Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Hey folks; I'm alive, just very tired, feeling overwhelmed, and was feeling a bit too dizzy to want to drive earlier. (No freaky symptoms this time, just felt migraine-ish when I wasn't sitting down.) Local friends who've done the Dance Of The Red Tape before are going to take me to see some sort of advocate person who will help me deal with getting health care and such. And I do plan to get to one of the cheap/free/sliding-scale clinics folks have pointed out.

Something I hadn't considered until someone on alt.med.fibromyalgia pointed out, but that I now need to read up on: it seems the symptoms I described are associated with narcolepsy. (Until now I'd just had a "television plot device" level understanding of what narcolepsy is, which -- unsurprisingly -- turns out to be rather incomplete.)

This is not a good time for me to be bad about answering email, I know, but yesterday and part of today I was Just Plain Worn Out, and I think I mentioned the feeling overwhelmed part. (Not just health and impending Interaction With Bureaucracy; also big to-do list and the ever present Scary Money Issues), so part of the time I've been resting and the rest of it I've been oscillating between mentally running away and trying to force myself to get things done.

Actually, I'm having to force myself to answer the phone. I just want to run away from the world, y'know? But I figure this is not the time to fail to answer my phone, either, if I'm awake and actually hear it ring. Feh.

Between that and just plain curiosity sparked by questions I'd been asked, I found myself feeling like I had to suddenly teach myself optics. So I learned Snell's Law, brushed a lot of rust off my trigonometry skills, and forced Excel into doing something it's not really meant for (when you have a hammer...), so that I could have a nice neat diagram illustrating spherical aberration using real numbers and calculations and everything. Now that I have a pretty picture (which I can't seem to export from Excel except by "printing" it to Acrobat, and the aspect ratio gets stretched in the PDF for some reason), maybe I can convince my brain to shut the Hell up and let me go to bed. (Quick, before I get sucked into the problem of finding detailed numbers on dispersion (lots of explanations of what it is, and a few blurry scans of graphs showing typical dispersion curves, but where do I find either a set of formulas describing the curves for various materials, or a tab-delimited or HTML table with lots of values that I can usefully interpolate between?), or tweaking the Excel spreadsheet to show me the paths of light through a parabolic lens instead of a spherical one! (Or before I edit in yet another parenthetical comment!))

Then again, a quarter of the reason my brain was shouting at me to learn optics was to shut up the parts that are just spinning in place from worry and other icky feelings. Yeah, need to be tired enough to get some rest.

I'm going to have to get around to learning to do macros in Excel. (The last time I used macros in a spreadsheet program, it was Lotus Symphony. I did write some pretty intense (for their day) macros though.) Or I'm going to have to find a shareware/freeware optics-diagramming tool. Or I'm going to have to sit down with Mr. C Compiler. Tonight I was not awake enough to re-derive forgotten mathematics, learn new material in physics, and do graphics programming all at the same time. (But somehow I decided I was awake enough to stumble through chart creation in Excel to force it to draw shapes for me?) I do need to get around to learning to write for X sooner or later though, and this might not be a bad project to use as an excuse for that.

Something I was going to complain about a week ago but forgot: It's annoying to try an unfamiliar brand of "Extra Sharp Cheddar" (because it's cheaper) and discover that for that manufacturer, "Extra" translates to "Not". Never before have I had Cheddar that tasted so close to American. (It's not the first time I've been disappointed this way, just the most extreme example. So I ought to know better.) And no, I'm not contemplating whether parabolic, low-dispersion cheese would be "sharper".

I know I'm not being terribly responsive, but I do appreciate the support, concern, suggestions, sympathy, and information.

Geez, reading back through this I see that I'm in an odd combination of scattered and microfocussed states. Too bad that's the wrong headspace in which to examine that headspace in detail.

Stress. Stress stress stress fucking stress, okay? Gonna go pet my cat now, if she's done zooming up and down the stairs at full speed.

I just heard a most disconcerting and loud thumping, and saw something disturbingly cat-sized plummet past my window. I got the distinct impression that a cat had fallen from the 2nd-floor roof, or possibly from the third-floor window (the one toms stand on the frame of to flirt with Perrine through the glass).

I can't see anything moving in the shadows, and I didn't hear any hurt-animal noises when I leaned out the window or when I went on the back porch; if there's a dead cat or one too seriously injured to make a sound, I won't see it until the sun is a little higher. But a small grey cat did flee the sound of my voice, so it's possible that he hit enough bits of wall, ivy, fire escape, etc. on the way down to slow enough to escape serious harm. Or that something inanimate fell, instead of a cat (possibly something knocked over by a cat?). Still ... disconcerting.

"A keen thing about contra dancing is how individualistic it is. Contra dancers are like snow flakes. No two people swing the same way. There seems to be so much information about a person being telegraphed in how they swing, if I but knew how to interpret it." -- siderea, 2003-11-29