Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." -- Peter F. Drucker

I started this last night but had a nap-attack and set it aside. Let's see how much I have to edit for it to still make sense ...

Did not wind up feeling any better. Did not go to rehearsal. On the theory that unexplained low-grade nausea that gets neither better nor worse, without other GI symptoms, but with headache and spaciness, even if the headache isn't the head-cracking, completely-flatten-me kind, might be signs of whatever phenomenon underlies migraines but just not up to full-blown migraine levels, I tried caffeine and ibuprofen to see whether that would help. Hoping this much caffeine doesn't make too many other problems for me. [It did, some, but the caffeine gave me other problems. The next day I'm still not feeling great, but hoping not to repeat yesterday.] Anyhow, my sense of time had been wonky all day. At 19:00 it felt like it was 22:30. At noon it felt like 17:00. At 14:30 it felt like 11:00. And my armpits have been super extra mega stinky (but oddly coffee-scented as well). Odd. No clue whether that's connected to how I feel or not. Basically had a crappy day physically. I'll survive. *shrug* The flu would be plenty more miserable than this; this is mostly frustrating.

Anyhow, trying to catch up on bits and pieces that have been accumulating in odd corners of my brain lately so I can stop thinking about them. And then I'll restart Opera and hope it gets back to all those windows I had open before Perrine walked across the keyboard in just the right way to make it quit. *grrrr* (It usually does do the "continue where I was last time" trick correctly on this machine; it usually loses most of them on the NT box.)

So ... nothing important or deep here; just how I'm doing and a bunch of minor observations about stuff.

Saturday's snow did its pretty-but-messy thing, and I wrote about how slippery the roads were. Then I went and read misia's griping about how the city of Baltimore "handles" snow removal ... y'know, if it had been a foot of snow, I would've said, "Yeah, c'mon, it takes time to dig out, give the city a break." But it wasn't a foot. Unlike all the surrounding counties, the city didn't even declare a snow emergency, as far as I can tell (which means I parked a block away for nothing). That night on television (WBAL) a reporter standing at the county line pointed out York Road behind her and observed that the difference between how the two jurisdictions coped was illustrated by that street being completely clear on the county side of the line and still snow-covered on the city side. For out-of-towners, note that York Road is one of the major routes, not some random little side street.

Lombard St. got salted a couple of times but not plowed until late (much of Lombard counts as a major avenue, but out where I am (west of MLK) they made it two-way to slow traffic, and have had "no trucks after 7:00 PM" signs up as long as I've been here. It's still how one would get from the Inner Harbour to US Rt. 1 though.). When they did plow it, they plowed a single stripe down the middle, as though it were still a one-way street not important enough to clear both lanes of. So I watched westbound traffic straddling the double-yellow line for a while, until enough tires had munged the margins of the plowed stripe for people to start trying to drive in-lane again. I figured the plow would come back sometime late Sunday as they got caught up on everywhere else, especially after hearing on the telly that having made the main routes passable they were at that point going back and pushing snow to the curbs and starting to clear side streets. I'm really not sure which side streets they meant -- around here it seems they mostly waited for side streets to melt, at least the ones I can see bits of from my windows. They never did properly clear both lanes of Lombard.

But since the snow wasn't ohmygodwe'retrappedanddoomed bad (I've seen enough snow at once to do that to Baltimore. But the time that much snow left me stuck at the home of the ex-girlfriend I'm no longer allowed to mention, for some reason the "doomed" part didn't cross my mind.) .... where was I? Oh, right: since the snow wasn't "snowed in" bad, a few minutes with a shovel (or a little longer with stubbornness behind the wheel instead of digging) would've gotten my car onto that lame plowed-stripe and I could've gotten out if I'd been feeling well enough. Unfortunately, I wasn't feeling so hot. Since then the weather has slowly worked on the snow on the city's behalf. I'm still trying to figure out how the shady side of my street melted faster than the sunny side. (Maybe a few people making tire tracks in the parking lane changed the surface area enough to melt faster or something?)

Anyhow, the second dose of snow didn't add up to enough to do more about than take a broom to my front steps, and then the temperature got above melting yesterday, which makes a big difference for the roads and for how warm my house is.

[Update: it looks as though they may have plowed the far side of Lombard sometime last night or this morning, after most of it had already melted anyhow. Huh.]

I just poked my head out a window, and it feels like it's way above melting this afternoon. I should stick my thermometer out there or check Weather Underground to see just how warm it actually is.

Like a lot of people, I think I know how to drive in snow and curse all the idjits out there who don't. Early in Saturday's snow when I went out to the grocery store, I noticed that all the other drivers were going more slowly than I really wanted to, but I figured that was a whole lot better than seeing them try to go faster! Despite my general attitude toward snow, Saturday felt extra-slippery, and my gut said, "no major travel today". Sunday or Monday I heard on the news that most of the auto-body shops are full of cars and people who waited until late in the weekend to have their accidents might be waiting two months for their car's turn to be repaired. Whether this was a television-news exaggeration based on a sampling of only the first few repair shops in the Yellow Pages or an accurate assessment of the number of wrecks, I'm not sure; but it does make me think that maybe deciding not to push myself to drive out to anniemal's house in the snow on the weekend was prudent.

This weekend I have a rehearsal up in Towson on Friday night, and a performance with The Homespun Ceilidh Band in Fairfax on Saturday night at a Burns Night supper [PDF flyer] hosted by Clans Of Scotland U.S.A..

A couple of times recently I've woken up with pain in my throat and worried that I might be coming down with a cold until I've realized that it hurts simply from being too dry. It seems my house needs to have 3-4 gallons of water in it for me to breathe comfortably (eventually maybe I'll get around to measuring the volume of the house (different ceiling heights in different places, different width in front and in back, and I'll have to approximate the space taken up by stuff -- I just need to be bored enough and find my tape measure) and taking a more accurate water measurement than eyeballing the level of water in a pot, to calculate the partial-pressure or tie it to relative humidity at winter temperatures, but don't hold your breath). Fortunately, adding water to air is not difficult (and if I use the method that involves a big pot and the stove, sprinkling some spices in the water makes the house smell pretty). I also have a borrowed humidifier that I can use, when I remember that it's here.

I wonder which matters more, partial pressure (aka vapour pressure) or relative humidity.

This morning a dream woke me again. This time it started off like an episode of CSI, but quickly switched to the perspective of a housefly seeking maximum nourishment at a variety of crime scenes. The first involved mass murder at an orgy in a bar; the second took place on Air Force One with GWB (but it was all setting-the-scene and I never found out what the crime was going to be there). What woke me up was when I put the dream on 'pause' to go back and rewrite parts of the first scene to repair plot holes. On the fourth or fifth edit-and-replay, I became too aware of the fact that I was dreaming to stay asleep.

And now my eyes are doing funny things and my head doesn't feel good, so I'll post this and go close my eyes again for a spell. Got places to be tonight. Wish me luck.

Current condition (self, not weather) not suitable for highway-driving. Am missing rehearal again. Ungood. Feh. Once again, Wednesday means "shift focus to getting body to cooperate by weekend". *mumblebitchmoanwhine*

Silver lining: opportunity to confuse the cat -- shower, dress, then not go away. Awfully small consolation though. Closing my eyes now.