Month: September 2020

(I forgot to blog yesterday. As best I recall, my day involved morning run, Morning Office, Mass, hot breakfast, emotional backwash from the previous day’s interviews, reading proofs, miscellaneous reading, and dinner with friends.

Up early for my run, Morning Office, Mass, fruit breakfast, and then a marathon of [online video] interviews and assessments relative to a possible diagnosis of some of my peculiarities. Though the interviews were done by 15:30, they wiped out my day; it’s exhausting to sit through your life being cast in an unfamiliar perspective, sometimes with brutally abrupt forced-choice personality inventories.
We scrabbled for dinners from what was lying about in the fridge, watched The Kennel Murder Case, and an episode of 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown.

I slept later than was ideal, so there wasn’t good time for running before setting up before saying Mass, so I said the Morning Office, then went to Mass, fruit breakfast, and settled in to work. As it turns out, I wasn’t concentrating well, so I finished up Job in Legends, then launched into Moses In Egypt. That took much of the afternoon, at the end of which we ate some of Margaret’s mushroom paté, a creamy vegetable soup, and gluten-free naan. We watched the film adaptation of The Sweeney, and retired for the evening feeling a sense of impaired justice.

Between chilly and fresh, so that with a hoodie is too warm, and without is distinctly cool, I took the longer course without timing it. I had some aches and pains at first, but these diminished as I ran. On the other hand, I was relieved to get home.
Morning Office, hot breakfast, off to Mass, requested my absentee ballot (the short-fingered vulgarian will not be re-elected if I can impede it), lunch and resumed Legends work on Job. I almost finished Job, the finish line was in sight, but I didn’t quite get there; I spent a long-ish interval looking back at web evidence for my primary and secondary school days. I’ll mop that up tomorrow and resume Elijah and James.
Margaret made stuffed peppers for dinner, and we watched the Watchmen film with a view toward watching the television series later.

Slept well, fresh morning, and I considered not going out for my morning run, but opted in the end to go for a slow run for a mile or so rather than a vigorous run for a mile and a half. Morning Office, and most of the day spent hammering away at (first) the Twelve Patriarchs section of Legends vol 2, and (second) the Job (!) section. At the end of the productive day, Margaret made pizza (or, as she notes, more properly ‘cone of veg held together, loosely, by cheese, sitting precariously on a pizza base’) and we watched , which we thought surprisingly good. Partway through the film, we enjoyed a wee chat with Thomas, Si, and Laura; Thomas has encountered the Muppets and is wildly enthusiastic about them, his vocabulary is exploding, and he’s more adept at interacting with the world. He is captivated by ‘Kumbaya’, which led Margaret and me to reflect that we are so old that when we learned ‘Kumbaya’, it wasn’t the threadbare instance of what cynical observers could deploy as a synecdoche for over-optimistic utopianism.

Fresh run in the morning, Morning Office, and then I celebrated the Mass for the first time in months. Margaret and I went to Rick’s for breakfast (sitting outside, as we do), then returned to work at home via Sainsbury’s, where we picked up some odds and ends. A CFP prompted me to think about the novel Towing Jehovah for the first time in fifteen years or so, and when I snapped back into reality I couldn’t force myself to attention to Elijah or James. So I transcribed some pages from Legends and shook my head. I really need to have a ms for the James essay done by the end of the month. On the other hand, I finished the Jacob and Joseph series of Legends, and am rapidly finishing the Twelve Patriarchs portion, which will launch me onto Moses in Egypt.
Margaret made spaghetti with tomato sauce for dinner, and we watched The Meg as part of our ‘watch every film in which Jason Statham plays himself’ film series.

The day was unexpectedly warm this morning, so as I took another untimed (1.4 mile) run I shed my hoodie. Morning Office, a bit of work on translating a poem from the Greek, Mass, breakfast, a rest-of-the-morning meeting with Fr Andreas about teaching homiletics, dropped off my black jackets in preparation for clerical season, some research reading (Irigaray on the Vegetal), grocery shopping, and then back home at 4:30, which leaves relatively little time for productivity. Maybe some before dinner and Dicte.

Has anyone noticed that over a relatively short interval, the time of sunrise seems to have raced from ‘before I would wake up’ to ‘Holy smoke, is it that late already?’ I did wake up in time to not rush, so undertook an untimed full morning run, cool weather, Morning Office, Mass, hot breakfast, and a morning and early afternoon of concentrated work on Elijah, interspersed with some marking. As my powers of concentration ebbed, I modulated to working on Legends, but I had made manifest progress on the Elijah front.

We dined on broccoli, baked beans, and boiled potatoes with cheese, and watched a pair of Docte episodes, nearing the end of the series.

Untimed mile and a half, Morning Office, Mass, crumpet for breakfast (out of fruit), some more reading in the Talmud, off to the city centre to pick up Margaret’s repaired MacBook, home, to the grocers for soy milk, lunch, more research on Elijah and his meteorological intercession in rabbinic sources, leftovers for dinner, and Dicte and Cats.