"grammar can be exciting"

1. Something about the first week back is just so brutal on the senses. I can't believe I still have class for two more days before I get to "rest" and work on other, equally pressing things.

2. First thing today was Latin. I had an awful lot of homework for the second class; but you know, in the beginning ten practice sentences would take me two or three hours to decipher. Now, in the last chapter of the text (finishing up odds and ends before tackling the Pro Archia), the eight sentences took me about half an hour, and the fairly tricky passage of Cicero only took about an hour. I did pretty well, too. I'm somewhat hopeful.
Geyssen made a point of telling us today that the next few weeks of translation would be, in his words, hellish. It's good to have some warning, I guess, but I do feel pretty good about it at this point. Relatively, anyway. Latin always gives me vapours, but that's more or less to be expected.

3. And then there was my honours seminar. Last semester I had a really good time, surprisingly, mainly because even though the work was fairly intense theory (which I had no background in at all), the people were really fun and our discussions were unbelievably helpful for making theory make sense.
This semester we've been joined by Sam, another of the field school chicks, and also Tanya, Brian Campbell's girlfriend of several years. I know them both very slightly but I'm hoping that, the class being a fairly friendly environment, I'll get to know them more. Our work is different, too; I explained some of it yesterday, but today I learned we're also passing in written assignments almost every week as we prepare our master's thesis proposals. It's going to be a lot of work.

4. When I got home, I did some grocery shopping (the cats were verging on mutinous over the state of the cat food) and then tried to get some work done for the report I'm pulling together for Sue. It was slow going until much later this evening; I'm just getting a bit worn out from the shock of actually doing things all day long. I spent a while reading and playing online, and then Sean's parents unexpectedly showed up in town, so we went out to have coffee with them. It was a pleasant evening, and in the end I even got some work done on the report, though not as much as I'd like (I just don't have the information I need at the moment; I'm going to have to ask Sue about some of it and put in more work tomorrow night or Friday).

5. This book looks extremely entertaining. From the back cover:

That is a knit lace coracle. (A BOAT.)