eating crow

I am humbled. With all that happened in the last six weeks of 2006, I couldn't get my groove back. Then since the New Year, my hobbies have consisted of baking/cooking and spending far too much time combining works on LibraryThing. Then I thought to myself last week that it wasn't that I don't have time for Latin - it's that whenever the laptop is around, any free time gets sucked into the black hole of the internet. So I've been keeping the laptop upstairs to limit the amount of time I spend online, and it's amazing how much more I get done.

It hasn't been difficult to find time to work on Latin with the laptop out of sight. For most of the day, my Latin books are sitting out on an otherwise bare dining room table; seeing them whenever I happen to walk past is a powerful reminder. I save the most demanding work for when I have a block of time when Eliza is asleep, but I've been pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to translate just a sentence or two here and there when the books are already lying out.

After 4½ months off, I've had a challenging week of daily Latin. At first, I had to look up everything that I'd forgotten, but it has been getting easier with each day. I decided not to start from the beginning but rather to continue where I left off near the end of chapter six. Now after a week, I'm ¾ through chapter seven. I ordered a couple goodies to keep me motivated:

and .

My old group, Prometheus, is on chapter 12, and the newest group, Themis (started January 2007) is already on chapter 10. Prometheus is going at the rate of one chapter every two weeks while Themis has a chapter-a-week clip. Since the book is 40 chapters long, Themis will soon overtake Prometheus, so it may be that I catch up to Prometheus first even though at the moment they're two chapters ahead of Themis.

For now, I'm just taking it one day at a time. A busy holiday week is coming up, but I'll be sure to spare some time for Latin.