Summer Weather

It was another very warm day, got up into the 80s. Just like yesterday, I spent most of the day inside, partly working, partly trying to work. After a few weeks of shameful neglect, I am also back with the cleaning rotation--yesterday was the bathroom, today the bedroom and the hall. This is partly inspired by the fact that last night I noticed that the bottoms of Pocket of Bolts' feet were BLACK! He generously said that really he ought to wear slippers instead of going about barefoot, but it's my fault for letting the floor get so dirty.

For an hour or so while working this morning, I found some real joy in it. I was translating a passage that had always seemed too hard before, something I had put off doing until "some day" when I had time to sit down and do it. Now it's time to put the passage into the dissertation, but it turns out to be a really interesting passage, albeit long. I had a number of ideas about it even. But I have to learn to run with these things and pound out some pages, instead of doing what I did which was get distracted... wander off... start worrying about other things.

Pocket of Bolts came crutching home early, and helpfully interrupted my afternoon procrastination. I got a bit more work in, then did the cleaning as mentioned above, and went off to the store to shop for dinner. Pocket of Bolts' ankle is getting a little better, now that we have figured out how to wrap it correctly. It seems to be less swollen and painful, but I persuaded him to use the crutches anyway.

I am sitting in on a seminar on the Book of Changes. The prof said that we should at least memorize the basic trigrams, which I did. That gives you eight hexagrams right off the bat, because each of the trigrams doubled is one of the sixty-four hexagrams. For fun, I have decided to memorize the rest of the hexagrams too, one per day, not in the traditional sequence but in a mnemonically simpler order involving simple combinations of the trigrams. You might think I'm crazy to take on any more projects, but this one is quite relaxing. It makes me feel like one day is different from the next, and that each day if I've done nothing else I've at least learned one new thing. Pocket of Bolts tested me on my trigrams and said my memory is scary-good. I do miss having simpler tasks like classroom language-learning, where your success is measured by your skill with flash-cards...

Today's hexagram is Pi, heaven over earth, standstill/stagnation. Nowhere to go from here but up!