Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"One of the goals is, 'Active participation and support in initiatives that deliver strategically valued outcomes', which may be put in any Powerpoint slide, anywhere in the universe, anytime, with equal semantic contribution. I don't think people write those sentences. Powerpoint just congeals them by shuffling around phrases people don't use." -- austin_dern, , 2005-02-22

(Help with the lock is coming late tonight or tomorrow evening; thanks for the suggestions, folks.)

If precision is saying exactly what you mean, then is postcision trying apply spin after what you said has blown up in your face? ("What I meant when I said _______ was really ______ ...")

(Yeah, I know, not as snippy as the old progress/congress joke, but hey, I'm no Samuel Clemens or Will Rogers, and I'm not completely awake. But I am easily amused.)

I did sleep last night, but I didn't sleep very long. I'm feeling the effects of sleep deprivation now. Stomach feeling wonky, eyestrain that comes and goes, mentally very "scattered", combination of hyperfocus and distractibility, different pattern of typos than usual, taking a long time to notice I've gotten hungry, and playing a drum pattern for five minutes wondering why that funny stutter in it works out before finally noticing that I'm playing in 6/8. (There was pounding next door that sounded like they're hammering nails -- I've seen the owners in and out over the past couple of days, and finally realized I hadn't seen the folks who were living there in about as long, so I wonder if the house is between tenants and the owners are doing maintenancce -- so I figured this was a good time to make noise without pissing anybody off.) 3LF is looking kind of iffy for me tonight; if a nap helps enough, I'll show, if not, not. But the temperature is rather higher than the last forecast I saw last night predicted for today, and the streets are mostly clear (travel lanes completely clear, parking lanes clear on the sunny side and pocked with small clumps of white on the shady side), but my head isn't. I'm not going to shovel the walk. By the time I looked at it, it was starting to melt except that the trod-upon stripe was not-shovel-compatible ice (I don't have a spade, just snow shovels). But since the air is so warm, I just threw salt on it (after looking for rock salt every time I was in a grocery store for the past two weeks, I finally found some in the drug store where I bought magnesium tablets last night (and if you're willing to go out in the snow, you can miss the French-toast-emergency panic-shoppers who stormed the stores just before, and at the start of, the storm)) and will let it look ugly for a while as long as it doesn't look like anyone's going to slip and fall and break something on it. Ohh lookitthat -- sleep-deprivation sentence structure. Whee. Will resist the urge to throw in random paragraph breaks to compensate for having lumped too many thoughts into one pragraph already.

Oh bother, I just forgot what I'd been about to say before I got distracted by the idea of writing that sentence about pragraph breaks. Drat.

(Do I curse differently when I haven't slept enough? I should read back to see whether I can find a pattern.)

Whenever I throw salt on the pavement, I remember reading of armies salting the earth so their enemies couldn't grow crops, in ancient history class. Not so much here in the city where there are no lawns, nothing growing but the occasional tree in a little designated planter square, but when I lived in the suburbs I thought about it more -- whether the runoff was going to poison the grass. I guess it mostly just runs down the driveways, gutters, and storm drains though, or folks would've noticed a big problem with it by now. Hmm. I wonder whether anyone's checking the salinity of the harbour a few times a day and posting the numbers on the web where I can amuse myself by trying to correlate changes to tides and weather. Not gonna do the data collection myself. There are a lot of projects like that, where I wish/hope someone else will do the data collection for their own purposes so I can just look over their shoulder.

The leaks, which had been stable for a while, moved again upstairs. And I forgot (sleepy!) to go check when I saw that the snow was melting. So when I went to practice the drums, I saw that the floor in the other room was wet because the leaks were missing the buckets (I finally started buying kitty litter in the large, pain-in-the-arms to carry, containers, and a great side effect is free plastic buckets, so after Perrine has pooped enough I'll be able to start using those trash cans as trash cans again 'cause I'll have enough empty kitty-litter buckets for all the leaks that the trash cans are currently catching ... as long as I don't get more than one new leak per month). So I spent a while wiping the floor and moving buckets/trash cans. I need to get the roof properly fixed (as opposed to the short-lived "fix" applied previously). Then again, I've wondered whether the water might be coming in through the roof of the boarded-up house next door and running between roof and ceiling over to my house. I'm not sure how to tell without taking the roof (or both roofs) apart. I guess I could go up there with a garden hose some spring afternoon and see where I have to spray the water to get drips inside. (I want someone else to do the data collection... Oh, wait, that's not going to happen.)

I feel a little more solid behind the drums than I did on Saturday, though I still need a lot of work to get back to my previous (unimpressive but basically sort-of-competent) level. I really want to improve on that. I never did get the hang of going to a fill and coming back to a verse pattern cleanly; I always stumble badly trying to come out of the fill. I wonder whether there are any written tips that'll help me there, or if it's just a "gotta see it, feel it, practice the Hell out of it, no shortcuts or missing understanding" thing.

Last night I had a craving for Mackesson Triple Stout. But the roads were really, really ooky, so I wasn't going to drive as far as anyplace I knew I could get it, even if I thought the store would be open when I got there. (And it was a pretty specific craving. Guinness would not have done at all.) Driving the short distance to a Rite Aid for magnesium (and then, because it was next door, going ahead and picking up groceries at Super Fresh) was one thing; cruising down to Silver Spring with the roads as slippery as they were when I finally felt up to leaving the house: not worth it. Amazing contrast between last night and today. from slickeryslippery to clear. But I did learn a new trick for shortening the car's turning radius on extra-slippery snow with front-wheel-drive last night. Saves steps in what would have been a three point turn. Surprised I hadn't twigged to it before, but I guess I've finally been driving FWD long enough to start to see it as something other than a liability (because I'd gotten so very used to knowing exactly what RWD would do before I started driving FWD).

And now I've completely lost the thread of what I'd planned to say when I sat down, but I probably covered in the first paragraph anyhow, so I'm going to poke briefly at email and go rest my eyes.

Edit: I just remembered what I'd been about to say before the bit about extra paragraph breaks ... The temperature three storeys up is significantly warmer than the temperature at street level. I opened a window upstairs to lean out and look at the sidewalk, and thought it felt downright warm. Then I opened the front door to fling some salt on the sidewalk and noticed it was fairly chilly.