Intermittent Week

CWs: food

We had Juneteenth, 19 June 2024, off of work for a holiday. So it made for an interesting week, broken up into two halves of two days of work each. It was nice having the day off; we mostly did errands and such around the house, and had a lazy morning. Then two more days of work, which mostly went OK. I’m happy it’s Friday when I’m writing this. I’m listening to good music and relaxing. Hung out with my spouse for the evening, and we hung out with the kitties too. Lyra was kind of a fireball for a long time, but she’s calmed down mostly.

We’ve gone back and forth a bunch about weekend plans. There’s a breakfast place that has a Pride pancake and my spouse really wants to get it. So we may do that. I dunno honestly. I have 6h of Latin to do for the weekend, which is pretty normal, and ideally I do 2h and 4h, or 3h and 3h, split across Saturday and Sunday. My money’s on 2h Saturday and 4h Sunday. Whatever, it’ll all work out. I tend to do fun stuff on Saturday and leave Sunday for relaxation and catching up on Latin, maybe an errand or two.

I haven’t read as much as I’d like this week. I read a book of The Iliad (14) earlier this week, and it was a good one. I really love the poem, but it’s a lot to take in at one time, so I am reading it very slowly. But I’m getting there, I’m a little over halfway through! And I picked up a book of Stephen Crane’s stories off of my bookshelf and I started reading that too. He is most famous for The Red Badge of Courage, which is about, IIRC, the American Revolution. I wasn’t aware that he did short stories, so I picked up the volume awhile ago. It’s an odd one, but I think it’ll be an interesting read. I just finished Ryka Aoki’s Light from Uncommon Stars, which was absolutely lovely, and had a trans teenage girl protagonist. I definitely recommend reading it if you get a chance! Otherwise I’m reading Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales, which might as well be Homer in terms of its register. So I’m trying to pull books that are a middle ground and a little easier to handle, a nice sheltered harbor between the tides of various epics.

I want to get back to reading Ennius’ Annales at some point, though. Translating Latin 10hrs a week, though, mostly dispels any desire to read Latin in my free time. But I am enjoying it and Skutsch’s edition, the gold standard for this particular text, is lovely (it was a splurge a few years ago, when I inexplicably found it on sale for half of list price or so). And I miss reading Greek! I am somewhere in Hesiod’s Theogony but I can’t remember where for the life of me. I kinda want to read my bizarro edition of Nonnos’ Dionysiaka, a translation where each of the 48 books is by a different translator (for the most part), so it will be a fascinating patchwork when I get around to it. I imagine the Greek text is gonna be lovely, though, too. Nonnos is a late epic poet, ca. 4th or 5th century CE, and most people have overlooked him due to his lateness in the timeline (similar to Quintus Smyrnaeus, on whom I wrote my master’s thesis), but unfairly so. He was an Egyptian from Panopolis, writing in perfectly passable Homeric Greek. I have the Loeb set and I’m happy about it. I have Francis Vian’s Bude texts of Quintus’ Posthomerica and those are really lovely too. The facing French translation is not 100% useful to me, but the text is very sound, and it also has a commentary. Quintus has had a sort of resurgence in the last decade or so, and I think people are finally appreciating his work. At very least, people should be appreciating it for restoring, essentially, large parts of the mostly-lost Epic Cycle to us.

Anyways, it’s Friday night and I’m happy to have a couple of days to chill before we get back to the grind. We have 04 and 05 July off, though, in a couple of weeks, so I’m really happy about that. We are taking Ajax and Xya in for their annual on the 5th; I don’t mind taking one for the team on our day off. Their annuals are always around that time, so it’ll be nice to get them checked out. Both are 12 this year, so they’re getting up there, but all things considered, I think they’re both in pretty good health. Lyra is just around 3 now, and as rambunctious as ever, but she has been a wonderful addition to our little kosmos, our little δῶμα [doma] (“home”).

My parents are coming to visit in about a month, too. We got tickets to the Rockies’ “Star Wars Night” and it will be super fun. My spouse and I have tried to go most years, and made a tradition out of it; we only missed a year or two of it. We took my parents a couple of years ago and they had a great time, so we thought we’d take them again. It’s fun to see a game, get a cool t-shirt (it’s Grogu from The Mandalorian!), and get out of town for a bit. We generally park at a park-n-ride and take the light rail or a bus down, so we don’t have to deal with Denver traffic (ugh). So that’ll be good, and we’re looking forward to seeing them in general. I enjoy having family visit for sure.

But yeah, that’s about it. I wanted to get some thoughts down and thought I’d share them with y’all. Hope y’all are doing wonderfully! <3