Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

[Edit 20040806.1545 -- broken link to MS Fantasy Ball info replaced with working mirror site.]

Uncooperative body today. Some important things didn't get done. Just did the eggs potato cheese thing, hoping to get enough rest tonight (and crash early enough) to make tomorrow extra productive. Wish me luck.

I did spend some time reading LiveJournal though, when I was too ... well in hindsight I guess my problem was probably migraine "aura" ... to get anything done and too muddleheaded to realize I needed to lie down or take something. I got to "?skip=980" on my friends page, which took me back to the evening of the 30th, and LJ won't let me page back any farther than that. So not only was I skimming pretty fast for some days, I haven't seen part of the 29th and part of the 30th at all. There are entries I would have replied to but felt I already had too many in the queue to add more, there are entries I would have replied to if I'd gotten to them earlier, and there are 116 windows open in my web browser at the moment, many of which are comment views of friends' entries I want to get back to later but have not yet read in detail. Then I finally realized how much time I'd spent in this rather zoned state and went back to bed.

I wouldn't have been quite as far behind as I was, except that on my last chance to do a lot of LJ reading, I got caught up in the "No pity, No shame, No silence" avalanche, and became rather focussed on that for a couple of days. Once misia realized she needed to direct it to other fora, there was enough of a lull before things got rolling in nopity that I had a chance to pull my head out, but looking at my reactions to things in private conversations (in person and in email) I'm realizing I'm a long way from having said all I want/need to say about that. How much of it I'll have time to write before I leave for The Pennsic War, I don't know. There are a fair number of posts by friends (and a few posts by strangers) from those two days that I really want to respond to but haven't yet, as well.

I've been neglecting people. For the past few weeks it seems I've been switching between being busy, not feeling well, and not being home, without enough time in other states (once I stop feeling like crap, I'm behind and therefore become busy again) to catch up with people. I did get to see Erica, and I managed a way too short visit with anniemal, and I've made it to most of my rehearsals the past couple of weeks, but I've not gotten together with Marian to for camera geeking, I haven't managed that data-recovery/troubleshooting session with keith_m043, I've missed at least two social events I'd been really looking forward to, my responding to email has been spotty, and I'm still behind on major items in the "bad things happen if I don't get these done" category. So if I've been lame, or even downright rude by neglect, please try to forgive me if I don't manage to catch up until the end of the month. This includes answering months-old email from my cousin and updating my friends list, as well.

I am not prepared for Pennsic. Since I'm not driving the truck and thus don't have to be there early Saturday (I've got a wedding gig with The Homespun Ceilidh Band Saturday evening that I had to stick around for; I'll also be missing the Thrir Venstri Foetr (Three Left Feet) performance at the MS Fantasy Ball the same night, but I wanted to make sure to find an excuse to remember to mention it here because it's something folks ought to know about) ... uh, that parenthetical comment got long enough to lose the train of thought, so I'll start over (instead of going back and editing, lest I lose my own train of thought, since between fibromyalgia and possible edge-of-migraine my short term memory and mental-organization are Not Good right now). Right, I was saying ... [scratches head, suddenly remembers, "hey, idiot, what I was saying is a few lines higher up on the screen, you don't have to scratch your head and try to remember!" -- see what I mean about current cognitive performance? And neurologists who've tested me don't understand why I, a [expletive]ing computer programmer, find this phenomenon to be A Problem And A Symptom as long as I come out somewhere within the "human adult normal" range on their tests! (Okay, now this has gotten out of hand. Pop the bloody stack already!)] Uh, right.

Since I'm not driving the truck and therefore don't have to be at War at a specific time and date, I've decided to try not to stress about "missing a few days, oh no, I'm missing a few days", and plan to attempt to be both organized and as-rested-as-I-get before starting out, so I'll seriously dive into preparing on Sunday, and expect to get to Cooper's Lake sometime Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. Part of that preparation includes scraping together gas & grocery money and begging Mom for money to pay my Baltimore Gas & Electric bill. *sigh* I'm a little nervous about taking my car, not because it's got any problems, but because the last time I drove my own car to Pennsic, that car ate its own motor about a mile from troll and had to be scrapped. But I've not gotten around to making other arrangements, so it may be too late to do so. I'd gotten used to effectively unlimited cargo space in the truck (a rented truck of the largest size one can legally drive without a Commercial Driver's License, AFAIK, filled to its weight limit with pavilions but still having most of its volume empty), so I'd gotten used to bringing pretty much everything that it entered my mind to bring. Driving my own car, I may need to leave something behind, like one of the guitars and a couple of drums, and pack some things in smaller containers than the "oh so convenient to have when it rains" Rubbermaid totes, so as to better squish things into crooks and nannies nooks and crannies in the car. (BTW, over the years I've gotten more of a sense of which are nooks and which are crannies, but I'm not sure I can formulate a definition yet; it's still in the "know it when I see it" stage. Part of it is the shape, I think.)

If I ride up with someone else, all the parameters change. I wonder whether a) one of my mother's minivans will make the trip and b) whether she'd be comfortable lending it to me for a couple of weeks and that kind of distance ... and c) whether any of the communal camp infrastructure that is, last I heard, being left behind this year for vehicle-space reasons will fit into the minivan and can be fetched before the folks I'd need to get it from drive off to Pennsic. Obviously I should have been sorting that out days ago.

And finally, I got a letter from BGE about a scheduled power outage on the 13th, which means I need to finish dealing with or bookmark these 116 open browser windows, and either manage to make my LAN properly bring itself up correctly without manual intervention or plan on not being able to reach my home machines the second half of War (yes, there's an ISP at Pennsic these days -- hey, that's how one day at a past war I was able to have typeset copies of a tune I'd written the afternoon before, without having left site: it started with a telnet connection to home where I have the software to go from ABC notation to a PDF copy of a score using nothing but vi and a bunch of command-line tools -- very telnet-friendly (though come to think of it, now I could use nothing but web-based tools, and thus not need to connect to home)). I guess I should temporarily move my quote-of-the-day file and posting script to my ISP in case my home machines (where the script runs now) don't come back up correctly when the electricity is restored.

I had more that I wanted to make sure I wrote about tonight, but most of it has slipped my mind now. There's one item I'll put into a separate entry though.

One thing about the drive up: however else I wind up feeling about delays, cargo space constraints, or fatigue, I can be cheered by having The Right Driving Music for this trip. Unfortunately only two other vehicles on the road to Pennsic will have it -- the draft mix of the second Homespun Ceilidh Band CD -- because it won't be released until probably a month or so after Pennsic, but at least I'm personally set to make the drive with the proper sonic accompaniment. (It's not period, but it's consonant with the Pennsic atmosphere and oh boy is it driving music.)

By now y'all will have heard of, probably giggled at, and possibly ranted about the significance of, the latest verbal gaffe by our president. The gist of it is that Bush said his administration is "looking for ways to harm America". Although I've got no love for this administration, nor any inclination to excuse (or fail to mock) Bush's musutterances, my gut reaction to this one differed from what I've been hearing so far.

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we,"

When I first heard this, my immediate reaction was, "hey, that can be deliberately misunderstood in a giggleworthy manner," not, "oooh, Bush misspoke," or "he said he's trying to hurt America." No, I heard it as, "They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and [in order to stay a step ahead of them] neither do we." So I don't think this is properly a "Bushism", a case of his fumbling or butchering the language, or a Freudian slip. I think the phrasing is a mistake because it's so easy to twist for irony or snarkiness, not because he actually said something stupid.

So laugh it up, but laugh in silly-mode, not in "look, we found another sign he has to go" mode. He does have to go, for all our sakes (my fellow citizens and my foreign friends), but this one doesn't go on the list of reasons. This one is in the "look how clever we can be with language since he gave us an opening" pile, which is a very different thing.

That said, I'll now proceed to giggle.

Thanks to the folks who responded to yesterday morning's sex question. Still mulling over the comments before responding to them. Some useful thought-fuel there.

"It's easier to fool yourself about the healthiness coefficient if you don't stare at the grease while still in its most concentrated form." -- silmaril, 2004-03-15

I need migraine drugs. Feeling like this is costing me money as well as interfering with that "having a life" thing and helping friends. The drugs I've got can knock it back for a few hours, but it keeps returning. I don't like how Midrin makes me feel, but at least it seems to keep the next one from happening for a couple of days.

In other news:

theferrett posted a very short poll about sex drive.

midwinter posted a not-much-longer poll about searching for health information.