The elephants, though, functioned as tanks do today

I didn't mean to drop off the internet quite as dramatically as I did last week: I was spending most of my days out of the house and my sleep went down to an average of two to three hours a night with the result that my spare waking hours were going toward work and the rest toward feeling that my brain had converted itself into slurry. Last night I bought a second light-blocking curtain for the north-facing window and read myself to sleep with National Geographic's "The Most Influential Figures of Ancient History" and Hestia curled against my hip, kneading and purring; I checked out around Darius I, having first skipped forward to Hannibal (and been really entertained that Scipio Africanus featured as a sidebar player with the epithet "Hannibal's Bane," which suddenly made the whole thing sound like P.C. Hodgell or Tolkien), and woke this morning around eleven o'clock instead of six. Autolycus still tried to get me out of bed by climbing onto my chest, washing my face, and biting lightly at my wrists, but unlike every morning of the last two weeks then gave me up for lost, settled onto the pillow next to my head, and fell back asleep for nearly another hour during which I dozed and had dreams I can't remember, except that they were not nightmares. For lunch I made myself the fried sardines with tomato sauce I had been wanting for about forty-eight hours solid. A lot of neat things happened this week which I have not written up, including movies, theater, and cooking lamb curry with schreibergasse. Let's see how much I can sleep tonight.