Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Wound up needing migraine drugs after all, but hey, at least the drugs worked. (Problem is that they started wearing off during the drive home. Oof.) Gig went really well. Nice site, good food (though in the set we played after dinner, I seem to have burned up all the food I'd just eaten, 'cause I got really hungry again), pleasant interactions with the site staff, caterers, and photographer, and, most importantly, the bride and groom and guests seemed to have a whole lot of fun (especially when they loosed up a little and danced). I assumed the couple had seen us at a festival or something, but John said they found us on the web and hadn't seen us in person before. They said they were going to recommend us to all their friends, so I think they were happy with us. (And given the how well people coped with the waltzes versus how well they dealt with dancing to reels, I think we were the right band for most of their guests.)

Amusingly, just about the first thing anyone said to us after we arrived (an hour before the reception was supposed to start), was, "Oh, thank goodness, a Celtic band. If I have to hear 'Mustang Sally' one more time, I don't know what I'll do." I don't remember who said it (site staff, caterer, somebody else).

Broke another string. During "Jock Wilson's Ball". It blew the other five strings way out of tune when it went, so I switched to the 12-string mid-tune. Stayed on the 12-string until dinner was served and I had time to replace the broken string. Wondering whether there's something wrong with the bridge that's causing strings to break more often (but on both guitars, starting about the same time?). Most of the breaks lately have been down near the bridge.

I am very, very tired. And my head and eyes hurt. And I can't take any more Midrin for a while. So it's time for me to crash. Interestingly, my shoulders, arms, knees, and back don't hurt as much as I'd expected (especially after a four-hour gig). My right hand is kind of painful (in the fleshy part between thumb and forefinger), but the other parts, while they do hurt, don't hurt anywhere near as much as I thought they would.

Oh, one of the waltzes we played as "Edna Michael's Waltz", which Mike wrote. I really like that tune, so that made me very happy. (I think we're putting it on our second CD -- gotta go check the proposed list.)

"But the people now running America aren't conservatives: they're radicals who want to do away with the social and economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are concocting may give them the excuse they need." -- Paul Krugman, thanks to vvalkyri

Just woke from a dream about a musical "train wreck" on stage. But it was a really strage sort of slow-motion train wreck, where things fell apart in a really strange way and nobody could tell why it had happened. Actually the dream was about a really odd concert that had something to do with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (there was lots of TMNT artwork on the walls, in an otherwise very sterile looking, evenly lit, white room), with the entire audience off to the band's left instead of in front of us, and for some reason I had a huge leather drinking vessel next to me. The band falling apart so strangely was just the part that woke me up. And once again, what woke me was the dream having become too confusing to sleep through. It's like my brain writes itself into a corner and can't continue the story or something so I have to wake up. That's been how most of the dreams I've remembered in the past several months have ended ... or "not really ended because I woke up instead", if you prefer. They get more and more confusing until they hit some sort of confusement threshold (yeah, I know "confusion" would've fit there but I wanted a different feeling to the word) and that wakes me up.

I do not feel like I have slept anywhere near long enough.

What's it called on Darkover when those hallucinogenic flowers bloom during a period of high winds and folks at some distance wind up tripping? "Ghostwind" or something? Thought of that because as I was typing my previous entry, I glanced out the window at a tree being bent over quite a bit by wind, and my sinuses and the roof of my mouth are an itchy uncomfortable mess. I wonder what the pollen count is this morning. (I guess the connection to the hallucinogenic plants on Darkover is the very strange dream I'd just woken up out of.)

It is Darkover I'm thinking of, right?

Okay, one last post about my surreal morning to clutter up everyone's friends-page: Just after finishing my last entry I downloaded my mail. Saw a message with the subject, "Call for submissions" and parsed it as, "Call for submissives". Probably a common-enough language-processing glitch, but it just fit so well with everything else I'm seeing/experiencing this morning.

Every so often when I'm working with a large spreadsheet or database under Windows, I'm tempted to export the whole thing to a comma-delimited text file, whack it with a few 'vi' commands on a Linux box, then re-import it, because it'd be so many fewer keystrokes. Or I just find myself wanting to 'grep' an Excel spreadsheet. Slightly less often, I find myself wanting to use 'uniq' or other tools. Even 'sort', if I want to sort on a fragment of a column. Sometimes I want to do things that there's really no good way to do in the fancy package I'm using; other times there's a perfectly good way that only feels like too much work because I know how easy it'd be in my favourite text editor. (I'm sure Emacs users (the heretics!) say pretty much the same thing.)

For all the data manipulation and calculation features of these modern packages, sometimes I still need the very slick Raw Power of thirty-year-old "simple" text-based utility programs. There's so much to be said for tools that just let you concisely tell them what to do, and let you build complex operations out of a bunch of very simple commands. I don't want a tool that tries to "do everything" because there's something I'll want to do that the designers won't have thought of. I want tools that let me do everything as long as I can describe what I want to do.

(So why don't I export-to-text/whack-with-vi/re-import? Sometimes I do. Other times I don't want to lose my formatting, or I've got a bunch of formulas or lookups into other tables, which wouldn't survive the export/import process well. Now a version of Excel that understood 'vi' commands would be wicked cool.)