dolorosa_12 | Carry on until the sun will set

This has been the first weekend in quite a while spent at home, without visitors, and without various time-consuming and exhausting household tasks to get done — and it has been wonderful. I've got a fairly full-on weeek coming up in terms of work, and having this brief, relaxing pause has been incredibly helpful.

It poured with rain all day yesterday, and Matthias and I got thoroughly soaked when heading out to the market, but we're now well stocked up on fresh fruit and vegetables, have picked up and returned various library books, and we were able to spend most of the remainder of the day hanging around inside, listening to the rain pour down around us. I felt bad for the stall-holders — not just at the market, but also at some kind of food festival taking place around the cathedral, since they would have been sodden, and would not have got much in the way of footfall.

Yesterday was also our wedding anniversary, and Matthias and I celebrated by going out for dinner and eating a ridiculous amount of sushi, which was delicious and cozy in the rain. We've also been revelling in all the various major works that have been done in our house over the past few weeks and are now finally complete: landscaping of the front garden, replacing the carpet on the stairs (the new stuff feels so soft and squishy underfoot), and having the tatty carpet in the living room, study and upstairs landing replaced with laminate. It all looks fantastic, and it's just such a relief to have it completed at last — what was there before was bothering me a lot, it was depressing to look at, and now it looks fresh, and clean, and new.

Other than all that, it's been a fairly quiet weekend. The weather today was nicer, so Matthias and I went out for a brief looping walk along the river, picking up takeaway coffee on the way home. Once I've finished catching up on Dreamwidth I'll go upstairs and do a slow, stretchy, calming yoga class.

Beyond all that, I've been doing my semi-annual reread of one of my favourite book series of all time, Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy. I've already written so much about these books, in my two tags for the series; my default icon on Dreamwidth is a drawing by the author of one of the characters with a quote from the books about her, for many years I was the series' sole online fandom, trying to generate fannish enthusiasm through sheer force of will, to the extent that I got to know the author and she thanked me in the acknowledgements of the third book 'for being generally wonderful.' In other words, my feelings about these books are deep, and just a lot in general. It's not so much what the books are about, although obviously I like that too (alt-history contemporary Roman empire political conspiracy thriller in which a ragtag band of dispossessed and devalued people — some of whom have supernatural abilities — try to take on the might of an empire), it's also the way the books are written, and the way the point-of-view characters think about themselves and carry themselves through the world. Of the four main point-of-view characters, three have this intense interiority — they're in their own heads so much, with this instense, obsessive focus on their own thoughts and actions, and how they are perceived by the people around them — and the fourth point-of-view character is basically the opposite of that, and the other three are constantly baffled and astonished as to how he can be so comfortable and easy in his own skin, in the company of any other people, everywhere. All this, shall we say, resonates a lot.

And that, in essence, has been my weekend so far.

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From:

vriddy

Hm... *places library hold, although suspended for a few weeks because I have 8 books out already and the juggling return dates is getting unwieldy* Extremely intrigued now :D

I'm also having a quiet rainy weekend, and it is so welcome and so appreciated :)

dolorosa_12

That's a lot of library books! I hope you like Romanitas, although to be honest, I've never had much luck in recommending it to others. Aside from one person I used to know back when we were both on Livejournal, everyone who's tried the series on my recommendation didn't make it past the first book, for a variety of reasons. It's a series about which I find it hard to be objective — it's not so much that it reflects my values (although broadly speaking that's true as well) as that there is something about the way those three point-of-view characters are written that made my understand something essential about myself on a personal level, in terms of how I react to, move through, and see myself in the world. The books made me feel seen — not so much in terms of seeing my own identity or experiences reflected back, just that we have a common way of responding to those experiences, and something I wasn't used to seeing portrayed in fiction.

In any case, I do hope the books work for you, but I'm cautious about book recommendations because everyone brings such different things to the table, and I try to be mindful of that.

The rainy weekend was so nice, wasn't it? Autumnal temperatures, and a good excuse to rest indoors.

Edited Date: 2023-08-06 05:21 pm (UTC)