Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not better for it." -- Abraham Lincoln (thanks to blueeowyn)

"I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not better for it." -- Abraham Lincoln (thanks to blueeowyn)

Clue #1: waking up feeling like I'm being gagged by a phleghm monster. Clue #2: waking up drenched in sweat, having kicked the covers off, though the room I'm sleeping in is the same temperature it's been for the past four days. Clue #3: nagging headache that doesn't feel like the migraine I had a couple days ago. Ugh. I'm as capable of adding 1.25+1.25+1.25 and getting "four, to one significant digit" as the next person (the shortfall in the bit after the decimal point would be failing to measure an elevated temperature when I stuck a thermometer in my mouth (I'm pretty sure I'd gotten any residue of darkroom chemicals off of it first...)). I wonder whether I picked up something from someone at Pirate Feast. (Or maybe that long-miserable-cold-wet adventure Friday lowered my resistance for some floating bug the DM rolled up on the Wandering Virus Table -- who knows?)

It's not super bad so far (knock wood) -- just enough to be a bit unomfortable, yet another thing to interfere with sleep, and makes my joints ache along with my muscles. But it annoys. Feh. And I still haven't managed to make the hike out to the pharmacy yet.

Smaller things, in different directions:

It turns out that the leftovers a bandmate grabbed for me while I was packing up my gear weren't the spicy vegetable curry I'd been looking forward to dining on the next few days, but the mild vegetable stew. Still good food, still free food, still food I didn't have to carry back from the grocery store myself, so still a win; just not the magnificent treat I'd been looking forward to, so a smaller win than I'd expected. Oh well. (And the curry at the feast was extra-good this year, too ...)

Friday night, after the relentless rain-inside-the-house when I really wanted a nap problem had begun to taper off, I thought, "I really, really want -- and deserve -- a cup of hot cocoa about now." But I was out of milk, so hot cocoa seemed beyond reach. But then, as I was searching the anti-mouse bin in case there was a pouch of Indian food that had fallen under other foodstuffs in there (there wasn't), I found a long-forgotten single packet of instant hot cocoa mix, (probably about three years old)! The just-add-water kind. So I got my hot cocoa after all. And after a day like that, a little thing like a cup of hot cocoa that I had thought would be denied me ... mattered. It felt like a pock after a long day of eit.^* (I also found the partial box of powdered milk that I had been looking for the day before and thought was lost or maybe just imagined to begin with. So I had milk(oid) in my coffee the last few mornings despite still not having gotten to the grocery store. *whew*)

And, of course, getting to go to the Pirate Feast and perform was very much not a small thing, and was most definitely a Good Thing (regardless of whether that turns out to be the source of my cold). I need to finish editing the few digital photos I took there. (I need to get an optical flash-slave and tape it to the digicam. The itty bitty built-in pop-flash is short range only, and there's no hotshoe or sync socket.^** Fortunately this camera retains quite a bit of information in the shadows, so in underexposed shots detail and even colour can be brought out in editing, but as one would expect, the result is noisy, producing a grainy effect and loss of fine detail.)

[*] That sentence isn't gibberish, it's jargon. :-þ They may be made-up words (and what words, ultimately, aren't?) but I'm not the one who made them up. 'Eit' has been footnoted in this journal before. It entered my vocabulary by way of 'that mailing list', as did 'pock'. 'Pock' here has a meaning unrelated to wht you'll find in online dictionaries (so far); it has been explained as "the sound of the universe giving you a free ball" (as in pinball) -- essentially the antonym of 'eit'.

[**] Though perhaps I would do better to hack the camera to bypass the built-in flash entirely and trigger an external thyristor flash unit via a sync cord, because while the built-in flash is underpowered beyond small-group-photo distance, it's not well controlled at shorter ranges so it's overpowered at portrait distance -- I frequently have to cover three fourths of the flash with a fingertip to avoid completely blowing out the part of the frame I'm interested in. A cheap external flash should do better at most distances, and I could tilt it to bounce it off of something when shooting too close for it to quench itself properly. A more expensive external flash would give me manual control over the power as well as automatic. But for this project, I need to acquire the elusive Round Tuit ...

Clue #1: waking up feeling like I'm being gagged by a phleghm monster. Clue #2: waking up drenched in sweat, having kicked the covers off, though the room I'm sleeping in is the same temperature it's been for the past four days. Clue #3: nagging headache that doesn't feel like the migraine I had a couple days ago. Ugh. I'm as capable of adding 1.25+1.25+1.25 and getting "four, to one significant digit" as the next person (the shortfall in the bit after the decimal point would be failing to measure an elevated temperature when I stuck a thermometer in my mouth (I'm pretty sure I'd gotten any residue of darkroom chemicals off of it first...)). I wonder whether I picked up something from someone at Pirate Feast. (Or maybe that long-miserable-cold-wet adventure Friday lowered my resistance for some floating bug the DM rolled up on the Wandering Virus Table -- who knows?)

It's not super bad so far (knock wood) -- just enough to be a bit unomfortable, yet another thing to interfere with sleep, and makes my joints ache along with my muscles. But it annoys. Feh. And I still haven't managed to make the hike out to the pharmacy yet.

Smaller things, in different directions:

It turns out that the leftovers a bandmate grabbed for me while I was packing up my gear weren't the spicy vegetable curry I'd been looking forward to dining on the next few days, but the mild vegetable stew. Still good food, still free food, still food I didn't have to carry back from the grocery store myself, so still a win; just not the magnificent treat I'd been looking forward to, so a smaller win than I'd expected. Oh well. (And the curry at the feast was extra-good this year, too ...)

Friday night, after the relentless rain-inside-the-house when I really wanted a nap problem had begun to taper off, I thought, "I really, really want -- and deserve -- a cup of hot cocoa about now." But I was out of milk, so hot cocoa seemed beyond reach. But then, as I was searching the anti-mouse bin in case there was a pouch of Indian food that had fallen under other foodstuffs in there (there wasn't), I found a long-forgotten single packet of instant hot cocoa mix, (probably about three years old)! The just-add-water kind. So I got my hot cocoa after all. And after a day like that, a little thing like a cup of hot cocoa that I had thought would be denied me ... mattered. It felt like a pock after a long day of eit.^* (I also found the partial box of powdered milk that I had been looking for the day before and thought was lost or maybe just imagined to begin with. So I had milk(oid) in my coffee the last few mornings despite still not having gotten to the grocery store. *whew*)

And, of course, getting to go to the Pirate Feast and perform was very much not a small thing, and was most definitely a Good Thing (regardless of whether that turns out to be the source of my cold). I need to finish editing the few digital photos I took there. (I need to get an optical flash-slave and tape it to the digicam. The itty bitty built-in pop-flash is short range only, and there's no hotshoe or sync socket.^** Fortunately this camera retains quite a bit of information in the shadows, so in underexposed shots detail and even colour can be brought out in editing, but as one would expect, the result is noisy, producing a grainy effect and loss of fine detail.)

[*] That sentence isn't gibberish, it's jargon. :-þ They may be made-up words (and what words, ultimately, aren't?) but I'm not the one who made them up. 'Eit' has been footnoted in this journal before. It entered my vocabulary by way of 'that mailing list', as did 'pock'. 'Pock' here has a meaning unrelated to wht you'll find in online dictionaries (so far); it has been explained as "the sound of the universe giving you a free ball" (as in pinball) -- essentially the antonym of 'eit'.

[**] Though perhaps I would do better to hack the camera to bypass the built-in flash entirely and trigger an external thyristor flash unit via a sync cord, because while the built-in flash is underpowered beyond small-group-photo distance, it's not well controlled at shorter ranges so it's overpowered at portrait distance -- I frequently have to cover three fourths of the flash with a fingertip to avoid completely blowing out the part of the frame I'm interested in. A cheap external flash should do better at most distances, and I could tilt it to bounce it off of something when shooting too close for it to quench itself properly. A more expensive external flash would give me manual control over the power as well as automatic. But for this project, I need to acquire the elusive Round Tuit ...

Ugh. Weather Underground says there's an 80% chance of thunderstorms tomorrow. Er ... anybody want to come over and help me nail tarps to my roof? I've got a bunch of the blue ones I use to cover my tent at Pennsic. I'll see whether I can borrow my neighbour's ladder.

Ugh. Weather Underground says there's an 80% chance of thunderstorms tomorrow. Er ... anybody want to come over and help me nail tarps to my roof? I've got a bunch of the blue ones I use to cover my tent at Pennsic. I'll see whether I can borrow my neighbour's ladder.