will be available tomorrow, so that's exciting.