I moved a metric ton of rocks today. Okay, maybe not a ton. Or even a tonne. But it was a lot. Last weekend a kindly neighbor bequeathed me with a bunch of large stones. Said bequeathment doubled the size of my rock pile and so I said to myself, `self, verily thou doth have a sufficiently large number of rocks.' And so I built the retaining wall I'd had in mind for close to two years now. Doing this entailed considerable shoveling and moving of dirt. I'm done. Boy am I done now. And my hands are lacerated to heck in a handbasket.

I mostly slacked off at my Latin classes this week. Monday was the first test of the quarter. I knew it was coming. I just forgot to study. The same was mostly true of the weekly vocabulary quiz. The homework, I was doing the hour before the class day it was due. Yet my grades were good. But I'm not taking the class to get good grades. I'm taking the class to learn Latin. For the most part of kept up. Last week, though, was just kind of meh. But now we get to participles. W00t!

I went to a lecture by the Reverend David Meconi, SJ titled Traveling without Moving: Love as Ecstatic Union in Plotinus, Augustine and Dante. It was quite good, highlighting some of the problems with strict Platonic (and Neoplatonic) thinking when it comes to interpersonal relationships. I should write more. The largest problem was that Reverend Meconi didn't discuss the possibility that the difference between Dante and his predecessors (Plotinus and Augustine) lies in the rediscovery of Aristotle and in the influence of medieval Sufi interpretations of the courtly love tradition in Persian poetry. I also got a vicarious thrill out of his extended discussion of the Malatesta dynasty in hell in the Inferno.

I went to a show choir performance by my daughter this evening. What can I say? It was show tunes. I fell asleep.