Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"The weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon." -- G.K. Chesterton, Mr Wells and the Giants (thanks to Patrick Juola)

yesthattom has announced that today is National Update Your Damn Profile Day. Last year that was 28 February, but I guess he's decided it's the last Friday in February rather than a specific date?

Anyhow, his meme, his rules: today is National Update Your Damn Profile Day. I'll get around to editing mine sometime this afternoon.

I had Urgent And Important Things on my to-do list today. Despite waking up before the alarm I'd set, I kept running out of steam at various points, so everything took longer than it should have. I did eventually make it out of the house to where I needed to go, before it closed, and remembered to pick up chocolate, bread, bananas, and light bulbs on the way home.

Slipping into "I'm so ti-...<drool><blank stare>...-red I can barely think" mode Yet Again, I plopped myself in front of the computer to procrastinate with LiveJournal awhile, realized I was probably missing a television show (nope, turns out I'd remembered to record it after all -- I thought I hadn't gotten around to programming the VCR, but I had), was too tired to haul my butt out of the chair ... got tired of looking at the computer, but Perrine had perched on the desk, so I looked at her for a while instead ... finally got up, discovered the show was being recorded, and thought that in my udoubtably destined-to-be-brief burst of what-passes-for-energy, I should do something else on my to-do list.

Instead, I went and sat at the piano in the "what tries to pass for 'dark' but who are we kidding it's the city", because I wasn't looking at sheet music. (Piano's on my BIG to-do list, but not my "stuff I really need to cross off the list this week" list.) I played until my right hand started hurting -- about fifteen minutes. I don't know whether that's an "it'll get longer with practice as I build up the right muscles and learn more efficient ways to move" limit, or an "I'll always have to be careful not to overdo because of the fibromyalgia" limit. I worked on the melody I've composed (subject to further editing) that sparked my questions about piano technique a while ago, the piece that made me realize I want to do more with the piano than I had thought I did -- I need to get good enough to play at speed while trying out left-hand parts. Then I played the ubiquitous saltarello, followed by "Norwegian Dance From Hungary #1" by The Flash Girls. Sometime in the second verse of the Flash Girls tune I realized I wasn't looking at my hand (so far I'm just doing right hand). Both of those tunes are much easier to play on piano than the guitar tune I compoosed (which is almost comically easy to play on guitar).

I really need to get around to writing down "Norwegian Dance From Hungary #1" one of these days (AFAIK neither of The Flash Girls has transcribed it -- at least not the last time I asked) and trying to work out the chords. (I wonder whether they'd give me permission to put the sheet music online after I write it down ... or how they'd feel about my wanting to perform it.) That was a tune that drove me crazy trying to learn it by ear on the guitar, until one day I tried it on mandolin (on the CD, the melody is on fiddle) and Bang! there it was. And once I'd figured it out on mandolin, it became trivial to play on guitar. I would insert a "But I digress" at this point, except that that's really all this whole entry is in the first place, isn't it?

I got up from the piano (not tired of it yet, but not wanting to cause forearm pain), and of course Perrine was crouched in the doorway watching me.

Perrine hasn't been eating as much as usual for the past few days. I think it's mostly because every time she goes into the kitchen she gets distracted by having to check out all the likely mouse-places; she's been pretty serious about the hunting lately. But she hasn't caught anything since I brought her back from anniemal's house.

Speaking of which ... Failing to adhere to my plan, Perrine has not yet been spayed. (Soon, soon...) The afternoon of the day I was going to take her to Viriginia, she went into heat. Throwing up in the car seemed to, I dunno, reset something temporarily; she didn't act like she was in heat when I was showing wedding photos to the friend who knows theferrett. But after she'd recovered from the next leg of the trip, Chez anniemal et syntonic_comma, she started up again.

anniemal's poodle, who likes Perrine, tried to be helpful. He was attentive. He followed her around. And eventually he must have finally understood her body language or something (pretty unmistakable really), because he tried to do something about it.

But he's a standard poodle, not a miniature or a toy. Fifty six pounds of poodle. Six or seven pounds of cat. She presented. He stood over her and put his teeth on the back of her neck (someone said they didn't think dogs did that, but he was trying for a distinctly feline-mating move there, whether dogs normally do that or not), and then got all confused trying to figure out how to make the other end line up at the same time. But a poodle torso just doesn't shorten that much on demand. Watching attempted rishathra bewteen geometrically-incompatible species was way more amusing than it should've been. I felt guilty for being so entertained (but dammit, I'm giggling now remembering it). We left them alone because it seemed unlikely he'd get far enough to matter (and she'd swat him on the nose if he did and she objected). Later the neutered male cat in the house, who still sort of remembers what to do, clued in and took care of her. His first few tries didn't work, but he must have figured out the details at some point during the night because the next day she wasn't in heat any more. Hey, he's healthy and he's shooting blanks -- no diseases and no kittens -- and afterwards she's calm again for a while, so it makes sense to let them do their thing.)

But the look of confusion on that poodle while the cat sat there caught up in her own frustration and apparently oblivious to his attempts ... it's a mental image that kind of sticks with you. Until this month, I never imagined a dog would get it into his head to even try to mount a cat.

Perrine will probably finally get spayed sometime in the next week or two, a few months later than planned.

Perrine is back on my desk again. I'm not sure whether she wants me to go to bed, wants me to go downstairs and stampede mice in her direction, or just wants to sit near me as I type. (Oh, she just moved to balance on the armrest of my chair. How sweet. And precarious.)

FedEx is bringing me a faster computer, a gift from someone on a mailing list I subscribe to. It should be studly enough to reasonably run X apps and an X display at the same time, and a particular Linux web browser has been suggested that might solve a problem I've got, so it's probably going to be a Linux machine. (It'll arrive with no operating system -- the hard disk wiped clean. So if I want to be respectful of licenses and copyrights, my choices are to install Linux or BSD, or to decomission one of my existing Windows machines (probably just transplant the boot drive). It would run Windows better than any of my current Windows machines ... I'm still deciding.) Anyhow, the naming scheme on my LAN is this: the box with the modem in it is named after a transgendered spy and diplomat; the firewall is named after a crossdressing soldier; the name server is named after a crossdressing movie director; the file server is named after a transsexual tennis player; the Windows machines are named after transgendered (or at least famous-for-drag) pop musicians, and the Mac and the Linux machine I log into most of the time are named for transgendered "serious" musicians. I need to find my file of names of famous (okay, some are in fact pretty obscure) transgendered people and see whether I've got another serious musician's name handy in case I do install Linux. (If I put Windows on it, it can just assume the identity of whatever machine I transfer Windows from.)

There's stuff going on this weekend. People from out of town in town. A weekend party. A birthday gathering. If I feel well enough to get out of the house, I'm going to want to be in multiple places at once.

I need to string another Ethernet cable to the blue bedroom, or I need to turn the one that's in there into a crossover cable so I can put a small hub in that room. I forgot to buy more RJ45 connectors today. Whoops. I should also string cable to the third floor so I can eventually (when I have a spare box) put a computer next to the piano for editing sheet music and playing back MIDI so I can try other parts against what I've already put in the computer. Y'know, I hate pulling cable. It's not even all that hard in this house -- I stick a straightened-out coat hanger alongside the radiator pipe from the floor below, go up stairs and tape the end of the cable to the coat hanger, go back downstairs and pull the coat hanger out and keep pulling on the cable until it reaches the hub, then crimp the ends on -- so it's not as though I really have some arduous task to gripe about; I just don't like doing it.

Hey, I think I've finally got the "I have other things I need to do but I'm too tired for most of them and for some reason I just need to write" feeling taken care of. I feel much calmer now. I should eat something and see whether Perrine needs food yet.