Whoever said Lord Nelson's dead?

All in all, this was a good weekend. Saturday contained brunch with gaudior and the usual suspects; Sunday involved schreibergasse, Grace, a five-person game of Elixir, and cooking multiple very tasty dishes; and I am throwing Monday in with the weekend because it included lunch with straussmonster ("epic LOLs"), chai with a beloved professor, and unexpected awesome conversation with duckhalladay on the train back from New Haven. I needed this weekend badly. I now have a recipe for eggplant that I not only tolerate, but love. And my time spent changing lightbulbs leaves me feeling oddly useful.

Leaving the station at Old Saybrook, we passed an abandoned building in a small lot: block concrete walls, the metal door shuttered down, weeds and dead ivies around the lintel and the blind windows. Probably it was a garage or a repair shop, something very mechanical and prosaic. There were trees growing in all around, dustily and dry-leaved in the westering glare. But high on the facing wall were metal letters in a round lowercase font that read apollo, and of course my thoughts jumped to a derelict shrine: not Olympian Apollo, the far-shooter with the silver bow, the lyre-player and the master of the chorus, but Apollo Loxias, the god aslant, whispering out of the dark fates and futures that only in hindsight align themselves into sense. The last few days have been given to experimentation with sonnets. Perhaps the next one should be the hymn-god's. (And if I get it wrong, he will send back the mouse . . .)

Speaking of sonnets, if anyone has favorites to recommend, please feel free to do so. I have been reading primarily Seamus Heaney and Gerard Manley Hopkins and wondering why it took me until now to discover Geoffrey Hill. He's like A Canterbury Tale in iambics. I need a more prolifically-paying job.