state of the Hobbit, on the road

I have my new glasses, which adrian_turtle kindly picked up and held for me (the optician is on vacation right now), and I can see better. Not perfectly: the best they can do for me these days is 20/30. But better, and they're lighter, which is nice. Adrian reminds me that they are purple, which is also good: subtle, but definitely purple.

Adrian and I are house/pet-sitting in a pleasantly air conditioned house in Belmont. The coolth is very nice; the stairs are a disadvantage; it turns out I sleep very well in a waterbed, and my lower back, which has been aching at a low level for a couple of days, likes it.

We had a pleasant chat with nineweaving yesterday in Harvard Square: we had stopped for ice cream rather than just changing buses in the bus tunnel, and she was picking up copies of A Midsummer Night's Dream. We talked about the pitfalls of con programming, and about different editions of books: she wanted several the same for a play reading, which led to me remembering my high school English class in which we were doing Homer. The school owned, and therefore we all were given, paperback copies of a prose translation. However, my Greek teacher had sung the praises of Richmond Lattimore, I owned his version of the Odyssey, and so I brought it in to class. I half expected criticism. What happened was that Mr. Baratta saw it on my desk, and proceeded to borrow it to read to the class from. (I hadn't gotten to Homer in Greek at that point; the next year, I did a little of the Iliad. I've forgotten almost all of it, as happens with a language one doesn't use. But I'm glad to have done that.)