I, Claudius, pt. 2

If you haven’t read much of I, Claudius, don’t despair. You can catch up. Stephen and I haven’t gotten very far. Not because the book isn’t good (it is!) but because Stephen’s life is very full, and so he hasn’t had time for reading; and because I lost my copy and found it only yesterday. So I’m still on Chapter V, and Stephen is on Chapter 3. (Stephen’s edition has Arabic chapter numerals; mine, more fittingly, has Roman ones.) So far, in the novel, Livia — Augustus’s wife, Claudius’s grandmother — has been poisoning many of the other characters. Just when it feels like the story is turning to something else, Gasp!, another poisoning. (This is Stephen’s summary.) I’ve also been reading some rather garish short stories by Ruth Rendell, who appears to have been, for a time, the most similar writer to Agatha Christie. And I’ve been reading a lot of other books and some philosophy articles. This was interesting and accessible, I thought (before yesterday, I’d never read it).

Also, these last weeks I’ve weighed more lbs than ever. And today I’m groggy due to illness. Still chipper, though.

The underworld

Another long interlude between blog entries.

The newest project of the Stephen-and-John-Paul Book Club is I, Claudius by Robert Graves, two chs/day. Read it with us. Today is just the second day. So far, the book is a hoot.

Yesterday I resumed my tutoring job at IUSB. I tutored zero tutees. This morning, at my highschool job, I discovered the building’s basement. It has offices and classrooms and a largish student population. For all I know, it may be the first circle of the school’s underworld: there may be a sub-basement; there may be a sub-sub-basement; there may be no end to the basements.

(I was warned about the woman I was sent to. Volatile was how she was described. But this morning, she was nice enough.)

Snowed in !!!

Well, not today; today we went to school. But yes, tomorrow we’ll be Snowed In.

In the snowy and the blowy

In the blowy and the snowy

[A House for Mr Biswas]

Back to the salt mines

Ana & David have gone back to Houston, and Edoarda & Stephen have returned from Nicaragua, bearing gifts and lbs.

Today was my first day back at work. I researched the prices of various editions of Plato — one of our teachers hopes to assign Republic to his highschoolers (God bless the International Baccalaureate). Not that I’m envious. Due to the budget, they’ll probably end up reading Jowett. … After I finished working, my church friend Karin drove me home, which spared me some agony since the temperature was close to zero. … On Wednesday it may be too cold to work at all. M&M are praying for the city to be Snowed In.

I ask E&S if the first sentence is too harsh. They reassure me that it isn’t. “It’s the truth.”

Edoarda: “You can just say that we came back hermosos.”

I ask them for permission to quote these things because lately I’ve been worrying that my teasing is too cruel.