Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Here's an administration that wants to spread democracy around the world, and they want to prevent people from participating in policy?" -- Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice, on President Bush's reinstatement of the Mexico City Policy ("global gag rule" regarding abortion), quoted in a story on Alternet.org by Jennifer Block, 29 April. (Thanks to swy1974 for pointing it out.)

*grumble* I'm tired of this... ( fibromyalgia and sleep whining )

On a less-whiny note, when I was in the grocery store yesterday, two people commented on my cross. I was wearing the large, pewter Celtic cross that a friend gave me a while back, which currently has last year's Pennsic medallion (a red oval almost perfectly sized to circumscribe the cross) stuck to it[1]. I usually wear a small, modern, gold cross, but I switched to my "garb cross" for a performance and have not felt like dealing with the fussy clasp on the small one when getting dressed lately, so I've been wearing the pewter one.

One man asked me about the significance of the design. When I explained that it was an old Celtic design, medeival or renaissance, he said that the reason he was curious was that he thought it looked familiar from movies set in that period. When I mentioned re-enactment groups, he sounded interested, so maybe he'll wind up checking out the SCA or Markland. I gave him my card so he can get the links from my web page.

The other man recognized the cross as a Celtic style, saying that he'd seen it when he was studying Gaelic. So I asked whether he was into Celtic music as well, and gave him a Homespun Ceilidh Band business card so he could check out our web page.

So ... I picked up some of the photos from the wedding I shot on Saturday (one lab emailed me seven minutes after I'd left the house, to say that my order wasn't going to be ready until today, but it wasn't a wasted trip, 'cause the other lab is around the corner from it, and I had to head in that general direction for something else anyhow). And I picked up prescriptions (and discovered that I'd exceeded the cap on my HMO's drug benefit, which means I need to look up when my coverage-year starts). And I got my nails done, and bought gasoline, and added oil to my car, and picked up the most urgent of the groceries I needed, and did most of my laundry, and repaired the latest hole to appear in my last remaining wearable "pirate shirt (which I need for the Homespun Ceilidh Band gig on Sunday) -- with white thread this time, and logged my spending for the past week in the spreadsheet I track my budget and checkbook in, and washed some dishes ... I did a bunch of things I needed to get done. Except sleep, dammit.

[1]: At Pennsic, I decided that having the string for my medallion getting tangled with the chain for my cross all week was going to annoy me, so -- like many other people -- I removed it from the string and found another way to wear it. The most obvious way handy was to open the jump ring on my cross and attach the medallion there. But then it clanked and rubbed, so I rolled up some gaffer's tape and stuck the two together. Which often confuses people when they notice that the two pieces are attached, and one in a while somebody asks me about the symbolism of the red oval behind the cross. Dunno what shape this year's site medallion will be, so I don't know whether it's going to work so well visually.

Failed to sleep since my last entry. Read some email; watched some television shows taped a month ago; sorted and labelled some of the photos from the wedding last weekend (just roll#/frame# with a Sharpie, not my fancy lots-of-info stickers); drove out to pick up film that wasn't ready yesterday; stopped for milk and garlic; wrapped more metal around the positive terminal of my car battery, which seems to be shrinking or something (the clamp is tightened as far as it can close, and it manages to become loose and fall off without coming unscrewed any). Realized I was pretty darned tired when I hit North Ave. and noticed that a zebra crossing was shimmering/rippling. It's been overcast all day, raining for part of it -- the pavement isn't hot enough to do the heat-ripple thang, so either there's some "Oooh, magic over here" special effect and I'm in a television show, or my eyes were going wonky from lack of sleep. (Hey, do the characters see all the special effects, or are some of them only visible to the audience? Obviously the characters must see some of the effects, 'cause the actors have to pretend to see 'em, but some I'm not so sure about, y'know?) Oh, right, parentangentical comments: D'Glenn must need to sleep. Wheee. But first, some leftover mac&cheese w/broccoli&peppers. G'night.

(One last bit: got the contact sheets from the infrared film I shot at the wedding. Way more useable frames than I'm used to with IR film. Combination of a bunch of posed group shots, and my only bracketing one direction from the meter-guess instead of bracketing over and under. Fewer "bulletproof" (nearly opaque) frames this time. But there was one shot of the bride and groom that I had to get printed as a negative (i.e. print onto reversal paper normally used for making prints from slides, so that the print is still a negative) because the neg looked so very cool. Hope it looks as cool at proof size as it did on the contact sheet.)