Two events today with my parents:

The 2009 Art Car Parade was wonderful, but very very hot.  There was a great little breeze that eased it occasionally, but it was really just hot. The cars were fantastic, our neighbors were great, and it was a fun time. Behold, the two bunny slipper cars:

See more (to the tune of almost 300 photos!) at my Flickr Set.

And Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul at the MFAH. This exhibit was so moving, I almost cried several times, and I definitely went into paroxysms of joy over several pieces.  Not just the photos and stories about the war-torn land full of archaeological excavations that have been abandoned (and the Bamiyan Buddhas, damn), but the glorious artifacts themselves - amazing and beautiful works the like of which I have very rarely seen.
One Roman medallion in particular made me go back for second and third looks, it was so delicately beautiful, a tiny infant Eros with the most beatific expression, embracing a butterfly Psyche.  And three ivory table legs in the shape of voluptuous and elaborately dressed Indian women. And the most amazing thing of all, a drinking vessel of Roman glass, painting with figures in inks that retained all the brightness and cartoon-vividness of a souvenir McDonald's glass, I swear. Unbelievable. Then came the room full of burial gold from nomads of the Steppes, and my art inspiration just went into overdrive. I may have to spend some quality time with some textile history books to envision the full beauty of the garb they must have worn.
It is incredible what was saved, and just imagining the scope of things that must have been lost, whether to looting or destruction, boggles the mind. The exhibit holds a tragedy and a miracle all in one, and I highly recommend that everyone who can get to it go see it. It'll be in Houston for another week, and opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in June.

On the list for tomorrow: IKEA and Star Trek.

I didn't really pay attention to this when it first surfaced, but a good non-fandom friend of mine sent me the link yesterday and damn if this isn't a wonderful speech.

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement : Harvard Magazine:

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

Mom says that rather than my being grateful to have geek parents, they are grateful that I turned out to be a big geek, too.
:)
Awwww.

We're going to see Pompeii at the MFAH this afternoon.  Yay!!

I finally uploaded my photos from the New York trip.

This is my flickr set.

While I was busy finishing up Harry Potter, Mom was reading aloud from the helpful phrases in Ancient Rome on Five Denarii A Day. I was rather impressed at how well I did translating them on the fly in conversation. (Examples: Nomen mihi est Livia. Salve!*, Scorpio sum - quod signum tibi es?**, and the inevitably useful Noli me necare, cape omnias pecunias meas!***) Ten years of Latin does not just turn to jelly in my brain! Yay!

It's really awesome to have a whole family who agrees that Time Travel Vacations are the best idea EVAR, and who could even agree on two or three destinations, Ancient Rome obviously being one. (Not sure what decade we'd choose, though - we're partial to late Republic, but also to early Flavian, and of course Julio-Claudian. And of course this book is set way later than all of those.)

I should dig out my copy of Route 66 A.D. (thankfully purchased before it was rereleased under a much less exciting title with a relatively dull cover: Pagan Holiday) and see if they like that one, too. It's not quite the same, but it's pretty awesome.

And since we're on the topic of useful Latin phrases, I direct you to my favorite of the Latin for All Occasions and Even More Occasions collection:
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.****


*Hi, my name is Livia.
**I'm Scorpio - what sign are you?
***Don't kill me, take all my money!
****I have a catapult. Give me all the money or I will fling an enormous rock at your head.

Slashdot | Star Wars Takes Over Harvard Commencement:

It is tradition at Harvard is to have an undergraduate deliver a Latin Salutatory address. This year's speaker, Charles Joseph McNamara, delivered an address all about Star Wars in Latin!

Man, the minute I stepped off the elevator I knew I was in the stacks of a college library. Crowded, maze-like stacks, they were, too, and the whole room with that distinctive smell. Old books, aged linoleum, metal shelves, something else that public libraries just don't tend to have... It's not entirely definable, I suppose, but it was like a time machine back eleven years to the basement stacks of Vassar's Art Library. Wow.
I am now entering a personal classical renaissance. I picked up these cool and exciting books:

Hekate Soteira: A Study of Hekate's Roles in the Chaldean Oracles and Related Literature
Life's Daughter/Death's Bride
Roman Religion and the Cult of Diana at Aricia
Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods

Woo!

Yesterday I spent the evening immersed in antiquity.  First, I took a quick tour of Imperial Rome at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.  Then I attended one of their distinguished lectures in the IMAX theater, E Pluribus Unum: Imperial Rome as a Religious Capital by Karl Galinsky, PhD, a professor at UT. 
Man, it was brilliant. 
I cannot begin to sum up the brilliance here, but suffice to say that it was the kind of lecture that made me want to be that guy.  Lectures like his make me want to sit down and re-evaluate my life.   And during the Q&A at the end, people asked pointed questions about things that seemingly contradicted his thesis, and he was so on top of everything.  He knew his subject inside out.  There were a lot of parallels between Rome's civic religion and America's civic religion as envisioned by the Founders, too.  It was so so interesting. 
The funny thing was that as I was walking through the exhibit, I kept pausing at various parts of the religious or daily life sections and thinking, oh, yeah, I know all about you from Lindsey Davis.  Ha, ha, so much for that Classical Education, right? 

The Blog | Danielle Crittenden: Washingtonia: The Spin-Off of "Rome" | The Huffington Post:

There is little I can say to console my fellow addicts of the HBO series Rome, which ended forever this past Sunday. Some of us might well need support groups to get through the coming Sundays without the company of Lucius Vorenus, Titus Pullo, Atia, Antony et al. (Was there ever a more cheerful and loveable mercenary than Pullo?
A hunkier thug than Antony? A greater inspiration to middle-aged female sexuality than Atia?) I understand why there can't be another season of Rome--the huge cost of making it, etc.--but why not a spin-off? Look around and there's one going on before our very eyes. And the set's already built...

WASHINGTONIA

ETA: The blockquote tags got borked when I posted through Deepest Sender. None of this is me. Fixed now.

I have updated my ministry blog at The Soul Unfolds with a post about my recent attendance at the Elaine Pagels lecture on the Gospel of Judas.
Here is a direct link to the post: http://www.thesoulunfolds.com/?p=6.

So my cold is still around. So is my neck pain, each morning like clockwork. I've been coughing all evening because of my nasal drainage. Fun.
I hate being congested, but hopefully the meds will keep it under control and it will pass. I'm downing Airborne every day.

I am working on my story again finally - the actual story as opposed to the notes for same. Patricia Wrede's Worldbuilding Questions are all fun and interesting, but there is really no need for me to answer them all at once. Or at all.
I picked up some fun magazines for half-price at Borders, and have been indulging in a festival of digital illustration. Special bonus, a DVD in the magazine with software demos! Woot!
Of course, given that my current move countdown is 18 DAYS, I won't be sitting around sketching for a while. I have books to sort. I think I'm going to have to sacrifice a large portion of the classical translations that I never read. I'm keeping all the secondary references, but the massive stack of works in translation will be getting the axe. I have Half Price Books to acquire them again should I actually need them beyond what the library can provide. The book decisions are tough, but it must be done.

Sometimes when coming in from a day out in the city streets, sweaty, grimy, and feeling generally ugh, I just really want a strigil.

We had a very Rome-themed party last night. It was very exciting. Donna brought the subject-mentioned snacks (blue corn chips, chocolate covered raisins, banana chips), and we also had cheese, apples, fruit, veggies, and wine. Lisa brought some Falerio, which was a fantastic in-joke for all the classical scholars among us.
The show itself was really quite good. It was peppered with historical commentary and the occasional snark from the gathered crowd, but really, I think we were all pleasantly surprised and impressed.
I have a lot of leftover cheese now. I guess I will have plenty for lunch this week.

This is probably not going to be that interesting to most folks, but WOW. They actually give degrees in this stuff!
I wonder how many PhDs I can realistically get before I collapse into a financial vortex.

For no reason other than that I felt like taking it down from the shelf, I have begun to read A History of Private Life, Volume I, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium.
Coincidence, then, that I went downstairs and found a documentary film on On Demand about a new HBO series called Rome that looks unbelievably fantastic?

Seriously, I was sitting on the couch with my jaw hitting the floor watching these featurettes.

Getting back into a Rome state of mind, I suppose. Roman-influenced fiction can't be far behind.