Late night quiet. I thought it might be as late as four o'clock and I look up to discover that it's pushing six. I've stayed up all night reading a novel, for the first time in I can't remember how long. All my late nights have been dissertating and such for so long. But I tore through a hundred-odd pages of Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander with rare pleasure. I'm already less frequently having to look up terms in A Sea of Words, which I'm very pleased I thought to purchase with this set of O'Brian's novels I found. In fact, the maritime vocabulary, particular with reference to sails and ship structure and types would have helped me out in a lot of fiction and non-fiction reading over the years.

A quiet night at the Lloyds, at least after the kids went down, though the Harrises called it an early night. Mike gave me some good feedback on thoughts about the revisions for the Odes of Solomon article, as he's up on that literature much more freshly than I am. Complications notwithstanding, it was really cool to be able to share the positive side of the reception both articles had received this week. (Or that I had discovered this week.) Some sad talk later on with Dan and Amy about the current state of the handling of the abuse scandal in the Church, balanced out by some light guitar play with Dan, where I showed him the basics of "I Met You When You Just Got Going (Uh-Huh)" and "St. Peter's Sunrise," although my voice was entirely shot from the moment I opened my mouth. I got to listen to him start to noodle out some interesting riffs on his guitar, which sounds much better for being restrung with some new Elixir strings. We ended up swapping guitars for most of the session. A Kopp's dinner kind of knocked me out with a very un-Lenten caramel shake decorating a fish sandwich.

Then home reading by about midnight. The student voices were slow to fade away tonight, with some new group working their way back to McCormick Hall after the previous one had disappeared a little earlier, with this last group blasting out some U2, singing along with "Vertigo" and a few other tunes before disappearing in turn, and my discovering the dawn was sneaking up on me. So, putting the book down. Aubrey and Maturin are back on land for the moment and at relative rest, and so should I be. Happy.