We’re up at the lake house for our last getaway of the summer — spending some time in the water, some time hanging out with the fam, watching the Red Sox on TV, and doing a fair amount of reading.

I completely fell off the ed-reading wagon for the last fortnight or so, and I have been giving good attention to my current “assignment” yesterday and today — maybe not quite enough minutes to fully make up for a 3-and-a-half hour deficit, but enough for me to feel comfortable in entering tomorrow with a sense of a clean slate. Like I’ve done enough “make-up reading” to balance the scales and therefore starting tomorrow I’m back to being “on the hook” solely for each day’s 15-minute reading goal. (Assuming I don’t wipe out again, of course…)

I’m also working my way through a history of the Baltic states, inspired by the Cruise and the ways that trip so strongly intensified my awareness of precisely how ignorant I am about this half of my lineage, as well as my desire to learn more. And, like with the rooster, there’s been some unexpected gifts. For example, considering that I’ve been looking towards Wicca/neo-paganism as a core spiritual thread in my life for about a quarter-century, it’s been fascinating to learn that Lithuania was the last European hold-out of pagan belief and culture during the Northern Crusades.

One might expect that a long holiday weekend would also be prime for lots of writing, but it hasn’t really worked out that way. With the sense of summer’s last hurrah hanging in the air, I’ve been very much inclined to unplug. Yes, I do half my reading on electronic devices*, but laying in the hammock reading on a kindle still feels tonally quite different from sitting at my laptop, surfing links, culling quotes, and building my usual sort of “cultural critique e-essay” blog post.

So instead, tonight I’m going meta, working within that particularly obnoxious genre I have come to call “writing to say why I’m not writing more.”

And I think the only reason I’m writing even this quantity of prose is that this sort of navel-gazing post — light on links and quotes — is easier for me to type in the iPad, so no laptop required.** Besides, a rain front has moved in, so the incentive to be out in the hammock or taking an after-dinner boat ride has kind of plummeted.

I’m aware that by taking it easy I’m contributing to the sort of irregularity that is supposed to spell doom for anyone looking to grow their blog’s readership. I’m also aware that by slowing down my already glacial pace of writing, I am adding to the pattern whereby I write about topics well past the time our 24-hour news cycle has aired, devoured, digested and then moved on from whatever-it-is. (For example, it is now a full week past the MTV VMAs and Queen Bey, yet I still haven’t sufficiently gathered my thoughts to write about it. I think that makes me Paleolithic in blog-years.)

But all in all, I’m okay with taking a light approach tonight. ‘Cos every now and then a lazy Sunday is just the ticket.

* As exemplified in precise ratio by my current two reads — Kirp in printed hardcover; Kasekamp on the kindle.

** At least, not until the final step of adding a few links and dropping in an image.

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Image credit: “Girl in the Hammock” by Winslow Homer, public domain (retrieved from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Winslow_Homer_-_Girl_in_the_Hammock.jpg )