Football, Latin, etc.

Another Thursday night finds me sitting at the big work table in my front room, watching live high school football on local TV, and writing, blogging, and hanging out on the Internet with Sally, my little eeepc netbook. A typical Thursday night, this, spent just the way I like.

Work on The Latin Project (TLP) that I mentioned last night went well today. Most of that time was spent looking through shelves and storage boxes in the back room, and downloading material from various places around the Internet. I was happy to find most of what I wanted, plenty enough to get me started. And I actually spent a little time working with the language itself.

Later tonight, at Midnight, Coast to Coast AM will have the monthly show with Linda Moulton Howe. I hope it’s a good one, and expect that it probably will be. She’s usually got interesting things to share.

Between the football and C2C, I might be able to get some chess work done. I’m not in time-trouble anywhere, but with as many games as I’ve got going now, it’s good to stay on top of things.

A new (old) project

One way to lose a bad habit, a way that has always proved effective for me, is to replace it with a good one. And I’m going to try it again.

The bad habit I’m going to break: paying too much attention to “political news,” more than I should. There is so much about it that either angers or depresses me. Being angry or depressed are not good ways to be, so I intend to minimize my time spent in those mental states be further restricting my exposure to political news.

This doesn’t mean that I’m going to stick my head in the sand. No siree. But I’ll be reading or listening to much less of it in the future than I am now, and I’ll certainly be writing about it and posting links referencing it much less frequently than I’ve been doing lately.

The good habit I’ll be replacing it with: the study of Latin, redeveloping an easy fluency in it. There have been two different periods of my life when I was pretty comfortable with Latin: studying it for two years when I was in school, a long time ago; and reading and praying from the Traditional Roman Catholic Missal on a daily basis later in life when I was an active member of a Latin Mass community.

I’ve been away from Latin for awhile now, and I miss it. Wonder how long it’ll take me to pick it up again. Guess I’ll find out.

Of this I’m sure: I’ll be a healthier and happier guy if I spend an hour or two (or more) each day with my Latin instead of following the political news of the day to the extent I do now.

Such a short dream, so many elements

Last night’s sleep was a rough one; the wonky sinuses had me sort of awake but still half-asleep through much of it. But there was some dreaming in it, and that’s a good thing.

Though I suspect there were more dreams last night than what I can now remember, the one that was with me as I woke is freshly in mind.

In this dream:

I was much younger than I am now, probably in my thirties, and had just finished a leisure ride on my mountain bike. The “home” I was headed back to was a rented room in a big house that could have been a composite of houses I knew in Peru, Warsaw, or Bloomington IN.

When I was about a block away from the house, a mysterious woman appeared on the sidewalk next to me. She was wearing a flowered t-shirt and black lycra running shorts and seemed to be headed to my house, too.

As I approached the front porch and shouldered my bike to carry it up the steps, the mysterious woman bounced up to the porch and let herself in the front door ahead of me.

The scene then flashed, and I was standing in the house’s big common living room. Another blond woman, whom I only know in a very tangential way over the Internet, looked up at me from a couch, smiled and said, “Surprise! Bet you didn’t think I could come right into your dream like this, did you?”

And then I woke. Sort of. It was a sinus thing that made me sit upright for a few minutes, but I never came fully awake.

When I laid myself back down, I focused on the last image remembered from the dream just mentioned, and I smoothly transitioned back into it. The woman on the couch was still smiling up at me. This time she said, “Hey, let’s use Latin, okay?” And she started speaking to me in Latin. And she laughed. Then I woke for real.