Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

After rehearsal I hung around a while for conversation, then went grocery shopping, so I got home at one o'clock ... and could not park in front of my house.

Because there's an impressively smooshed police car in the street nearly in front of my house. And intact police cars at either end of my block, closing off the street.

So I had to park around the corner (must remember to move the car before rush hour!) and lug my guitar and groceries in from there. The crumpled cruiser looks like it's been there a while -- I see no sign of whatever hit it, the pavement has been marked with paint where the tires are. I hope nobody was seriously hurt -- all the damage appears to be from the center-post back, so maybe the cop driving it only got spun around a lot and not banged up himself? With luck, I'll hear about it on television in the morning and get some clues. I'm still trying to figure out how the car landed in that particular position (so far my best guess is that it was going north on Fulton and got rammed by someone going the wrong way on Lombard (my block is the start of two-way traffic on Lombard, so anyone coming into the intersection from the west would be going the wrong way in a one-way block)).

Impressive smushitude. But not the most impressive I've seen. (In the past I've seen a car cut in half (literally, as in, it went away on two separate tow trucks) just across the intersection, and I've seen an SUV and a police car smashed together (fatally for the police officer) about a block and a half in the other direction.) Meanwhile, far to the east on Lombard St. (I'm not sure which side of MLK Blvd -- it's far enough that using a 400mm lens as a telescope was only enough to allow me to count the number of fire trucks facing me (they have a distinctive rotating light thingie on the front)) something is going on that involved sirens rushing to it from two different directions. Maybe that's an unrelated fire ... or maybe it's where whatever hit the police car in front of my house eventually ended up?

Once again I wish Baltimore had a 24-hour news radio station akin to Washinton's WTOP. (We've got talk radio, but that's mostly not news.)

And in unrelated news, Perrine is being very insistent about sitting on me, walking on me, kneading my chest, and making typing as difficult as she can. But oh, that purr. (And ow, those claws. I really do need to trim them.)

After being told "We have a policy that we are not being hacked." when he tried to report a security problem to Friendster, Jason Kottke wrote:

"We have a policy that we're not being hacked." That's my new favorite thing right there. No longer do I need to acknowledge any deficiencies in my life; policy will take care of that. I have a policy that I'm fabulously wealthy. I have a policy that I can dunk a basketball. I have a policy that I'm the the life of the party. I have a policy that I'm dating Nicole Kidman *and* Gwyneth Paltrow. I. Feel. So. Free. You really should try this for yourself. I have a policy that it's great.

It's warm today. It's naked-warm in much of my house, and thin-bathrobe-warm in the rest of it. (Translation: 290K, 17C, 63F -- which would probably feel pretty cool, if not chilly, if my body were still adapted to summertime temperatures here, but it feels downright toasty at the moment). It's warm enough outdoors that I opened the back door to warm up the kitchen a bit and let Perrine stare at the outdoors. The television news at noon reported a temperature that I frankly don't believe, 'cause it's right on the edge of naked-warm in my back yard (and no, I didn't go out there naked), and the temperature reported for downtown was significantly colder than this feels.

They finally hauled the smooshed police car away around four o'clock. I didn't hear anything about it on the morning news 'cause I was drifting in and out of sleep (and the volume was low, 'cause my main focus was on trying to sleep). I caught the entire channel eleven noon news, and there was no mention of it. This strikes me as odd. Searching the Baltimore Sun web site earlier hadn't turned up anything yet either. A police cruiser is destroyed (looking at it from above (out my third floor window) even I could tell that sucker was bent; I'm pretty sure it's not cost-effective to rebuild), a street is closed for hours, and it doesn't even get noticed by the local media?

At the moment I feel like crap, 'cause leg cramps and then rib and back pain kept waking me up all morning. Poor Perrine got disloged by my having to roll over every time she got settled. My back still hurts, and now my right buttock aches from the way I was standing when I washed dishes while listening to the news. Oops. Let's see how much of my to-do list (at this point a lot of it is really a "to have done" list, it's so far overdue) I can get to despite feeling like this. I've got a frozen (okay, it was frozen but yes, I did heat it up) burrito and a mug of decaf Earl Grey in front of me, I've had my Prilosec, and I managed to get the litter box scooped and the trash out to the curb before the garbage collectors came.

I hope to get a real entry done later this evening, but for now ...

Driving up Falls Road, I was behind an expensive-looking full-size sedan. Attached to the rear window was half of a golf ball, surrounded by a decal designed to look like cracks in the glass. Sure, it's basically dorky, but hey, it amused me.

I'm still not used to a camera that requires a batery to operate. On Christmas, the Pentax PZ-10 stopped doing the power-zoom thing (which I don't usually use anyhow) and then the autofocus stopped working. Last night the autofocus worked part of the time and I finally noticed the low-battery warning on the LCD. With most of the rest of my cameras, if I lose the battery, all it costs me is the meter (and autoexposure modes, if the camera has any). I think the Program Plus will shoot at 1/100, 1/1000, and Bulb without batteries, but I'd have to look that up. And I'm not sure whether the KX has a fully mechanical shutter. But everything else -- if it has any electronics in the first place! -- operates without batteries. The PZ-10 has no way to advance the film other than the built-in autowinder. No way to cock the shutter (which is probably all electronic anyhow). Once the battery goes flat, the camera stops. This makes sense, and the current battery has been in there for about a year I think, so it's not really a complaint about the camera; it's just an observation that I'm so unaccustomed to the situation that I find it startling to be reminded of it.

Being challenged on the way out of a store with a request -- no, a demand -- to see my receipt and look into my bag pisses me off. After being told, "I'm afraid I can't allow you to leave unless you let me," I decided that the folks who could see my receipt were the people at the customer service desk as I returned the merchandise and got my money back. But later I started wondering: what would he -- could he -- have done if I'd just said, "You bloody well can allow me to leave," and kept walking? Would he have physically restrained me, which I would have considered assault? Called the police to arrest me for taking something I had just paid for out of the store? (And yes, this was a store policy, with someone whose whole job is to hassle customers on their way out. I was not singled out.)

Similarly, in the past, I've told managers that the reason I'll never spend money in their stores again is because of policies that say "we accept personal checks ... oh, except for yours because you don't have your address preprinted".

Perhaps a Gollum-voice is not the most reassuring to use when telling a cat how preciousssss she is.

There were cardinals in my back yard today. I only saw one clearly, but there was a small flash of the same shade of red when the other one moved, so I'm assuming it was another cardinal, a younger male. If there were any females there, they didn't move enough to draw my eye (and, of course, would blend in much better than the males).

Perrine knows the word "bird".

While a bird she can't reach warrants a couple of frustrated cries or that cat-watching-birds chatter, for a housefly out of reach Perrine's complaint is a single short squeak.

Getting toothpaste in your eye kind of burns a little bit.

And no, I don't feel like explaining that other than to say it involved my cell phone and it seemed to make sense at the time.