Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

This week's mail brought something delightful and something icky: a package of chocolate bars from Canada, and another frightening electric bill from BGE.

The parcel of chocolate had been squeezed through the mail slot, and either at that point or somewhere in its route through two postal systems, the bars got broken up a bit ... which isn't a problem, since I'd break them up to eat them anyhow, but it did produce an interesting effect: in a solid chocolate bar, with no discernable layers or seams, some of the fractures were halfway through the thickness, parallel to the large faces. The chunks that didn't split sheet-wise didn't show any visible features that would explain a fracture along that plane (and those brakes were smooth and straight for multiple-centimeter distances, no curves, rough spots, or jaggies, unlike many of the ordinary lengthwise and crosswise breaks.

I've never seen a chocolate bar cleave that way before. I'm wondering whether it was an unusual manufacturing defect, or a result of the particular stresses the bar experienced on its way through postal sorting equipment and my mail slot. In hindsight, I should have taken measurements and photographs to guide experiments later ... but I'm having a very rough week, and failed to resist the attraction of the theobromine, sugar, fat, and dark, dark cocoa flavour, so the sample got consumed. (Maybe one of the other bars in the parcel will have broken the same way ...)

Treats and a puzzle -- food-yum and brain-yum both -- whee!

Tuesday night, I counted backward from when I'd have to leave the house to when I'd need to take pain meds for them to be working well enough to possibly get me working well enough to get myself ready and make the trip to rehearsal Wednesday (yesterday) before they started wearing off. Then I set a series of alarms on my cell phone (because my PDA ain't anywhere near loud enough.

When I couldn't fall asleep, I worried. When I finally did start falling asleep, I noted the time and realized that if I got a decent amount of sleep I'd be waking up right around when I needed to take the first dose of meds. Alas, I woke up too soon, was still groggy a few hours later, and crashed again, hard enough to sleep through multiple alarms and a phone call, not waking up again until rehearsal had already started, still un-showered and unmedicated and in too much pain to pry myself out of bed.

So, yet another missed rehearsal, followed by several hungry hours mustering the strength to make it to the kitchen. The worst of the pain did eventually recede enough to let me feed myself, deal with the garbage and the litter box, and replenish the bedside snack stash in case of another similarly bad day; washing the dishes will have to wait a bit longer. My big plan for tomorrow is "avoid getting a parking ticket or getting towed" ... my big plan for today was, "try to get the pain levels down to a tolerable level," which I've made progress toward but not acheived. (I haven't gone as far as codeine yet, because I'd hoped to get another decent round of sleep in before taking something that'll keep me awake no matter how exhausted I am. It may be time to just give up on getting useful sleep this week, and trade the stupid-from-lack-of-sleep feeling for the can't-walk-from-pain feeling for a day or so. If I take enough to knock the pain down, maybe I can manage, maybe I can get something done before I get to the stupid-tired stage. Assuming there's enough time in between the distracted-to-uselessness-by-pain stage and the stupid-tired stage.

Yeah, I'm pretty damned tired of this.

The other night we had rain that sounded pretty heavy (I didn't get out of bed to look), as well as a tornado watch for some counties (not here in Baltimore) ... and neither DTV converter got decent reception on channels that I thought I could count on them to get. Bleah. I still have to get around to trying a better antenna than þe olde rabytte eayres, so maybe DTV can be made to work reliably, but so far I continue to be unimpressed. I'll grant that when it does work, the picture is remarkably clear, and I like getting that classic movies channel attached to one of the local Sinclair stations and the second dose of PBS, but not knowing whether I'm going to get the shows I've set the timer to tape annoys me quite a bit.

Maybe I'll get lucky and when they repeat the episodes I missed, they won't be opposite something else I want to tape (since by then it'll probably be after mid-June and my analog tuners won't work any more). If DTV were mostly a big improvement, that would take away a little of the sting of cutting back the number of working tuners I have, but so far it is at best a mixed bag, not it's not often enough 'at best'.

Not that my bitching about it accomplishes anything, of course. Well, it lets me blow off a little of my frustration, and gets me complaining about something other than my health, so I guess it accomplishes something.