Respite and Rejuvenation

I’m making my way through the week as well as I can. I have Friday off and my parents are coming into town for a few days, which will be busyish, but it’ll be really nice to see them. My mom visited last when we moved into the house, in Oct 2022 (can’t believe it’s been almost 2 years we’ve been here!), and then my dad came out here last April to visit. They last both visited in July 2022, so it’ll be good to have them both here. I’ve had an incredibly busy week thus far, even though “it’s Tuesday, Cap,” but the next couple of days should be pretty chill. I have some loose ends to tie up at work, and hope not to have too many on Thursday, but it’s all good. The weekend, while really nice, was too short as usual, and we had a really nice time (see here for more on the weekend.

I’ve been wanting to revisit Petscop, my favorite weird webseries, which I got into basically from the start back in ~2018. It’s so delightfully creepy and unnerving and just gets under your skin. I heard that Marble Hornets is a similarly unnerving, creepy webseries, and finally, after hearing about it for years, decided to check it out. One thing I think must’ve been at least tangentially inspired by it is the movie Skinamarink (created, IIRC, by a YouTuber, so that would make sense), and I am also getting some House of Leaves vibes from it. It’s really, profoundly weird, and I’m about 1/3 of the way through it. Will probably watch some more after I finish writing this. I’m very much enjoying it and wish I’d checked it out when it started back in 2009 or so, but hey, this way I can watch all of it at leisure without having to wait for it. I remember waiting for months, sometimes, for a short Petscop video, so it’s good to watch a series that’s already complete. I’m going to rewatch Petscop too, of course, but episode 2 is almost 2hrs long, so I’m setting aside some time for that another day; Marble Hornets episodes are anywhere from 3-7min, sometimes more, so that’s doable.

I think I mentioned this before but I’m trying to go through my HBO Max “bucket list,” and at the very least, watch True Detective season 1, and watch all of Our Flag Means Death. We’re getting there slowly but surely, although recent weeks have been incredibly busy and we’ve mostly just resorted to calm YT stuff. I really want to shed that since we have too many streaming services and it’s becoming like cable all over again, which is the exact opposite of any of my intentions. We’ve been there, we’re not doing that nonsense again.

I got to sleep in a bit today since I started at 9am. Usually when that happens I snuggle with Ajax for a little while, but he was nowhere to be seen, hanging out in the living room with Lyra, so that was a bummer. Ajax is snuggliest in the morning and basically just wants to do his own thing at night. And Lyra is… Lyra. She is very sweet and snuggly when she wants to be, but she is still young and therefore bitey and scratchy, especially in the middle of the night when asking for food. I hope she grows out of that sooner than later; she will be 3 in a couple of months.

Otherwise I’m hoping winter lasts a bit longer here. It’s been in the 40s and 50s F for highs lately but still lows in the 20s and 30s F, sometimes lower, which is fine with me. I’m not ready for 90-100 F summer, which typically lasts from late May to late September if not longer. Too long for my liking. We don’t often get much spring here; in recent years, it’s seemed to transition right from winter to summer. Autumn is nice here, though, and I’m always happy when that rolls around and the trees start to shed their leaves. Things being in bloom here are fine, but at the same time, then the bugs come back, and mosquitoes, &c., and that’s not so fun. And then the lawn needs to be mowed. That’s the cycle of the year, though. Makes me want to read Vergil’s Georgics and spend some time thinking about farming.

I don’t have a ton to say tonight and I don’t want to force writing for writing’s sake. It’s like those letters of Cicero where he writes nec plura scribere possum vel. sim. (“I cannot write any more”) and goes on to write, uh… more. It’s a fun rhetorical effect but kind of laughable when we read it. I do enjoy reading letters, though, and the time I’ve spent reading 17th-century Latin letters by various correspondents in the “Republic of Letters” has been really, really fun. It’s a wondrous link to the past, seeing scholars, philosophers, and statesmen doing the same things that the ancients such as Cicero, Atticus, Seneca, Pliny the Younger, and others were doing way back. I took a class on Latin epistolography near the end of my MA program, and we read Cicero’s letters in exile, Ovid’s Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, as well as Seneca’s Consolatio ad Helviam. It was a great class and I really enjoyed learning about those facets of Roman literature, which I think are largely under-studied. I’d never read Ovid’s exilic output before; a whole OCT is devoted to those two works, and they’re fascinating.

In any case, hope y’all are doing well, and if you’re reading, please say hi sometime, would love to hear from you. I don’t have comments enabled on these entries by design: partially since I don’t want to code it in using HTML (I am trying to keep the blog purely Markdown-generated via Hugo), and partially since I don’t want to deal with spam comments (sorry, non-bots!). But I’m around on Mastodon and via email, and XMPP, if you so desire. Take care of yourselves!