Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Still at Mom's house. Breathing much better, feeling rather more energetic when I have any energy at all, and staying awake longer at a stretch, but still don't have my strength quite back and still peter out quickly -- though at this point my tiring so early may have more to do with my still absolutely screwed up sleep patterns than anything else. (For example: crashed yesterday afternoon around 15:00, was up again at 18:00, crashed again around 20:00 trying to escape a migraine, woke briefly at midnight, was up again at 03:00, thought I was going to fall asleep again around 19:00, but didn't (after failing to fall asleep when I started feeling worn-out, around 10:00).) A bit migrainey today but not as bad as yesterday. The fibromyalgia pain has been pretty bad. Between feeling a bit unsteady some of the time, and my legs and hips hurting often, I should probably still be using the cane; but my arms and hands and shoulders hurt so badly that I've just been lurching & limping because that's less painful than propping myself up. Feh.

OT1H, I do want to get home, pick up nearly two weeks worth of mail, be able to work on stuff I didn't bring with me, have access to video recording devices¹, let Perrine roam a larger area², etc. -- feel a little more independent. And there are some things I've been trying to set up on a couple of computers that I just can't seem to manage by shoving X through a reverse ssh tunnel (to get through NAT at both ends). OTOH, Mom has heat in her house, it's ever so much quieter here than in Baltimore, and there's food here. [Whoops, about to be a lot less food here, since we finally noticed that the refrigerator has stopped refrigerating. Eep!] I might head back tomorrow or Saturday³, migraine-and-weather-permitting.

Over the past few days I have managed to get a few cute photos, work on a couple of new compositions (until I got sidetracked into enhancing the notation software I'm using), repair a vacuum cleaner (shouldn't vacuums be naturally clean?), and verify that my mother's inkjet printer really is out of ink. And fall way, way behind on my blog-reading (though if LJ keeps showing me that stupid ad that obscures the text of the entries it appears on, I may find it easier to catch up because I'll just stop reading comments on LJ or peeking behind cut-tags there -- easier than trying to remember who has a paid account and who has a "plus" one). A few days ago I hit the point of really wishing I'd brought my bass guitar. (I brought my electric 6-string guitar, bass recorder, and mandolin. And a pair of drumsticks, which reminds me that I've got some audio editing to do in Audacity so I can share some sounds with y'all.)

And no, I neither put fuschia eyeliner on the cat, nor added funky colours in GIMP -- those colours were really there in my viewfinder, and I didn't put them on her.⁴ :-) And, uh, yeah, those are my fingers (and if you can make it out, my camera) reflected in her eye.

Perrine seems healthier, after a few days of scaring me by not seeming to eat anything at all. (The first night she was here, she came out of her hidey-hole for tuna, but then wouldn't eat anything, not even more tuna, for the next few days.) She's still noticeably smaller and lighter than she was in October, but is eating various kinds of wet food and kibble, and asking for food a few times a day. *whew* I really do think she had a cold or something interfering with her sense of smell, but I guess I'll never know for sure. (High on my to-do list for early next year: get her to a vet for a checkup & shots, after raising money to pay for that.) I was worried I'd need to rush her to a vet last week -- when I was barely capable of going anywhere myself. It's such a relief to see her eating again.

She's not especially happy here, not feeling free to follow me to other parts of the house lest the dog go after her (the dog just wants to play, and won't take "no" for an answer; but Perrine is not keen on this idea, runs away, and let herself get cornered once in the front-door closet). She's been out a couple of times, when Pepper has been shut in Mom's room -- even came to join me at the other end of the house while I watched television one night ... but then Pepper let herself out and came looking for Perrine. *sigh* But she did start looking a lot less unhappy after the first morning that I noticed birds in the bush outside the bedroom window, and told her they were there. (The word Perrine knows best is, "Bird!") She's spent a few hours quite happily entertained thus, and yesterday she spotted the birds first and told me about them. (After hearing her leap up on the dresser, I heard her chirrup, then chatter her teeth. So okay, she probably wasn't specifically trying to tell me, but the effect was the same.)

Mom bought some cat toys for Perrine, which she has ignored. But she found a ball in the bedroom that apparently got left here by mistake, having come from a toy my niece and nephews play with, and she has played with that a bit.

Is it just me, or does the dog look a little bit like Stewie from Family Guy? She looks vaguely cartoonish to me, anyhow, and if she's a Toon, that would explain quite a bit. Now if I could just convince her to stop trying to lick my feet and calves while I'm walking. And not to aim herself at my knees when I'm standing. Having an itty bitty dog jump up and hit my waist is disconcerting, but less likely to tip me over than a blow to my knees. (She can also jump up onto a dresser from the floor, which seems like more of a cat maneuver than a doggie one. This means that even though I put Perrine's food up there, Pepper can still reach it when she manages to get into the bedroom, and oh my goodness can that dog consume food quickly when she knows she's stealing somebody else's! *Fwoosh*, and the food vanishes. I suppose chewing must be optional.)

I should work on photographing a couple of antiques that Mom wants to sell (she won't have room for them when she moves). One is the old sewing machine that I want. We haven't nailed down the model number yet, but it's a White, most likely from 1929. Prices for similar ones that we ran across while trying to figure out exactly what it is, ranged from $40 to $400. The cabinet was refinished at some point, which probably reduces its value, but it has the cabinet (a false-front that looks like it has drawers, which folds up out of the way when the sewing machine is raised), while most of the late-1920s White machines I saw on the web either had an open stand or had been removed from their stand. This is the machine I learned to use and understand how to thread. (I had thought the electric motor was a late retrofit, being bolted on the back and driving the flywheel with a rubber wheel on the motor shaft, and there being a disconnected knee-treadle in the cabinet -- but after looking it up, it appears that the electric motor was original and the knee-thingie a mystery. Maybe White dropped some newfangled Rotary Electric sewing machines into completed cabinets left over from a run of human-powered machines??) The other piece is a table that we couldn't find anything close to on the web. (The closest we found was an Old Ironsides table, which is topologically equivalent, but has different proportions and is of a different wood.)

And I need to keep an eye out for K-mount extension tubes. For macro, I can use an M42->K adaptor, the screwmount bellows, and a screwmount 50mm lens (I love the fact that with one adaptor I can use early 1960s lenses on my digital camera (and with two adaptors, even older lenses work), but I wanted to shoot very small birds with the 400mm f/5.6 lens I brought with me, and the bush outside the window is closer than the minimum focussing distance of that lens.

I could carry a screwmount 300mm or 400mm lens and the adaptor, when I expect to be in this situation, but I didn't expect to be. A medium-length K-mount extension tube ought to fit in my small "three lenses and a flash" bag that I keep ready to grab in a hurry, right next to the 400mm K-mount lens that lives there.

Uh oh. I just came back from the kitchen and found the dog in the bedroom. She'd already eaten all of Perrine's food that was out. I chased her out, and she stopped at the baby-gate as if to say, "What? I can't cross that," but after I growled a bit she demonstrated how she gets over. *sigh* (Perrine just hurdles it looking like she's running a steeplechase. Pepper sort of lands on top for an instant, then tumbles down the other side.) Perrine was on the bed, not wedged in the corner underneath it, so either Pepper snuck in while she was sleeping, or she didn't bother to do the whole "I'm so scared of the dog!" thing because I wasn't here to watch. I'm not sure which."

[1] For all the time Mom and my brother have televisions going, they don't have any DVD recorder, VCR, or PVR hooked up. I'm not at all used to being so tied to (a) the broadcast schedule or (b) Hulu (which I can watch here, sometimes, though it's a major PITA), nor am I used to having television as background much of the time, nor the idea of watching some show I don't really like because there's nothing better on. I've always got plenty of recorded television to catch up on when I feel like watching something and nothing I really want to see is being broadcast ... and I'm not used to missing shows I wanted to watch just because I fell asleep at the wrong time or was in the middle of doing something else. It's just a different approach to television, I guess, and not one I've used since I was a child, back when only rich people had VCRs. Also: for all the hundreds of channels on cable, there's only a smidgen more that I want to see here than at home where I have only an antenna. I keep turning televisions off when I notice I'm the only person in the room, because I don't like the television-as-background thing. Is even Mythbusters worth being annoyed by CNN and Fox for? (Though I suppose if I had cable at my house -- living alone -- I could just never tune to either of those two conservative networks.)

[2] Perrine leaves the bedroom and jumps the baby-gate in the hall occasionally, but jumps right back as soon as she finds out where Pepper, my mother's tiny, very exuberant, terribly persistant dog, happens to be ... and Pepper spends a fair bit of time at the other end of the hallway, looking into the bedroom and waiting for Perrine to come out and play. Then again, there's a much bigger window here for her to watch birds from, and a dresser right under it for her to sit on ...

[3] There's a bit of holiday family-weirdness going on that bothers me a lot less than it seems it ought to -- not enough to warrant full-size type, but worth sticking in a footnote: I missed family Thaksgiving due to illness, the extended family (on my father's side) pre-Christmas party was cancelled due to the snowpocalypse (for the first time in 55 years -- but I wasn't really well enough to go by then anyhow), and close-family Christmas is apparently being held on Saturday at my sister's house on the Eastern Shore, to get around her (and her kids and husband) having too many places to visit for one day. Mom is invited, as is my married brother (& wife & offspring, of course). Apparently my youngest brother -- the one who lives with Mom and whom my sister is, last I heard, extremely judgemental about -- and myself, are not invited. I haven't heard one way or the other about there being a Christmas party tomorrow at the home of my brother's in-laws (where he's currently living) -- for a few years that was where we all met up for Christmas. So at the moment it looks like I'm doing nothing special at all for "The Holidays" (I didn't even go out on Hallowe'en) unless I wind up doing something big for New Year's Eve. Not that I'm really ready for Christmas, what with having spent so much' of November and December ill.

[4] Perrine was lying on a Very Pink blanket that sunlight was bouncing off of, casting her white bits pink and doing stranger things to other shades in her coat. All the pink and some of the orange in all three photos of her here comes from sunlight bouncing off the pink blanket.