Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"The secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life, and elevating them to art." -- William Morris ( thanks to jadegirl.)

As if I needed another thing to deal with. My car was broken into. There wasn't much there for them to take, and they didn't break a window, but it still means dealing with the police and figuring out whether my auto insurance handles the stolen copies of Spinning Reels and the Homespun Ceilidh Band demo CD (I had some of each in the car in case I run into somebody who needs a demo or wants to buy an album while I'm out. I also usually carry a portable CD player with headphones and an opened copy of the CD but I have to check to see whether I'd put that back in the house or not.

I called the police. They wanted a detailed list of what was taken, and I said I hadn't looked very far because I didn't want to mess up fingerprints. They said they don't take fingerprints from cars unless there's a murder or something else big like that. For simple theft-from-auto they can take the report over the phone. Funny how when my camera bag was stolen, the police gave me a raft of shit for not contacting them quickly enough to preserve any evidence!

*grumble*

Whoops.

This morning when I called the police, they said they could take the report over the phone. This afternoon when I got back from some errands and called the police, I was on hold until the time I had to move my car from the far side of the street to the near side because of rush hour. This evening when I got back from doing the things I went out to do when I had to move the car, they said they were too shortstaffed today to take a report over the phone, so they were sending an officer to my house.

So I promised I would stay put until an officer showed up, checked my email, replaced the light bulb in the front hallway, and finally noticed that I never got next week's TV Guide in this week's mail. (It usually shows up on Tuesday. That was a holiday. It didn't show up after that.) And TV Guide's week starts on Saturday, so unless I get out to pick up a copy at a store or manage to find all the relevant info online, I'm just sort of hoping that everything's on the same schedule as last week when I set up my VCR.

Hmm. I just remembered that TV Guide does have a web site with the listings in one place with an amazingly inconvenient-to-me user interface (unless they've improved it in the last year and a half or so), so I don't have to figure out the URLs of each television station I get after all. Still annoying, but not as big a problem.

Hmm. If I write myself a sticky note reminding me to ask for my nails to be a sixteenth or an eighth of an inch longer than I really want them to be when I go to the nail salon, where do I stick the note where I'll see it at the apropriate times? My dashboard maybe? (For the folks who don't know me in real life: I've got acrylic on the three nails of my strumming hand that get the most wear from the guitar strings, and on occasion I've played right through the acrylic and exposed the natural nail in a single (busy) weekend. The six bucks every couple of weeks that this costs is an expense like guitar strings or batteries, a cost of playing in a large Celtic band with a lot of Scottish tunes in the repertoire. My natural nails pretty much grow fast enough to keep up with average wear for other kinds of music.)

I got several things done today. I feel like there's too much left undone, unprepared, even though if I look at how much time I've spent Doing Stuff and going places and dealing with people, it's been about as much as I can really expect from my body on a good day and quite a bit more than I could accomplish most days. But I still need to make sure I'm ready for tomorrow's recording session and know who's giving me a ride, however wiped out I am at this point.

My house is currently 288K, though for some reason it feels far colder. (Uh, maybe I should calibrate the dollar-store thermometer I'm using, come to think of it.) It was a little colder around sunset, but I turned the furnace on for forty minutes or so when my fingers got all clumsy. I forgot to check the temperature at which I felt mostly comfortable, before I turned the furnace off. It looks like I'll need to burn more heating oil this year than last year, but I'm trying to use as little as possible because I just can't afford it. Oh yeah, aplying for MEAP is on my list of things I keep not getting to while I still have energy. Argh. Last year I think I got away with waiting until the day after Thanksgiving to turn on the furnace.

Paint on the walls upstairs is nice, but what I really need are better windows. Except that those cost a lot more than paint, and I don't think my mother (who paid for the painting) can afford enough new windows to do enough good. Maybe if there were some plan where we could just pay as much as the new windows saved us each year until the windows were paid off... (Which reminds me -- I need to find out how much as modern gas furnace would save me compared to the pretty nifty-looking coal furnace that was converted to oil probably before I was born ... and how much of the cost can be subsidized by Baltimore Gas & Electric.)

A police officer did come and take notes for a report on my car having been broken into. It didn't take long, but she did take the time to actually look at the car (mostly just checking how they got into it, I think). I don't expect them to ever find the culprit, but I did want to make sure the incident was in their crime patterns and trends database. I do hope such a database exists, anyhow.

There was one other odd ... or was it an end? ... that was in my brain when I started typing, but it's gone now.

Hey, is anyone out there able to hear phone LJ entries at the proper speed on a Mac? I thought it was just something about my configuration, but I've seen comments indicating that other Mac users were hearing chipmunk voices too. (I haven't installed *.ogg compatible sound software on my Windows boxes yet.) I'm using Audion 3.0.2a9 under MacOS 9.1.