hot day, tired animals

today has been too hot. i've slept most of the last 24 hours. woke up at six for dinner - it's closing in on 10.30, and i am exhausted.

the house is quiet, filled with sleeping critters. both bunnies are sprawled lazily in their houses, warm and cranky. the rats oscillate between picking fights with each other, and sulkily curling up around their condo. the skinks snooze in their house, and wandered around outside, in the apartment, lackluster and belligerent as skinks often are. Kali the dragon sleeps on N's lap, little arms relaxed and a tired frustrated expression crossing his face.

the heat does no one well here.

every so often, a piece of newspaper shifts in someone's house. (that's my preference to cage. all the beasties, after small runs around, attempt to get back to their houses, because it is their territory, and they like it there.) the rats shift around, bunny moves a leg, and the skinks dig deeper into their newspaper. a rat sneezes. the shingleback sneezes too. we are suspecting that he might have a slightly abused past and it worries us - he needs a vet trip.

my mind is hazy, like the feeling after rain on a hot humid brisbane day. it is lazy and cannot hold ideas together very well. sleep suits me today, because it keeps me safe. it is groggy and lazy and smells like sweat, like sleeping all day and folding over and over.

i am starting on the introduction to my complete works of Sappho. i find it interesting that the work that is read, and loved, and respected, on the basis of what has been left behind. it's a similar thing to what interests me, working with manuscripts. it is an art of piecing together the fragments. it differs so much from oral histories, which are offered and are open verbal interactions. manuscripts are collected fragments of what is left of someone's life, the slipped through the cracks, the physical spaces and creations and movements, all added on top of each other. when i've worked with people's reciepts, or old old diaries, or gently, passionatly complied scrap books of photographs of planes, i wonder what they'd think of someone like me reading through them, moved by their attention and their passions, their sheer will to communicate and how this stays behind.

it's what i like about libraries.