Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Did not make it to SCA classes Saturday. Did not make it to bandmates' Oktoberfest party Sunday. Did not manage to do much. Did make it to Bowie to visit my mother and my youngest brother, though halfway there I started feeling like maybe being in a car wasn't the best idea for the moment (I was feeling better than that for the drive home, fortunately). Still have not gotten around to writing up last weekend (if I mention that aloud enough times maybe I'll actually wind up doing it), so here are disjointed observations instead:

Seven-Eleven has cream cheese; Wawa has cheddar; neither has Prilosec. :-(

I finally found out which exit to take to get to the Wawa with the big sign advertising what is usually the cheapest gasoline price around, off of I-97. Unfortunately I didn't fill up a week or ten days ago, before the prices got so [expletive] high that even the cheap gas is wince-worthy.

Being a vegetarian means never having to deal with prying open clams or oysters (actually I didn't eat either of those before I went veg either (but I did have to dissect a clam in high school), nonetheless, there are still Pistachio nuts to provide a similar challenge/frustration. (Okay, most open easily (and you're not fighting that impressive clam hinge muscle); but it's the really stubborn ones that you remember.)

Mom has started buying this fancy, not-from-concentrate orange juice that comes in a special bottle that tries to look like a classy carafe instead of a plastic jug or cardboard carton (it's still got a plastic screw-top though). It's stuff I wouldn't normally even think about, but I have to admit it's tasty. Then on the way home I got some really cheap generic orange juice because I had run out of concentrate at home. It tastes much better when the memory of Mom's expensive juice isn't quite so fresh. Oh well. (It'll taste normal to me again by morning.)

I'm fussier than many people I know regarding milk that's just a wee bit past its best condition, but my cat is considerably more fussy about milk than I am. I just finished off the jug of milk in the fridge and thought to treat her with a tiny bit of it. Perrine got all excited at the idea, but rejected it after a sniff. A few days ago she was quite enthusiastic about consuming a similar treat from the same jug, as is usual for her. (But anniemal said Perrine was uninterested in milk while at her house.)

Shortly after I got home, Perrine indicated that she wanted to play. She wanted to play "chase". My leg hurts too much. I got her to play "catch the airborne toy" instead. She was quite enthusiastic about that until the toy landed near a box my brother had given me (yard-sale booty -- he's got major tag-fu). The context-shift was so sudden that it almost seemed as though she had to time-travel back a few seconds to change her focus so fast: the box has the scent of two small dogs on it. *sniff*sniff*sniff* She has met these dogs, but only briefly (that is, not long enough to either make friends or assert dominance over them.

Converseation with Mom after watching British shows on PBS led to wondering why MPT hasn't brought back Butterflies. Some of the Britcoms they do show, they've cycled through the complete set of episodes a few times, and while those are in fact good enough to bear re-watching, I do wonder why some fun shows we haven't seen in a long time are being ignored. (That, and I haven't seen every episode of Butterflies yet, so an end-to-end run of it would let me fill in the gaps. Also, how many years after the UK audience sees a show do we get to see it in the US? My Hero is on what, season, uh, four? Five? How long before we can see the rest of season two here? (I saw two episodes of the second season on MPT, I got psyched up for seeing more, and them *poof* it was gone again. Urk?)

(Also, what's up with BBC shows having six- or seven-episode seasons? Is that just how it's done over there, or only for the shows I've gotten around to looking up episode guides for?)

And with that, I think it's time for bed.

"The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves." -- Plato (427-347 BCE)

Thanks to xpioti who requoted it off of AWAD

The things that fall into my brain at odd moments ... (maybe I do need that Faraday coif after all?) ...

Is it possible to make something like an aerogel out of metal instead of silica? If so, would it still be called an aerogel, or would it just be "metal foam"? One web page I read suggested that an aerogel could be made from "anything that can be dissolved", which would suggest that it could be done with metal (but would the atomic properties of metals interfere with formation of the gel, and/or would structuring a metal as an aerogel result in a nonmetallic substance made of a metal element?) ...

The thought that started this was that I suddenly imagined what fun it would be to create sculptures out of a brass aerogel. Assuming that we can create metal gels, would it matter that we started with an alloy instead of a single element? (Argh -- more web surfing to do, because I've reminded myself that there are things I ought to know about alloys but don't. If my understanding is correct, an alloy is not a compound, but I'm not sure whether it's simply a mixture or whether it's some funky special state in between a mixture and a compound because metals do funny things with their electrons, things of which the Moral Majority probably would not approve.) I could see switching my vague project ideas to alumin[i]um or tin if an alloy would be bad. Or maybe copper ... but wow, what happens to an aerogel as it oxidizes? I'd hate to wind up with nothing but a cc or so of fine green dust a year later.

(Though of course the right artistic themes and some creative marketing could turn the ephemeral nature of such a scultpture into a positive attribute. Like if you could make soap-bubble art last long enough to sell on eBay, eh?)

I need to open a whole bunch more browser windows, but I'm low on RAM. So I must either finish what I was doing with all the windows I've got open, or fire up another computer to run a web browser on. Or probably just go back to bed, because it's obvious I still need sleep. At least when the noise in my brain-circuitry randomly produces a signal-like structure it's often entertaining to me ... (yeah, the Faraday coif would be to protect y'all from having stuff get beamed out of my head -- :-P ). Okay, okay, right, time to either post to talk.bizarre or go to bed, right. I'll find out whether I was really awake now when I get up later and find out whether this entry actually exists in my journal.

But the more I think about it, the more I think that mere "metal foam" would suffice for the first ideas that came to mind, but despite that, the more nifty I think the notion of a metallic aerogel is for sheer "because it's there" value.

So where do I buy brass open-cell foam? No, wait, wrong question ... How can I make soap bubbles last long enough for an eBay auction? No, wait, still the wrong question ... Has anyone made electroluminescent aerogels? Wait, so wrong a question that, well, where the heck did that one come from? Why am I not already back in bed? Right question. Good mNoIrGnHiTn'!

Apparently not destined to get a decent amount of sleep this morning. A house is burning, on Pratt St. as far as I can tell looking out my back window. Lots of sirens, emergency vehicles still arriving, and it's close enough that my house already smells like smoke. (I may be a block off, but since I can see flashing lights when I peer between houses, Pratt seems most likely.)

Hmm. They don't usually burn in daylight.

I was right about the location: Pratt street, same position on the block as my house is on Lombard. Two houses, both occupied. Nobody knows what started the fire yet. An elderly man with an oxygen tank was taken away before I got there, and a woman from the other house was talking to bystanders on the sidewalk. I saw a fireman loaded onto a stretcher (from his body language he didn't seem to be very messed up, so I'm guessing it's something like a sprain or a strain; I hope that's all it is). Unless an ambulance puts on its siren leaving the scene, I should be done with sirens for a little while. So now back to the sleep attempt. Gotta see if I have any throat lozenges left first.

Most of the fires around here are at night, in winter, a couple blocks farther way from me, and in vacant houses -- and that's plenty bad enough. This time people lost posessions, possibly their homes (I've got no idea how bad the damage is inside; from the outside all I saw was broken windows (every window) and smoke smudges), and were personally in danger. Yeah, I know "these things happen", but still: man, that sucks.

Looks like it's out or mostly out (they're not coiling up the hoses yet, but they're not exactly bustling about urgently either); there's still smoke wafting about but I couldn't see where it was coming out of.

I am soooo tired. (Cue Beatles music.)