Still hosted by Conversion Diary.
1. Blogging hasn’t received much priority over the past week or so; I’m much more focused on fiction writing and just haven’t done a whole lot else. Lost City is finally starting to move!
1. Blogging hasn’t received much priority over the past week or so; I’m much more focused on fiction writing and just haven’t done a whole lot else. Lost City is finally starting to move!
2. Well, that and I discovered Netflix has Chuck on view instant. Maybe I’ll solve the above problem by blogging about that, because man that’s a great show!
3. In addition to stepping up my writing, I’ve been carving out more reading time, since that’s fallen off lately. Right now I’m tackling a bunch of books at once, as usual: I started Marlowe’s Faustus last night, I’m still plugging along through the monster that is Witness, I’ve resumed my study of the Summa, am casually re-reading Chesterton’s The Catholic Church and Conversion, and have recently gotten back into Monster Hunter Vendetta, the second book of the very fun Munster Hunter International series (if you want to know what those books are like: the part I read this morning had the hero getting into a pit-brawl with a gang of gnomes for calling one of them a lawn ornament). Whew! As you can see, I really need to allot more time to reading to get through all these.
4. The above makes it sound as though I’m a lot smarter and more active than I really am. Let me clarify; I’m reading these books in the same sense that I’m keeping my apartment clean: I get around to it maybe once a week if I don’t get too distracted.
5. Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis (also Aldous Huxley and…someone else, right?). There was an embarrassing moment earlier this week when, with all the coverage going on, I ended up thinking it was on the 19th and posted on Facebook to that effect. Well, in my defense, when half the internet spends the whole week leading up to the date of Kennedy’s assassination talking about it, it’s sometimes hard to pick out which date specifically they mean to commemorate (especially if you’re skimming for the more interesting bits).
Anyway, my carelessness about facts notwithstanding, today we ought to do something to commemorate the passing of one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth-century by reading one of his works. If you have time, plunk down with Screwtape (the audio book is only about four-and-a-half hours). If not, peruse a little in The Weight of Glory or The God in the Dock for his essays (one of my favorite is a very brief sketch where he imagines an argument between his soul and body: “That’s soul all over; give me an order and then blame me for obeying!”).
6. In violin I’m starting to try to learn vibrato (that thing where you wiggle you fingers to get a trill on the full and half notes). It’s really difficult! As in ‘how the heck do people do this?’ difficult. Basically, it involves quickly adjusting the amount of finger touching the string, without jerkign the whole violin all over the place. Or, to put it another way, you move the hand/arm in question in such a way that the only effect is that the finger holding down the string moves slightly. Yeesh! Still, I’m making some progress; I have the foggiest idea of how it’s supposed to work now, which is an improvement over last week.
7. This weekend is my birthday! No real plans yet for the day itself, but I’m taking Monday off and planning on doing two things; going down to the shooting range and writing at the coffee shop for hours on end. Huzzah!
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