Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I got to Balticon much later than I'd planned to, after fighting a sinus headache (I guess -- it felt very different from a migraine and was all in the upper half of my face) most of the day. I saw a lot of people I haven't seen in a great many years, as well as folks I just havent seen in many months. I hung out. I had short and long conversations. It was a good day for clothes-watching. I stayed a little later than I should have. I'll go back after I've slept. I'm too tired to write in much more detail right now. Being around so many of My People is an especially good thing for me right now. And madbodger gave me a DigiComp I (a plastic mechanical digital computer that some of us oldbie geeks remember from childhood -- I remember assembling my first one at the kitchen table with my father when I was a whole lot shorter than I am now). I'm tempted to assemble it at Balticon when I go back there to show it off to the folks who never had one and wonder why some of us speak fondly of this toy, if I feel like making a side trip to buy rubber bands for it when I get moving in the morning. (The ones in the box have long since lost their elasticity.)

A bummer: I noticed that the guitar I carved a new nut for -- which I chose as the one to carry around for the day -- has a cracked brace. :-( Fortunately it's one on the back, nearest the sound hole. Once I figure out how to clamp it, I'll take the strings off and reach in there with a syringe full of either wood glue or epoxy.

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2006-05-12:

"People get far too unnecessarily soppy about having a muse, with the swooning and the homilies and the sense that it makes one better than unarty mortals, but I have generally found a muse to be more or less like an overactive bladder. It's an inconvenient, insistent, occasionally humiliating condition. When you gotta art, you gotta art now." -- Ursula Vernon [http://www.emg-zine.com/may06/wombats.php]

(submitted to the mailing list by Jean Rogers)