Almost April's Ides

CWs: physical health, work, food, alcohol

Today is 11 April 2025, or, as the Romans would say, a.d. III idus Apriles (i.e., “3 days before the Ides of April”). The Romans counted inclusively, so we’re including today in that count (Friday, Saturday, Sunday). I kinda enjoy the Julian dates, and had to teach myself them for translating 17th-century Latin letters, where they were often still using Julian, rather than Gregorian, dates. Hence you’ll often see “S.V.” (stylo vetere), “Old Style,” and “S.N.” (stylo nouo), “New Style,” for dates. IIRC, the dates are about 10 days off, so you’ll often see dates like 11/21 Oct. 1650, the first date being Julian and the second being Gregorian. Apparently there was quite a bit of variation, however.

It was a busy week per usual. I woke up on Wednesday morning feeling under the weather, so I called out and snuggled in bed with Ajax for awhile. It was nice to rest a bit and I felt better heading into work on Thursday. I don’t love taking days off from work, but I have to remind myself that sick leave is there for a reason, and I’m extremely grateful (and privileged, let’s be honest) to have sick leave. When I was a teacher, yes, we got summers off (2 months, from late May to early August), but my school gave us 5 (!) PTO days, to be used either for sick leave or vacation. There was not a dedicated pool for either. We had a horrible secretary we’d have to call when we called out, and she often made us teachers feel bad for calling out. The sub plans were sometimes worse than just coming in sick, which itself is another problem. It has taken me a long time to get over the bad vibes from those bad old days, but I feel OK about it, and my colleagues certainly have no qualms about using sick leave. So I’m getting better about that.

We have a fun weekend ahead. Errands tomorrow, but mostly fun errands, and then on Sunday we’re doing an event downtown which involves basically a “crawl” between various downtown businesses to get various treats. Our downtown puts on events like that at least once a month, and I thought it would be fun, so I got us tickets. We will have a nice Sunday afternoon. I’ll get Latin done in between, I have 4.5h to do and it’ll be fine. My spouse is getting hair color done tomorrow afternoon, so I’ll have some time (at least 2h) while that’s being done. I’ll probably get a six-pack of beer tomorrow, and we have a couple of fun drinks for the event too.

I’m enjoying translating 17th-century Latin letters. The squabbles of 16th- and 17th-century philosophers and academics are pretty amusing. I find the Republic of Letters (respublica literarum) very interesting as well, the name for a vast circle of epistolary correspondents including the Frenchmen Ismaël Boulliau, Pierre Gassendi, the Brothers du Puy (Jacques & Pierre), Jacques-Auguste de Thou, Jean-Baptiste Morin; Germans such as Johann Heinrich Boecler, Johann Albrecht Portner, Johann Ernst von Rautenstein; the Dutchmen Nicolaas Heinsius and Christiaan Huygens; Johannes Hevelius of Danzig; Maria Cunitz of Byczyna in Silesia (variously located in Poland and Germany, depending on the shifting of borders), and many others. It’s an endlessly-fascinating slice of history and literary history I’d never known about until I started working on these letters in 2010. I’ll have to writ something at greater length about my thoughts on the letters and other treatises eventually, but it’s hard to collect my thoughts. The subject is extremely vast, so it makes sense that the professor I’m working with has been spending decades upon decades on all of this stuff. It’s overwhelmingly vast.

I feel like I haven’t had much inspiration to write lately. Life has been boring, but I’m OK with that. We generally have our little routines in our little kosmos. The outside world has been pretty horrifying to see and I am just trying to do my best to cope with all of it. We are doing fine, all things considered, but it’s scary.

I don’t have much more to say tonight. It’s calm and quiet and I’m listening to music, and I will probably play some more Dark Forces, since I found a lovely source port for it that makes it quite nice on modern machines. Hope y’all are well, and stay safe, and take care of and love each other as much as you can <3