The obligatory flag photo. It is my country, the only one I got.
But also, the work of bees goes on, as it has done forever, and God willing will always do until the end of time:
I need to cut back this bee balm before we leave town next week, to encourage it to flower again. I always rather like it at this stage, though, with its ragged little petals all splayed. And of course the bees love it and work it over mightily.
Not much on today, as I guess befits a holiday. The Viking leaves for the airport in the next half-hour, and I'm sad to see him go. It's been a too-short visit, but a nice one. After that, I need to work on my last essay for next week and read more of the Poetic Edda, for an archived course I started yesterday at the Albertus Magnus Institute, taught by my friend Amy Fahey of Thomas More College, on Norse literature. The 8-session course covers the Poetic and Prose Eddas and the Icelandic Sagas, the backdrop for Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, a body of literature beloved not only of Tolkien, but also C.S. Lewis and, not surprisingly, the Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset. This seems like an important piece of the large literary puzzle to have in place, and while I wait for my Middle-English poetry course to begin, I figured I might as well make the most of the time.
Also: some house laundry, in the wake of the Viking visit. It's a good day to hang things out to dry, and I plan to take advantage of that. Sheets, towels, kitchen linens, etc --- time to bake it all in the sun.
We'll do dinner at home tonight, since we've been out twice this week already, then go for a drive with Dora so as to miss the fireworks.
It's another hot one, high of 94F.
Wearing:
*Secondhand Flax linen tunic (S, if you can believe it), bought spring 2024
*Secondhand NY&Co linen-blend skirt, bought January 2023
*Xero Jessie sandals, bought spring 2023
Yeah, yeah, the patriotic outfit. I didn't want to be too screamingly overt, but when else ya gonna wear this combination? Answer: I do wear this tunic with this skirt at other times, but today seems the obvious day. And I might as well give the teal Z-Trek sandals a rest, in favor of these grubby Jessie sandals. They need a wash, in the same way that the soul of a nation might be said --- nevermind.
Anyway, here we are.
LUNCHTIME UPDATE
Well, didn't mean to be a downer. I do have . . . shall we say . . . mixed feelings about our political situation, but then there has not been a phase of my adult life when I have not, for some reason or other, had mixed feelings about our political situation.
But --- though it sounds trivializing --- life does go on. I can't do much about the big picture. What I can do things about is the little picture, the one I immediately inhabit. So, again, here we are. I can't save the world, but I can do the laundry. I can create a little order in my home. Everything could be swept away tomorrow, but today is the only day I have to live right now, and I can do these things.
So: the laundry is washed and is drying on the line. The dog is walked and is now reposing in her crate, where it's cool and shady and she has some water and a soft bed. I have made headway on my essay. In a little while I think I might watch the second class meeting for this Norse lit course --- I can't access the specific syllabus, but I think I've basically read the things she's going to talk about in the second session. Then I can keep reading the Poetic Edda. I'm not going to read absolutely everything, and I am doing some skim-reading because I want to complete this course in days, not weeks, but I will at least have read things.
And I'm going to eat some lunch. That's always good to do. It's part of maintaining order, and maintaining order is a way of maintaining civilization. The Benedictines knew this in the 6th century, and it remains true and important to know today. It's the little things that prop up the world as we know it.
AFTERNOON UPDATE
People have started randomly shooting off loud things, but I did entice Dora out to walk around the block and pee. We are going to load her up in the car later on, drive up to Blowing Rock for dinner (so I guess I'm not cooking, which I can't complain about), then go up to the Parkway, out of the way of any noise, we hope. In Blowing Rock we can park under a covered garage, where the car will stay cool --- I'm going to walk D. again, I hope, before we go, so that between that and the car ride she'll be tired enough to sleep. We'll take the smaller crate with us, with her cooling mat, so she can ride with her seat belt, but then be crated while we're not in the car with her. That seems safest.
I have also let her lick a lick mat spread with hemp oil, so possibly she's good and stoned by now. We can always hope so. Fortunately she likes the taste of hemp oil. I've been adding it to her food for a while now, figuring that it has many healthful qualities, but also . . . hemp is the first ingredient of any high-quality calming chew for dogs, and hemp oil is a lot cheaper than a tub of high-quality calming chews. It does actually seem to help some, too.
I watched the second class session for the Norse lit course --- it was very good. My friend Amy is a marvelous teacher, and in her quiet, unassuming way, she's brilliant. She moves around a lot in these lectures, in terms of ideas and frames for discussion, bringing in music as well as other literature as part of the discussion. This second installment began with an examination of a (replica) Norse chess piece, which was a great on-ramp into a conversation wisdom literature and the role of knowledge in the Poetic Edda.
Again, it is FREE to apply to be a "Fellow" of the Albertus Magnus Institute (though they cheerfully accept donations, and a regular pledge gives you access to a number of things that I right now do not have access to). There's no failing if you don't complete something, but it is fun to have a reason to work through some reading. I am very much wishing I had known about all this when this particular class was offered live --- these are synchronous classes, with live discussion, when they're first offered. I'm very much looking forward to the Gawain/Pearl Poet class. But even this archived class is giving some nice shape to my time during the day, as well as some impetus to read more things.