Winter                                                                      Seed Catalog Moon

My Latin skills have begun to increase.  I can almost see myself learning.  Most of the time for the last four years it’s been slog, slog, slog, slog, insight.  Repeat.  Now something has begun to happen, like that learning has begun to snowball, building on itself.  Which, I guess, is what’s happening.  It’s weird, but fun.

(pic:  Ta Dah)

Microsoft, I’d forgotten how much you used to frustrate me.  Now that I no longer work as much in Word my animus toward Microsoft had softened, but getting Missing back from Robert Klein reminded me.  I can’t open the damned file.  I’ve had this problem ever since I “upgraded” to Word 2013.  It has some protective mechanism that is very suspicious of outside documents.  I’ve unlocked most of them, but so far this one, one I really care about, won’t open.  Grrrr.

Still, I’ve looked at some of Robert’s work and he’s very thorough and helpful.  I can’t utilize his work to its full capacity until I can get the document into Word however.  That’s where I can manipulate the editing and see exactly what he meant.  Grrrr.  Again.

One step closer to finishing up the final draft.  Might get it done before Denver.  If I can open it in the first place.

Winter              New (Seed Catalog) Moon

The new year has begun, or as I thought about it in light of a post below, the next year has begun (Happy Next Year!).  It finds me following trails laid down in other times.

In the morning I went through, for the second or third time, parts of the Lycaon story that I have previously translated.  The goal now is to sight read the passage, translating with minimal helps.  Right now I have to write a definition over the word, perhaps a grammatical note, but the way to get fast is to read Latin as I read English.  That’s a long way off, but I can see the horizon line of that skill.  When I reach that point, I’ll be able to do serious scholarly work as well as learn great stories.

In the afternoon I picked up Loki’s Children, itching to get my fingers on the keyboard, putting some pages behind me.  Got waylaid looking up material about Thor, who is a very interesting god, probably the most loved god in Norse antiquity and mainly a giant-slayer, though he had a sideline in the inadvertent killing of dwarfs.  He killed Alvis, for example, by asking him questions until the sun rose and the light of dawn turned Alvis to stone. Alvis wanted to marry Thrud, Thor’s daughter.  Thrud, not exactly an elegant name, is it?  Maybe it sounds better in Old Norse.

The research turned out to be very useful, allowing me a thread I can use for building a strong throughline in Loki’s Children.  Sorry, but that part’s top secret.