It’s rare indeed that I can say I got to enjoy sunshine and birds singing on my birthday, which is nestled deep in the most hopeless stretch of winter. A welcome surprise in the moment—but also ominous, what with climate change and all. More and more, our weather has been more reminiscent of Florida than Pennsylvania … more on that in a bit.

Writing Updates

I have the informal goal of drafting a chapter roughly every 2 weeks, giving myself more room for sections that are more demanding. February worked out pretty well for this: the Book 3 draft is now at 12 chapters, 56,000 words. As I get deeper into it, my expectations for the plot and characters have changed so much—for the better, I think. Part of me feels bad for the “wasted” notes and outlining I did earlier, but the other part of me feels like that all had to come out before I could reach the point I’m at now.

Current Goals

Well-rounded Latin practice. Aside from normal practice this month, I wound up meeting a few classics professors at my alma mater and explaining why I thought speaking Latin was valuable and should be part of regular Latin curriculum. It’s kinda crazy to me that it’s not, seeing how spoken human language came long before writing and is one of the most fundamental ways we establish connections with others. I hope they take the message to heart. It would be nice to have more people to talk to!

Being a good Stoic. I had a big test late this month when a severe windstorm swept through our state, knocking down many trees and power lines and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power. We were really lucky in that our power was only out for 8 hours (some people lost it for days!). It did mean throwing away a good amount of groceries we had bought just hours earlier, but that didn’t bother me really. What I found myself most worried about was my cat: could we keep the house warm enough overnight, and if not, could we find somewhere to go that would take him? We have friends in the city, but not any who are prepared to board a cat at a moment’s notice. I admit, I had trouble letting go of those worries during the outage, however much I wanted to relax. Thankfully, our power came back on before it got too cold in the house. This was certainly a learning experience for us. We’ll be getting a few UPS units so that, during the next outage, we can run a space heater in one room and reduce the likelihood of having to leave our house.

Listening to German. In the comments of my last post, Walter had the wonderful suggestion that I try playing video games in German—mentioning Skyrim in particular, which I’ve played through many times and still adore. Instead of firing it up again, though, I figured I would look for videos of the game in German. That way, I could pause and replay cutscenes as many times as I liked. I started with this series, which is the only one I could find that was both in German and had German subtitles enabled. I find the narrator’s running commentary and customized loading screens hilarious. He also has many more videos on learning German, so after I’ve reviewed Skyrim some more, I want to check out the rest of his channel!

Civic engagement. I missed the LWV meeting, but intend to volunteer for voter registration again soon.

That’s it for this month. See you again soon! :)