Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"We may have Paul Martin, but at least we have some grasp of marriage." -- konishi_zen, 2005-11-10, in response to the state of Texas having outlawed marriage entirely by leaving one word out of an amendment intended to restrict marriage to heterosexuals.

Urk. Awake. Feeling unpleasantly interesting sensations from several of my body's subsystems at once. Hope this stabilizes shortly. (Hmm. One does not get hung over from merely contemplating drink, right? So some parts of how I feel are distinctly unfair. (Last night I had a hankering for hot buttered rum, but was stymied by a lack of butter and a pronounced unwillingness to find out how hot-margarined-rum would taste.))

First waking was from ( a dream about World War II (sort of) )

The geography glitch didn't wake me. The fact that the house I grew up in wasn't even built until well after WWII didn't wake me. The fact that WWII wasn't fought in Maryland didn't wake me. No, realizing that TCP/IP wasn't invented yet was what woke me. Go figure.

There are probably a whole slew of hitorical/cultural/weaponry errors in there as well. It was very much a pop-movie-ish version of things.

Yesterday was a yo-yo day: up for a while, trying to get things done; fade out and rest; get tired of resting and get up again; fall over; get a second burst of energy; etc. While I was up, I banged on a frustrating computer. It's one of the "fast" machines -- bearing in mind that in my house 350 MHz counts as fast, and I haven't gotten rid of all the 486/66 and Pentium/75 machines on my LAN yet -- and I'd previously tried to install Linux on it only to render it unbootable. (It arrived either with Windows on it or no OS; I've forgotten.) And when I say "unbootable" I mean that it would no longer even boot from a floppy or a CD! After a whole lot of "this shouldn't work but I'll try it anyhow because the problem I'm trying to solve shouldn't exist in the first place" tinkering, it suddenly decided to recognize its CD drive after all. *Whew* So I was able to put a current version of Linux on it -- the rest of my machines are running Mandrake 6 or Red Hat 7, except for the box that lonebear gave me that's running ... whatever version of Debian this is, probably a lot newer than anything else in the house other than what I installed last night.

My plan (assuming a steady enough supply of round tuits) is to configure the new box to replace an existing one, including its identity, then upgrade the old one and configure it to replace another old one, and so on until every Linux machine in the house is running something released this year. Then I'll probably not get around to upgrades again until the whole house is ten years out of date, but I'll have had a brief period of being current. Then maybe when I download an interesting package, I won't have to contemplate quite as many "but it requires version {mumble} or later of such-and-such first, and even if I put it on the file server those three boxes over there won't be able to run it" issues.

Saturday I had a brief period of perkiness in the morning that lasted until early afternoon, then crashed pretty hard; I was feeling a little more alive by evening, but not enough so to make it to the party I'd wanted to go to. Feh.

But now that it's a weekday, I've got urgent things to do that involve interacting with weekday-type-organizations. Ugh. Let's see how I feel after a bit of food and some ibuprofen. Just sitting still to write this seems to have helped a little.

( shuffle-ten meme )

The catch is that so far I've only got a hundred and eleven tracks copied to the iPod, and eight of those are sections of an audiobook and another three are recorded radio talk programs. So this "shuffle" is only shuffling through a tiny portion of my music collection. I'll have to remember to do this again in a few months, when I've got more of my CDs transferred to the device.

Then again, it did pull out a song that's so very me but that I hadn't listened to in months, "Womb Envy". There are bits of it that don't fit me, such as not wanting to wear a dress or "trade equipment", but the core idea -- wishing I could bear a child -- is something that definitely applies to me. Sometimes it's just one of those background things; other times it's an acute and painful longing. Or noticing that I feel envy at the same time as joy for friends who are pregnant. So if the point of doing the meme was to provide a seed for writing something more personal than a list of tunes, I guess it worked... ( lyrics )

Are green peppercorns naturally much hotter than black peppercorns, or is it just that my green peppercorns are that much fresher than my black ones?

Pink peppercorns are sweet. I like them. The hotness comes well after the sweetness.