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.