Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I've got three different keyboards on which the 'o' key has developed a bouncing problem (I often get two 'o's when I typed one, or three when I typed two). I'm starting to wonder whether I've really got three keyboards with the same glitch, or whether one of the fingers on my right hand is what's bouncing.

The Madrigal Feast in Damascus was fun, though traffic getting out of Baltimore was a bitch and a half. And apparently traffic in the rest of the region was bad as well -- as I was parking my car half an hour later than I'd planned to arrive, I got a phone call from the car bearing three of my bandmates coming up from College Park / Silver Spring, who were delayed by traffic even more than I had been; and as I hung up the phone and got out of the car, a bandmate who drove in from Rockville arrived, complaining about traffic. (Well, first she complained that I'd gotten the last space in that section of the parking lot...) A pity that event schedules conflict so I can't do the second night of that and Winterfest. (I'll be at Winterfest with Thrir Venstri Foetr / Three Left Feet, but most of the rest of The Homespun Ceilidh Band will be at the madrigal feast.)

I've got song fragments and tune fragments and some fraction of a poem trying to assemble themselves in my brain. Let's see whether I can carve out a chunk of time in the next few rather busy days to sit down with a guitar and the piano and some staff paper and see whether I can capture them before they evaporate. (I've lost more melodies that way...)

I'm finally drinking the bottle of "Monty Python's Holy Grail Ale" that my brother gave me at Christmas. For two months it has sat in the fridge, as each night I'm too busy doing stuff I want to concentrate on, or not feeling well enough to add alcohol to my blood, or in enough pain that I've needed to take painkillers that it'd be unwise to mix with alcohol, or not home, or just not in a beer mood. At last, an evening when I'm not worried about getting up early the next morning (I don't have to be at the event site to help with the sound system until 16:00), when I've already punted most of my to-do list for the evening, when I sorta feel like I deserve (hey, it was a fun gig, even if I couldn't hear John while we were playing) a leisurely (I started drinking it more than an hour and a half ago) glass of brew, when I'm not already feeling wobbly and uncomfortable or migraine-y, and when I didn't have to take anything stronger than Ultram earlier (and that was around 19:40 or so). I don't like this ale quite as much as Skull Splitter or Mackesson Triple Stout, but it's definitely in the "enjoyable in the right mood" category.

So I guess it's serving as a Christmas present and a birthday present at the same time.

A few days ago I was making a quick stop in a grocery store to pick up cat litter, and decided to grab some comfort foods while I was there. I hit the Hispanic foods aisle looking for malta, and they were out of Malta Goya (I don't recall whether that store normally stocks Malta India as well, but if they do, they were out of it then). I saw an unfamiliar brand of something that really looked like it was just a more expensive version of the same thing (which isn't that suprising -- there's a Danish beverage called Vita Malt which, based on the ingredients list and flavour, appears to be just that: a more expensive version of malta).

But it wasn't. It was not like malta. Nearly the same ingredients, but oh my goodness what a different flavour! Reading the label, both appeared to be basically unfermented beer with carbonation added. Malta comes across as an extremely dark-flavoured (if you get colour mappings from taste the way I do), heavy, sweet soda. Too heavy and too sweet for some people, but not quite molasses-soda. (Yes, it contains way more Calories than cola.) It's got hops in it, but not enough to really notice. This other drink, which I've forgotten the name of ... well it was like I'd been smacked in the mouth by a non-alcoholic version of a Really Hoppy Beer.

I don't like hops. I don't like hoppy beers. (It took a homebrewer who was paying attention to what beers I liked and didn't like -- one of my bandmates -- to pick up on the pattern. Until he pointed it out, I didn't really know which part of the flavour the hops added.) If you look at the beers I'm willing to drink -- Skull Splitter, Mackesson, Guinness, Monty Python, somebody's nut brown ale, somebody else's pumpkin ale -- the Monty Python and the Guinness are probably the ones with the most conspicuous hops flavour (at least to my taste buds), and those aren't as hoppy as most beers I've been exposed to (obviously, I don't like most beers). Two of them could even be called sweet (but in a very different way than the sweetness of, say, a lambic). Bitter I can enjoy, but not hops bitter. That burnt-bitter taste that puts some people off of stouts? I like that. But hops are a different kind of bitterness. So getting my tongue flogged by a fistful of hops wrapped around a beerish tanginess when I was expecting a dark, sweet soda was rather a bit of a shock. Fuck that -- it was startling as Hell. And I think the remaining 4/5 of the bottle is still in anniemal's fridge.

(And yeah, for someone who didn't really discover beer until long after college, I'm terribly picky about my beer. Actually, that's why I didn't start on beer until so late -- so far, I've never met a lager I can stand, and nobody ever handed me an ale to try until that first Guinness when I was in my twenties. Since I decided early on that I wasn't going to drink anything I didn't actually enjoy the flavour of, I often joke that I "flunked beer in college" (usually followed by an observation that most of my schoolmates "passed beer ... in one sense or another"). I really do feel like a beer beginner still, which may seem a little at odds with my preference for brews a lot of other people seem to think of as "advanced beer drinker" beers for some reason, and my rambling about nuances of flavour. *shrug* I had to find the few categories of beer I could stand before I could start learning which specific beers I like.)

So there's my night: drove home from the gig, fed the cat, checked my email, and sat down with a glass of ale to cap off the evening while writing in chatty-mode to my friends. Not as good a splitting the beer with someone in person, sitting on a sofa and shooting the breeze, but it'll do for tonight. (I finished the beer a couple of paragraphs and a reread/edit ago.) Perrine is either trying to tell me to go to bed, or to go sit in the kitchen so she'll have company while she eats, I'm not sure which. (She has food in her bowl right now, but I've noticed that she often waits for me to go to the kitchen before running down there herself to eat, and unless she's especially hungry, she'll wait until she thinks I'm going to stay in the kitchen for a little while before she starts. I'm considering moving her food dish to the office so she can eat when I'm on the computer -- that's where I usually eat.) But I've got a couple more things I'd like to do online before I crash.

A couple of months ago I was offered a good deal I couldn't afford, on a nice enlarger. Now someone has offered pretty much an entire darkroom (well, not the room, but...) for $200+shipping, and I'm wondering whether I can raise that much before somebody else speaks up. I don't know enough about enlargers to know how the enlarger in this setup compares to the first one, but in any case, the idea is extremely appealing.

I'm now a whole week behind on my friends list reading. I've skimmed the past few days, but there are a lot of "I should come back to this and read the whole thing later" entries, and I never did read last weekend or the beginning of the week. I do plan to get caught up if I can.

"Another responsibility upon all adults is to fearlessly examine the facts of their lives, to confront whether they are in deed living in accord with their values, and to strive earnestly to bring their way of living into accord with their values.

"So the question before you is, 'What are your values?' [...] What, in your mind, constitutes a life well lived?"

        -- siderea, 2003-12-14