A sense of progress

 You know, summer and the year is flying by.  Already the end of June.  I mean, it was a good month -- the weather is nice, and life is good -- but I am liking the summer; nice weather, lots of stuff to do, just enjoying the weather.  Rah.

I went to hang with a friend last night -- helping him pack for a move -- and he and his gf (oi) were like "gee, you have really been working out."  This is odd to me for a bunch of reasons, such as the fact that I am still 12 pounds overweight and while I have been in a tweener phase as to adding weights... I am not exactly adding 20 pounds a rep.  At least I was able to help a friend (lugging crap and discussing man things) and I appreciated the comments, even if I do not exactly believe them.

Finally finished book 20 today, or at least what I am calling book 20 (I lost count, but it's close).  It was about the Roman Army in the East, but also morphed into other subjects -- they didn't really have a policy of defensible borders, they didn't go to war for reasons other than plunder, they tended to put camps and bases in areas that were not terribly defensible (but made sense for other reasons), etc.  Interesting; basically, for a long time (and even now), historians tended to look to modern examples as to explain why they did what they did... but it doesn't exactly carry over to now.

I watched the 1925 version of "The Wizard of Oz" today; it's a silent film with Larry Semon (a very sad Hollywood tale) and a not-important role played by Oliver Hardy.  It was...good?  I mean, it wasn't great, and doesn't follow the novel/1939 version a tall, but the story was...cute?  The acting was decent, and it was...comedic, certainly to someone in 1925.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/29/magazine/moderate-democrat.html?smid=url-share
This is....terrible.  :P