Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

That was an extremely long day that started with far too little sleep. Now I'm going to sleep for a few hours and go back to Glen Dale. Perrine seems to be very hungry but can't decide whether to eat or follow me around. I tried to post an LJ entry from my phone via SMS earlier but it doesn't appear to have gotten through.

ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz

"Mr. Bailey complains that his rep is trash
So he's seeking compensation in the form of cash
Bailey thinks he's entitled to some monetary gain
Because Eminem used his name in vain
The lyrics are stories no one would take as fact
They're an exaggeration of a childish act
It is therefore this court's ultimate position
That Eminem is entitled to summary disposition."

-- Macomb County Circuit Court judge, Deborah Servitto, from her ruling dismissing a slander and privacy invasion lawsuit brought against rapper Eminem.

(From the Quotation of the Day mailing list, 2003-11-10. Submitted to that list by Bob Bruhin.)

I got a hunch that our second set might get moved earlier than scheduled and began making my way back. When I heard the gunfire stop I revised my guess to even earlier, but I was too far away. Sure enough, by the time I reached the far side of the field, I heard my bandmates playing "Childgrove" as the first tune. I made it over there just in time to pick up my bass recorder and join the final repetition.

Today felt like a longer day than it was. I'm sure weather ten Kelvins warmer than I'd expected was one on the things that made it feel long. Apart from being caught out of place when our set started a quarter hour early, and despite feeling achy and tired throughout, it was basically a good day. I finally found out how a balalaika is tuned. (It turns out one of the gueses I'd been using when confronted with balalaikas in the past was pretty close, but not quite right.) I saw people I hadn't heard from for a long time. I saw people I'd seen recently but am always happy to see and hug again. I got to answer questions and explain stuff to people.

Afterwards, exhausted, I drove to Bowie. My mother was not home, but my brother was. He showed me photos from their trip to Cyprus. They were shot on a 2 Mpixel digital point&shoot and printed at a drug store or photo lab. Some looked pretty good; others showed a lack of detail. With the magnification I had handy, I couldn't see individual pixels on the 4x6 prints, but I did see edge artifacts in one shot. My brother said that without extra memory sticks and without access to a computer, he'd just deleted all of those frames as soon as they'd been printed, which made me cringe. (He had tried to capture a scene too wide for his lens by shooting two frames to put side by side. He got more overlap than he'd intended, but it did work (this is not surprising, but it's also not guaranteed). I suggested stitching to two images together on a computer and getting a single wide print made from that instead of carefully lining up two 4x6 prints whenever he wants to show it. That was when he told me about deleting the pictures as soon as they'd been printed.) My impression is that I would not be happy with a two megapixel P&S, confirming prior predictions. (I do want to add digital to my photographic toolkit, and others have pointed out that it doesn't take long for savings on film and developing to add up to the cost of a cheap digicam; the problem is that the cheap digital cameras available so far won't do me much good. So I'm waiting for the probably-distant day that I can get my hands on a better digicam. If a low-end point-and-shoot fell in my lap, I'd use it to shoot things I want to post on the web (possibly just before or just after shooting the same thing on film, unless I wanted it only for the web), but it's not worth trying to come up with money for.) Even the budget ones are pretty nifty these days, so I'm not surprised that so many people are happy with them. It's a matter of "use the right tool for the job", and they're the right tool for some jobs.

Then my mother returned from grocery shopping and offered me prickly pear cactus, which I'd never had before (I liked the flavour and most of the texture but decided that I didn't like those quite enough to make up for the seeds), then served me fried halloumi -- my very favourite cheese in the world. (The page linked to describes it as being made from goat's milk, but when I've seen it specified on the wrapper it's been sheep's milk.) Halloumi halloumi halloumi! Yaaaay the squeaky cheese! Mmmmm. Sorry. Got carried away. I really like halloumi. Then I got presents! My brother gave me a tiny plastic bouzouki, apparently intended as a Christmas tree ornament, on which the tuning pegs (only four strings on it) actually turn! They don't stay in place well, but I can fix that ... and with a body only a couple of inches across the thing isn't loud, but I'm going try to tune it just because. The frets are just lines on a decal, so I don't have to worry about them being lined up right. I figure I'll tune it to an open chord and strum it just to be silly. And my mother gave me a book of Cypriot music. I can't read the text, but I can read the wee dots, and I'll be able to pronounce the titles (and lyrics, for the songs) even if I don't know what they mean.

I also found my 7th grade Greek book, so I can start recovering knowledge I've forgotten. (Not that it'll mean I'll be able to read the comments about the tunes in the book Mom gave me, since that's modern Greek and the textbook is for Homeric Greek, but I'd been wanting to brush up on ancient Greek anyhow.)

Alas, somewhere along the line I slipped into migraine-land.

I've got the television news on as I'm writing this (I'm using the Mac, with the video window sized to fit next to the telnet window), and they just mentioned a NASCAR race which was held up for a while to repair a pothole in the race track. I'd somehow failed to ever contemplate the existence of potholes in race tracks before.

I'm going to put some aloe vera gel on my face and sit down with the music book and a guitar for a little while.

Anybody looking for a place to live in Bowie? Mom has a rental property (rambler-style house, which in Bowie means the L-shaped kind) that needs a tenant.

The gunfire mentioned in the first paragraph was part of the event program. Marching Through Time draws military re-enactment groups from several periods into one place, and some groups (including the WWII ones) stage battle demos. I thought I was hearing a wild-west group until the machine gun started up and I realized it was the group scheduled right before our second dance set.