Slogging Through Athanasius

I had a very busy weekend, it would seem, yet the amount of accomplishment I had, now that I look back on it, was not all that much. On Friday I learned I would have to teach our adult life group on Sunday, due to a death in the family of my co-teacher, who was scheduled to teach. So some time Friday and Saturday evenings went to that, actually close to three hours.

Saturday was a work day. We cleaned up the mess from our downstairs ceiling demolition, and the downstairs bathroom wall paper stripping and spackling. This turned out to be a good sized task. The plastic sheeting I put down to catch the demolition mess was old, old, old. It shredded in a lot of places, and much material went through to the carpet. Still, it caught a lot of the mess. I carried two of the four demolition trash bags up to the garage for setting out on trash day. We swept and vacuumed the carpet in the computer room and bathroom, and an hour later it all looked good. This carpet is coming out due to water damage in the family room, but we want to keep this undamaged part to make throw rugs or use in a storage room.

Then I tackled the primer trim in the bathroom. This went okay, but took me twice as long as it should have. I have a painful rheumatoid arthritis breakout in my right hand, wrist, and arm. I can grip a paint brush with it, but can’t twist my wrist as needed for brush work. At least, I can’t twist it very much. So I was stuck using my left hand even in places when my right hand would have made more sense. Laying on the floor around the toilet, stretching my left arm to places unseen by human eyes for years, was not my idea of a good time.

The trim is done, except for one place where I found some of the wallpaper not stripped. Tonight I’ll strip that, and maybe finish the trim. Don’t know about the rest of the primer yet. This morning I feel like I was hit by a bus, or how you feel after playing softball the first time in the spring. Muscle aches. Bone aches. General weariness. This kind of body function is ridiculous. I’m only 58. What’s it going to be like when I hit seventy?

Despite that, I managed to complete an article on construction contract administration for Buildipedia.com and submit it. In that series that makes four down, one to go. I did not get the article finished on the Crystal Bridges Museum, but that should be an early one for today. Nor did I work at all on my poetry. T'is the season for submittals, and while I’m not giving poetry much effort these days, I ought to submit a few to literary mags.

It’s very painful to type. I’m still working through my morning stiffness (it’s 8 AM), so maybe it will get better during the day. Blogspot is down right now, so I’m typing this in Word. I just remembered, however, that for some reason Blogspot has not allowed me to paste text in lately, so I’ll probably have to re-type this all, on my noon hour—assuming the site is up by then.

What, you wonder, does all this have to do with the title of my post? I managed to spend about an hour reading Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, my foray into original works by the early Christians. This is supposed to be one of the more accessible early works, but I found it hard going. Perhaps it was tiredness of the body which did not allow my brain to fully engage. I understood the words fine, but the overall message escaped me. I was really slogging, not rising above and conquering the book. We’ll see how it goes, in a time when mind and body are in sync and properly functioning.