Today I got up at 3:30am. I do not hope to repeat the experience any time soon but it’s probably going to be awhile before it wears off.

So I’m going through the pictures and getting rid of anything that isn’t in perfectly clear and useable format. Then I need to weed them down to about six to eight pictures per shrine. What I’m thinking is two pages per shrine, and if I count the predellas as two (instead of six) then there are about 25 to cover. Three of them are post period but I think they need to be included because they show a nice progression of the artform.

This is what I’m like when I don’t get enough sleep. Or more to the point, get enough good quality sleep. I’m a little wired.

I have lots of correspondence to catch up on as well. There are plenty of thank yous to send out and additional questions that I need to get answers for because, for all I learned in the past two weeks, there are still big holes in my knowledge. And there is one location that I need to get pictures for yet.

The gratifying part of the whole experience was being told that my site is bookmarked because I’m “the go-to person on this subject matter.” Which also explains why the only useable results I get from web-searches generally come from my own website. It took me all day yesterday to get the logins and passwords for my site fixed but I’m now able to update the site (something I’ve been remiss in doing since the last trips’ updates were made) and managed to get the table of shrines all nice and pretty. And there’s my sense of accomplishment for the day.

Most of the shrines have been renovated at some point which is kind of sad because nobody ever wants to put things back in the same order that they found it in. There is also a significant amount of symbolism involved in the placement of the flowers which is missing from some of the shrines and so I have to look into that as well. And the renovations were generally done with papers and fabric coverings that were not original to the shrine. It’s difficult to know what is original and what I need to just ignore. Since I have a good selection of shrines to look at I should be able to get a good and educated guess as to what goes in each pile.

And then I still have several books that I need to go through as well. Just so much of everything!