Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Lebovitz's Laws:

• Nothing is evenly distributed.
• Tight, centralized controls will lead, at best, to fewer and worse disasters.

I've been alternating days of feeling halfway decent other than the usual pain and early fatigue-after-not-having-done-very-much, and barely-get-out-of-bed days -- which I suppose is a pretty normal spell, for me. I made it to Darkover (four performances -- two with HCB and two with pick-up dance bands) but was too wiped out to stick around for the filking either night or to return on Sunday for a day at the con without obligations and schedules. I made it to a rehearsal for a recorder group to see just how rusty my reading has gotten lately, and to 3LF rehearsal (well, about the second half of it). I wasn't in great shape Wednesday but I got where I needed to get to. Saturday I played at a Madrigal Feast where I felt awfully under-rehearsed but things went pretty well in general anyhow. (I think -- I hope -- most of my mistakes were covered up by the rest of the band, especially by the other bass recorder player (I stayed on bass recorder all night), but alas the band as a whole fell apart on one of my favourite tunes, "Riu Riu Chiu". I'm pretty sure the audience did notice that, but it is the nature of audiences of live music to quickly forget the embarrassing train-wrecks if you nail the next couple of tunes.) I'll be doing that again -- same event, different location -- this coming Saturday (last I checked there were still three $65 tickets left ...). They're not feeding the musicians, so we bring sandwiches and stuff to nibble while the actors have long bits to do without us. This coming Saturday, I may wind up playing bowed psaltery on one tune.

There's supposed to be a HCB performance this Wednesday night, but , er, there's something about a leak and six feet of water and the building condemned, or something, and we're still waiting to hear whether that gig will actually be happening or not, and exactly where if so.

As might have been expected, I was pretty useless for anything yesterday. Today I've got a to-do list a kilometer long, but will try to pace myself so that I don't get too tired today to be able to go to 3LF tomorrow and HCB Wednesday if we do turn out to have a place to play. There's always the sheer randomness of fibromyalgia to screw up any care I take in trying to schedule my downtime, but I can at least try to keep the odds tipped my way. I've already decided to punt the to-do items that involve getting dressed and going anywhere today, with the possible exception of a run to a hardware store late to buy new mounting brackets for the railing on the back stair -- since my tumble from the top of that staircase started with the top bracket breaking off, I think I want to replace all three with sturdier ones. anniemal gave me a new wooden railing to replace the one that broke off so dramatically; it just needs to be cut down a little to fit, and maybe get a coat of paint (and, ideally, get sanded smooth), so all I'll need to buy are the brackets and maybe paint. Picking a day when I have the energy to dive into a hands-on project is the bigger obstacle. Needs to be done though.

So far I've been trying to manage my capable-of-doing-stuff days with only my performance schedule in mind. I haven't even begun to take party announcements/invitations into consideration. I really need to start doing that too, as some social time would do me good. I mostly see people at rehearsals, not random hanging out or parties. So I've been very bad about keeping up face-to-face relationships (for oh, several years now, at least). Wanna fix that.

Today, I'll see how much paperwork I can get through, including scary government forms (scary mostly because they're government forms, and I get twitchy worrying about whether I'm translating from bureaucratese to plainspeech (or Glenn-idiolect) correctly when I run into questions that seem to include unstated assumptions). And practice the bowed psaltery. Later in the week maybe I'll try to deal with OS installation/upgrades on a couple of machines. (I already did battle with Debian's 'apt-get' and 'aptitude' and fought it to ... an inconclusive result, possibly considered a draw but less straightforward than that sounds. It did involve use of a Red Hat rescue CD, and while a current kernel is installed, I cannot boot it (and 'apt-get' seems to be telling me it can't complete configuration of the new kernel because the new kernel isn't configured yet -- huh?); and I have X back, and the terminal program I'd been using, but I was without anything X-related for a while and my menus have been rearranged and my screen resolution changed, so I'm not sure whether I'm ahead or behind on the GUI front. Methinks I'll live with what I've got for a few days and focus on the aforementioned paperwork. And (*sigh*) phone calls.

It did occur to me that I missed an opportunity for a bit of schtick this past Tuesday -- I should have brought the broken-off piece of railing with me and carried it into rehearsal. Then when somebody asked me why I was holding it, I would've explained, "Oh, holding onto this is supposed to prevent my falling down the stairs." Might have gotten a laugh, I dunno.

My mother fell recently too, which I found out when I called her last night. It sounds like she got hurt a lot worse than I did. I'm hoping to get out to visit her sometime this week. I hope my brother who lives with her is being helpful.

I'm a week and a half to two weeks behind on television watching (and that's not counting a few shows I haven't watched any episodes of yet this season, hoping I can find the videocassettes in the right order when I get around to them, such as Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars); the only things I'm current on are Heroes and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. And I'm only current on the television portion of Heroes; I haven't even looked at the comic book/webcomic/whatever yet -- and is there something about character blogs that I'm missing, too? I'm about two weeks behind on LJ as well and kinda random about recent email -- I've peeked at my 'busy' and 'newsish' filters a few times, but have not really done more than a quick skim each time, so I feel like I'm behind even on those portions of my friendslist. (I did pay enough attention to note the juxtaposition of an entry claiming that "illegal aliens murder 12 Americans daily" almost immediately below an entry linking to an article about how "entirely made-up statistics being quoted all over the place, against immigrants" which starts off by showing the 12-murders-daily statistic is bullshit.

Urk! And I've gotten behind on collecting quotes for my quote of the day; the scheduled quotes run out on Wednesday -- eek! (I do have a bunch of unscheduled-yet quotations in the file, so worst-case I'll just use up a bunch of those. But I was saving some of them for particular holidays, anniversaries, or times when specific topics come up in Congress and the newspapers again -- and some are in the "still deciding whether I really want to use this" category.) Maybe I'll make time for quote-mining my friendslist tonight if my sleep-meds fail again.

I think that's about the right amount of procrastination. Now on to filling out forms.