Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Home now, after spending 3+ hours longer than I'd planned/expected, helping my brother with his computer. Learned a little bit about WinXP (including realizing that I don't like it as much as Win98 and WinNT) ... That wasn't high on my list of things I wanted to learn about, but it'll probably wind up being useful again later. Didn't get it all sorted out, but did manage to improve things for him. Wishing he'd gotten an iBook though.

Got part of a psychology-of-food comment half-in/half-out of my brain, but too sleepy to phrase it halfway reasonably right now. Got to be up and active midday, so had better crash pretty soon. Hope to be able to make it to a birthday party in the evening, but that's going to depend on my getting a good sleep now and having a good day tomorrow, both. Feeling pretty ragged now. Wish me luck. Extremely unlikely to manage to hit another party in between rehearsal and the birthday party, alas (there'll be people there I haven't seen in too long -- and good food). Wishing I had the knack of bilocation though.

(Or, if I could bilocate, would I just get tired twice as quickly? And if I tried to play guitar in two different cities at the same time, would both of me have to play the same song?)

Demanding kitty is telling me I need to stop typing and pay attention to her. Gonna go crawl into bed and perform my "cat pillow" function.

"This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer." -- Will Rogers (1879-1935)

Home from rehearsal and a couple of small errands I decided to squeeze in afterward. Because of cellio, I had a wicked craving on top of being simply hungry, so I stopped at Dukem (thank Google) for carryout. One craving satisfied. (Ethiopian food is really better enjoyed out with friends than alone in my kitchen from a styrofoam container, but I was tired and wanted to get home, and this way I still got my yesimir wat.) Now I need to lie down for a while before I can figure out whether I'm up to going out to a party tonight. (So if I do show up, it'll be late -- I seem to have a pattern of showing up for the second halves of parties lately. I guess I'm the second shift.) Rehearsal mostly went well, except for a few spots where I still get lost and some runs I have trouble with (I still have to think about the high G# on bass recorder, and there's no time to think ... more practice is the obvious solution). And one piece that I was going to play percussion on that may need a better percussionist than I am -- I may wind up tacet on that one. (It's a tricky piece, and I don't think the drum can actually set a groove for everyone else to follow -- the percussion is going to have to be decoration if it's there at all -- I shouldn't take anything more than I can do technique-wise, but I need to be a lot faster at hearing what it does need. I'm going to type it into the computer and make a MIDI to practice against, and see what I can come up with by next rehearsal.) I really liked the Scarlatti piece that I hadn't heard before (Sonata for 4 Bass Recorders) ... Though there were five of us working on it, so I'm not sure whether I'll be doubling someone else or sitting that one out in the concert.

Okay, resting now. In an hour or two I'll decide whether I'm up to going to the second half of the party or need more rest.

I haven't looked in the bathroom yet to see whether Perrine killed that mouse or not. Hope I remember to look for that before I step on it, if it's there.

It's after eleven. I'm feeling well enough to hang out and play music for a little while, but not well enough to drive there safely. Argh. Trying not to dwell on the feeling of frustration. (Kinda failing here. I'd seen the possibility that this would happen, and made my plans with an "if" in them -- tried not to set my own or others' expectations too high in order to head off disappointment -- but I guess I wanted to go to the party more than I'd wanted to admit to myself. Feeling bad about it doesn't help anything, but feeling foolish for feeling upset is going to help even less, and feeling frustrated for feeling foolish about feeling sad anyhow heps less still. Tack on a level of self-conscious, and we're almost there, but then stick all of that behind a haze of exhaustion so it looks all blurry. Don't need anyone to pity me if I get good enough at self-pity, right? Feh.) Maybe I thought too much about what the party is probably like, and I should have left it a vague abstraction in my mind.

I miss the days when having this many items on my calendar would have been Not A Challenge. Perrine, on the other hand, does not seem at all disappointed to have me at home.

I try not to let things like this get to me too badly, most of the time (and with the fibromyalgia, things like this happen a lot), but sometimes it sneaks through the ego-defenses and gets me anyhow. Sometime when I'm not feeling acute change-of-plans disappointment, I should write about some related patterns I've noticed in my own psychology (but I don't usually think of doing so until it hits ... I'll stick it on the to-do list that I, ah, er, often forget to look at).

I need to get my house into a condition amenable to hosting parties myself. Hosting takes energy too, but it would take "do I have the energy to get there" out of the equation. I'd still be upset about missing friends' parties, of course, but (assuming anyone came) I'd see people more often.

Okay, I'm even more tired than I'd thought. I just noticed how long it's taken me to type this.