Camera Camera !@#$%

Ok, the good news is that the digital camera has returned from its vacation in Illinois.  The nice people at the Canon Factory Resort claim to have returned it to its factory specifications.  And I believe them.  I’ve already taken a dozen pictures of things I’d been meaning to take pictures of and they’re sweetly uploaded onto the Mac here, and I’ve seen them and fiddled with them and they’re pretty.  

But I can’t show them to you because Blogger has a headache or something.  Try as I might, an “internal error” is preventing me from uploading any of these lovely new photos.  Or any lovely old photos.  

I’ll try again. 

!@#$%

One more time. 

*sigh*

I give up.  

So the fun post full of pictures that I had mapped out in my mind is sort of pointless right now, so I’ll try to distract you.  

Hey, my eight year old started reading the Aeneid tonight.  Yeah, the one by Virgil.  Only then I mentioned that the monsters in The Odyssey were way better, so he switched.  This was all prompted by these books.  We’ve been reading them out loud since we finished HP.  They are fun too.  Anyway, at a loss for what to read on his own before bedtime tonight, having finished this earlier today, I was browsing the bookshelves for something to suggest until we can get him to a library tomorrow.  The Aeneid sort of jumped out at me because of the Percy books, so I took it out and told him what it was.  “But it might be too hard, being this big, elaborate poem-thing and all,” I said.  He snatched it out of my hands before I could return it to the shelves.  Then I dug out the Odyssey and there was a discussion of Greek and monsters and prose and poetry and the prudent use of a glossary.  

They’re tough, but he likes them, and he immediately had an easier time with the Fitzgerald Odyssey than the Aeneid, whose translator I cannot remember right now and the book is in there with the sleeping child (Edit:  turns out it’s the Mandelbaum.  If you’ve ever ready Dante’s Inferno, or even the entire Commedia, there’s a decent chance you read Mandelbaum’s version.  Cream-colored covers with the black ink drawings of the torments of Hell.  Thank Barry Moser for those.)  Suffice to say it’s the one with the green cover and the pen and ink drawing of a person (also by Moser.  Dido?) bleeding to death.  I read The Odyssey for the first time in TWELFTH grade!!!  Who is this child I have spawned? 

One more try on the pictures.  

Gr.  

Next time:  Paint and hammers.