A lot has happened.
I shaved my head. Shaved my head and bought a bunch of hats. Mainly because I got fed up with worrying about how I looked. If I had a bad hair-day it just ruined my mood, ruined my day. I got a bunch of "newsboy" hats, four of em. Two herringbone tweed (one charcoal and one brown), one gray woolen plaid, and one linen beige. My strategy at the moment is to simply always be wearing a hat. No ego to get caught up in my hair if I have no hair.
Also, I am in the process of attempting to start an online shop. I won't share too much detail yet because I don't know if it's going to work out and I don't want to enthusiastically ramble about something that might crash and burn in a couple of weeks... but it involves restoring ancient Roman coins. I know that restoring the coins alone will eventually pay for itself (but is laborious), but the other aspects of the "business" are what makes this so exciting for me. I ordered all the supplies, some have arrived, some are on the way. I hope to be posting updates soon, hopefully updates of success and not updates of failure.
Some cool shit that happened to me recently -- I sold a (single) Pokemon card for over $100. Which kind of awed me, that someone would be willing to throw that much money at me for a card, but then I remembered how I bought the fancy clothbound gilded Art of War instead of the cheap one, or how I bought the penguin classics clothbound Lucretius' Nature of Things because I thought it would look pretty with my other Penguin Classics hardcovers. People are willing to waste money, the "prudence" of the waste is dictated by preference and inclination I guess.
But -- onto the Latin!!!
I have been studying Latin some more on my own, and quite frankly the past week and a half I have been hardcore slacking. It's just so easy to get caught up with less laborious things and just lose track of time.
I bought a book that I think is hugely helpful supplementary to the main textbook -- A Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin. Now, I want to point out (if I didn't in my last latin log) that Ecclesiastical Latin is different from Classical Latin in that Ecclesiastical is the kind that the Catholic Church uses (pronounced differently mainly), while Classical is the way that the Romans probably maybe spoke like. It's the same language in the sense that people who know Ecclesiastical can understand Classical and vice-versa, but the kind of material that one learns is totally different -- a Classical book is going to prepare you for Caesar and Virgil and Cicero, while an Ecclesiastical will prepare you for the Vulgate and for Aquinas and Augustine. So why did I buy the primer? I don't really have a good answer at all, other than "I want to speedrun the vocab in that book so I can piece together the Vuglate". Which isn't a good answer, but I would say it's worth the money for that reason alone.
The main problem I am having right now isn't learning the declension tables or conjugations or this or that, it's mainly just trying to cram all the vocab into my head. The only way to learn vocab is to drill flashcards daily -- in fact, 10 minutes a day is better than 120 minutes all at once, the memory people say, because spaced repetition such-and-so.
I hit the books SUPER hard for a week when I went up to Wisconsin with my family. Brought no technology, just the books. It was the only thing I had to do, and I was most studious with my time. This has confirmed some things for me -- one, my general lack of study since returning from Wisconsin is due to laziness and not inability to concentrate, and two, removing all distractions is the best way to study latin. I will be spending three days a week on campus since transferring to this new university. A plan of mine (maybe not yet THE plan because I don't have an intuitive feel for the class schedule, but a working plan) is to arrive at campus bright and early in the morning with only my books. Study in the library until my class at 2:00-smth, and then head from there to my other class, and then study some more or get a book or whatever and go home. This will force me to dedicate all of my time to Latin (and Tacitus, Plutarch, Suetonius, and whoever the other guy is, Polybius I think), that or just fall asleep.
I REALLY want to take a stab at Euripides' Bacchae. I saw it in the library when I was looking for Ovid's Metamorphoses. But I'm hesitant to start with the old Greek playwrights because I know that if I like them it will be a huge timesink. lol.
Inflections are really giving me a headache. It's logical, it makes sense, and I just have to memorize all the goddamn declensions, but it's so different from English that I'm just outright unfamiliar with structuring my thoughts in Latin. My goal is to be able to take all my university notes in Latin -- partly because that's pretty neat, and partly because I think it will help me learn, to be forced to think in latin. Maxime defessus sum.