Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I like to think the linguistic accident that made 'God's Friday' into 'Good Friday' was no accident at all. It was God's own doing -- a sharp, prophetic jab at a time and a culture obsessed by happiness." -- Chris Armstrong, "The Goodness of Good Friday", Christianity Today, 2003-04-18

( second half of the paragraph, for folks wanting a little more context and not put off by a wee bit of preachiness... )

Wednesday morning I got very little sleep, so getting less accomplished that day than I'd hoped, then feeling like I was thinking and moving in slow motion by that evening, was not terribly unsurprising, however frustrating. Yesterday I got my head stuck in the car-shopping process, searching eBay and Craigslist and putting notes in a Google spreadsheet (so I can access it equally easily from home or from anniemal's house), slowly realizing that sounds hurt^[1] and I was still "thinking through mud". I wasn't sure whether it was fibro-associated wierdness or an incipient migraine -- I did drink basil/lavender tea, and it did seem to help a bit, which suggests that I managed to head off the worst part of a migraine that had been headed my way.

(Not that yesterday was entirely bad. Dinner with anniemal and syntonic_comma and vvalkyri was nice despite the sharp-sounds/slow-brain thing and accidentally putting too much pepper in the lentil-parsnip curry.)

A little over an hour ago I suddenly woke up feeling more clear-headed than I have felt in the past forty eight hours. Feeling awake and aware feels nice. Feeling ... coherent. Only problem is, gee whiz, my back hurts a lot and I was awake at 0-dark-thirty. (And my head hurts, but it feels more like sinus pain than anything else, so perhaps some seasonal Canadian drugs^[2] will help with that.)

Anyhow, it still feels good to feel like I've got my brain back out of the oobleck it felt like it was buried in yesterday and the day before. Feels more like being me.

[1] The crinkling of a plastic bag five feet away on the other side of a door is not, in general, supposed to be painful, right?

[2] Currently the only antihistamines I know of that work for me are loratadine (just barely, if I double the dosage and take it twice as often) and Zyrtec (which is less effective than it was a few years ago, but still works well enough to notice). But Zyrtec a) is not covered by the state health-care-for-poor-people plan even if the doctor calls 'em up and insists that the patient needs it (it was in the "doctor has to argue" category until the new general health plan superceded the old prescription-assistance-only plan and the city-run clinic became a provider to the state thingie) ... b) is wicked expensive in the US, and c) has no generic equivalent avauilable in the US. But in Canada it is 1) OTC (under a different brand name), 2) much less expensive even in the name brand, and 3) available more cheaply still in generic form. Fortunately, I have friends in Canada, to whom I am quite grateful. Now as long as the next new antihistamine comes out before my body decides it no longer wants to react to Zyrtec ... (fortunately it seems to have slowed down that process as I've aged -- I've gotten more years out of each of the last few antihistamines than I used to).

Note to self: stop saying, "But it's a Jaguar, in my price range." Even if it weren't for Jags' reputation for needing frequent maintenance and the "needs work" in the ad, there's just no way the double bass is going into a two-door Jaguar unless that sunroof is way bigger than any sunroof I've ever seen.

But I could strap the bass to the roof with bungee cords!

(I guess a motorcycle is out of the question too.)

For anyone interested, here's a snapshot of the shopping process so far: the leftmost few columns of the Google spreadsheet where I'm keeping track of what I've found and whom I've talked to (and at some point soon I hope, which cars I've looked at and test driven). These are the cars I haven't completely ruled out yet, subject to massive winnowing as I take a closer look at each, take a closer look at my bank account, incorporate advice from y'all, get questions answered, etc.

If you think you want to see the whole spreadsheet and add annotations (I've got a column for "advice from friends"), drop me a line and I'll add your email address to the collaborators list. (If you want to be helpful but don't want to get quite that involved, don't worry: I'll continue asking questions right here every so often. Or just venting.)

Remarkably, I actually found a few Volvos! One's already sold, one is $500 to high, one is on eBay, and the other two I'm waiting to hear back from the sellers (in one case I left a message asking "is this the sedan or the wagon?" In the meantime, do we know whether the double bass will go into a Volvo 740 sedan?).

I still want the "what cars can carry a bass" wiki. So far, on rec.music.makers.bowed-strings I've discovered that the topic has been extensively discussed on a mailing list, but I don't know yet whether that list has publically searchable archives. It's a start.