I guess daisies will have to do

Rabbit, rabbit. Moving is exhausting. Everything that is not my computer, my medications, or Doppel-Abbie is still in boxes and bags in my brother's former bedroom and I have access to the internet but not reliably e-mail because of an idiosyncratic interaction with the house network. But the cats are in the summer kitchen; I have set up my futon, desk, green basket chair, and beige-colored square of spare carpet in a cleared space surrounded by long-stored furniture of various provenance; Autolycus has already summited Other Mount Refrigerator twice and Hestia has colonized the very top of the stacked bookshelves as her personal aerie from which her eyes flash out like foxfire as she surveys this strange new land. She was also walking along the top of the mantel over the grill when I came down the second time, which puts her about four inches from the ceiling and all of the fragile objects usually stacked there very hastily relocated by me. Autolycus ran to me, leapt into my arms, clung to my shoulder and purred like an outboard motor. It is too hot and sticky for me to sleep in the summer kitchen tonight, especially since I will not be able to use the ceiling fan (it is within paw's reach of the cabinets that run alongside Other Mount Refrigerator, which goes to prove my point about cat-proofing), but I made the bed anyway and have my fingers crossed for cooler weather. They have both eaten dinner. They have been allowed to play with the blue denim catnip feather. Hestia is still wary of the nighttime noises and the outdoor smells and the tiny greenish insects that keep whacking themselves into the fluorescent light over the futon—she is hissing and growling more than I would like, especially at her brother who gives me a betrayed look every time—but she has also stretched out on the carpet to have her belly rubbed, leapt in beside me when I sat in the basket chair, and dragged her two favorite toys off into the white cardboard box that I left on its side as a cat nest. I don't like being separated from them during the night, but all signs point to them being all right without me, if still settling in. I will put Doppel-Abbie on the pillow beside me and unpack the box fan in the morning.

Someday a change will come and you'll be beside me one more time

So far today has been very full of work and catch-up. My brain feels like a rinsed-off slate. I slept eight and a half hours and I am not surprised, exactly, that I dreamed about trying to track down an obscure film or television play involving Dan Duryea and ziggurat astronomy, but I really wish I remembered more about the plot. I have a distinct, monochrome memory of Duryea's character standing at a shop counter or a bank window, pleading with an authority figure while a tense-faced girl waited edgily at his side, and another of a desert sky at night, vividly and obviously a painted backdrop. There were some crowd scenes, something like a town hall meeting; the star-watching structures were contemporary rather than archaeological, so we weren't in ghosts-of-Cahokia territory, but that doesn't then tell me where we were instead. I remember stray lines from articles I read about it, no dialogue from the film itself. There might have been a fire. Have some links.

1. These are the poems that have most recently struck me: David Lau's "Curtain Design for Victory Over the Sun," Peter Balakian's "Head of Anahit/British Museum," Merlin Ural Rivera's "Memoria," and M.K. Foster's "Volta."

2. Last Friday, because I was still living within ten minutes' walk of Harvard, I made myself leave the house in the middle of a difficult afternoon and spent the rest of it much more calmly at the Harvard Semitic Museum and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology. At the former I was once again mistaken for a student; I explained to visitor services that I hadn't been affiliated with a university for eight years and never with Harvard and then regretted it slightly because the third floor, where I like to visit the cuneiform and the artifacts from Cyprus, turned out to be full of professors with office hours. I left at four o'clock anyway because it seemed polite. The Peabody had a small but intensely beautiful exhibit of feathered clothing and ornaments, including an Ainu woman's coat made from the skins of dozens of silver-black ducks, in the same room as two bilingual exhibits on Moche ceramic vessels and the many kinds of American ocarina. I really like the news about the Philistine cemetery.

3. The HFA has announced its annual all-night marathon and the theme this year is trains. I'm not sure how many times I need to see Snowpiercer (2013), and Night Train to Munich (1940) is a hot mess whose best feature is Paul Henreid cast not yet against type as a sympathetic villain, but I haven't seen Twentieth Century (1934) in a few years, I am always up for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), I know nothing about The Narrow Margin (1952), and I am very interested in Nayak (1966), which if I make it will be my first Satyajit Ray. I'm planning to try.

4. I continue to think that John le Carré looks like one of his own characters.

5. I just really like the sphinx on this 5th-century black-figure lekythos.

I write this post from the futon in the summer kitchen, where Hestia is washing herself on the cat blanket and Autolycus on the planter dangles all of his long black limbs like Anansi or Arm from Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (1994). I have conquered the internet issue! It just took something like thirty feet of ethernet cable. I still need to set up the box fan. derspatchel is on his way over. We will camp out with cats.