Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"[The computer] is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated." -- Alan Kay

[And happy birthday to realinterrobang!]

"[The computer] is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated." -- Alan Kay

[And happy birthday to realinterrobang!]

<mode="complain complain complain" soundeffect="sheesh" opt="eyeroll">

Wait, this rain is supposed to last how long? ( Weather Underground screen capture )

One of the big cat-litter buckets, the one under the biggest stream, needs emptying every 25-35 minutes, not long enough for a nap.

Not sleeping. Bailing.

(Actually, I could really use a proper bail. I've been using a pitcher, but a scoop with a flat side would be much better. When the water got too deep for my sabots on the shallow side of the room I did spend an hour bailing, and lowered the water level by an inch and a half, and now my back hurts from all that bending over. Go figure.)

Two roofers are supposed to come today but the temperature is supposed to hover a wee bit above freezing for the hours they're expected, which is going to make their getting up there kind of treacherous, I fear, given the state of the sidewalks earlier and the icicles forming on my chimney. Hey, maybe it'll just be wet, not icy, when they get here ... what's falling now sounds more like water than ice and it's flowing quickly enough through my roof to convince me it's all liquid, so maybe the ice I slid on earlier with haversacks of groceries hangging from my shoulders will be melted by all this rain ... or maybe it's freezing into a thicker sheet as I type. Hmm. Maybe I should run downstairs and open the front door for a look at the steps.

Of course, the sound inside the house: [YouTube video from my phone for the sake of the sound] is so much louder than the sounds from outside that I could be just not noticing sleety sounds (SleeTones?).

I want to sleeeep.

---

My next door neighbour's roof is leaking as well. He joked about just turning his living room into a swimming pool. So I started wondering which would be cheaper, the roof repairs or whatever filter, chlorination system, etc. a pool would need.

I also started thinking that my third floor needs a goldfish. (Except that all the chemicals dissolving into the rain on its way through the roof and ceiling would undoubtedly kill a fish. And with any luck this situation won't last too much longer.)

I'd also considered that I probably have a mold farm, and joked to somebody about pouring a bucket of Lysol or something similar onto the leaky spots of the roof and letting it percolate down the same pathways the rainwater has taken.

I was being facetious then, but I've since started wondering whether that might actually work.

<mode="complain complain complain" soundeffect="sheesh" opt="eyeroll">

Wait, this rain is supposed to last how long? ( Weather Underground screen capture )

One of the big cat-litter buckets, the one under the biggest stream, needs emptying every 25-35 minutes, not long enough for a nap.

Not sleeping. Bailing.

(Actually, I could really use a proper bail. I've been using a pitcher, but a scoop with a flat side would be much better. When the water got too deep for my sabots on the shallow side of the room I did spend an hour bailing, and lowered the water level by an inch and a half, and now my back hurts from all that bending over. Go figure.)

Two roofers are supposed to come today but the temperature is supposed to hover a wee bit above freezing for the hours they're expected, which is going to make their getting up there kind of treacherous, I fear, given the state of the sidewalks earlier and the icicles forming on my chimney. Hey, maybe it'll just be wet, not icy, when they get here ... what's falling now sounds more like water than ice and it's flowing quickly enough through my roof to convince me it's all liquid, so maybe the ice I slid on earlier with haversacks of groceries hangging from my shoulders will be melted by all this rain ... or maybe it's freezing into a thicker sheet as I type. Hmm. Maybe I should run downstairs and open the front door for a look at the steps.

Of course, the sound inside the house:

is so much louder than the sounds from outside that I could be just not noticing sleety sounds (SleeTones?).

I want to sleeeep.

---

My next door neighbour's roof is leaking as well. He joked about just turning his living room into a swimming pool. So I started wondering which would be cheaper, the roof repairs or whatever filter, chlorination system, etc. a pool would need.

I also started thinking that my third floor needs a goldfish. (Except that all the chemicals dissolving into the rain on its way through the roof and ceiling would undoubtedly kill a fish. And with any luck this situation won't last too much longer.)

I'd also considered that I probably have a mold farm, and joked to somebody about pouring a bucket of Lysol or something similar onto the leaky spots of the roof and letting it percolate down the same pathways the rainwater has taken.

I was being facetious then, but I've since started wondering whether that might actually work.

I do not generally write haiku, but it's clear that having been exposed to the form has influenced me. Although I usually don't count syllables or tweak the relationship between the ideas presented to make haiku, I keep thinking, and occasionally writing down, things like,

The kitchen is cold,
The food hot;
Breakfast is consumed quickly

with the sound of it in my head definitely having the "this is supposed to be poetry" pacing even though it's too short for me to feel I can 'legitimately' call it a whole poem except when I happen to hit the haiku or limerick pattern. (And yes, I know about "Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes" and "The Red Wheelbarrow", so this is more about whether I feel I've 'done enough' for it to 'count' than about the definition of a poem. It's my issue.) The thing is, nowadays, after having been moved and amused by many haiku over the years, I can write these snippets down and leave them to be found, standing alone as their own somethings even if I'm not quite ready to call them poems. (Snippets. Fragments. Crumbs. "Bits of poetry". Maybe someday I'll have the self confidence to just go ahead and call 'em poems.) Once upon a time, if I wrote something like that down, I'd have felt I needed to write something longer for it to be a start, end, or middle of; that it was too short to be complete, and could only be taken as a note reminding me to write something based on it. Not something ready to let anybody else see or hear.

Now I can just put them out there, maybe a section of a journal entry set off from the rest, or a short journal entry by itself; a cryptic post to a mailing list or a newsgroup, or something to insert into a silence to see how others react to it. (Or, of course, building a doggone essay around it, which is, of course, cheating. (And correlates to the "if you have to explain it, it's no longer funny" maxim in comedy.) But really, I was about ready to post that this morning when I started thinking about how my attitude has changed since I was younger, and decided to compose this entry instead. Honest.) If I see a longer work waiting to be born, I'll go ahead and write that, but I now have the option (okay, I always had the option; now I've 'given myself permission' to do something I've always been allowed to do) to either extend the snippet or let it stand by itself. Perhaps it would often be better if I did use snippets as the seed-crystals for larger pieces ... or perhaps not. (*shrug*)

So. Either I've broken myself of a habit that limited me, or I've gotten lazy as I've aged. Either way, it interested me when I finally noticed the change. And I do think reading all those haiku was a major factor in how I got to this point.

But also, either way, I feel kind of guilty/ashamed for not writing more poetry than I do, these days. Hmm. Another issue to explore. Later.

I do not generally write haiku, but it's clear that having been exposed to the form has influenced me. Although I usually don't count syllables or tweak the relationship between the ideas presented to make haiku, I keep thinking, and occasionally writing down, things like,

The kitchen is cold,
The food hot;
Breakfast is consumed quickly

with the sound of it in my head definitely having the "this is supposed to be poetry" pacing even though it's too short for me to feel I can 'legitimately' call it a whole poem except when I happen to hit the haiku or limerick pattern. (And yes, I know about "Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes" and "The Red Wheelbarrow", so this is more about whether I feel I've 'done enough' for it to 'count' than about the definition of a poem. It's my issue.) The thing is, nowadays, after having been moved and amused by many haiku over the years, I can write these snippets down and leave them to be found, standing alone as their own somethings even if I'm not quite ready to call them poems. (Snippets. Fragments. Crumbs. "Bits of poetry". Maybe someday I'll have the self confidence to just go ahead and call 'em poems.) Once upon a time, if I wrote something like that down, I'd have felt I needed to write something longer for it to be a start, end, or middle of; that it was too short to be complete, and could only be taken as a note reminding me to write something based on it. Not something ready to let anybody else see or hear.

Now I can just put them out there, maybe a section of a journal entry set off from the rest, or a short journal entry by itself; a cryptic post to a mailing list or a newsgroup, or something to insert into a silence to see how others react to it. (Or, of course, building a doggone essay around it, which is, of course, cheating. (And correlates to the "if you have to explain it, it's no longer funny" maxim in comedy.) But really, I was about ready to post that this morning when I started thinking about how my attitude has changed since I was younger, and decided to compose this entry instead. Honest.) If I see a longer work waiting to be born, I'll go ahead and write that, but I now have the option (okay, I always had the option; now I've 'given myself permission' to do something I've always been allowed to do) to either extend the snippet or let it stand by itself. Perhaps it would often be better if I did use snippets as the seed-crystals for larger pieces ... or perhaps not. (*shrug*)

So. Either I've broken myself of a habit that limited me, or I've gotten lazy as I've aged. Either way, it interested me when I finally noticed the change. And I do think reading all those haiku was a major factor in how I got to this point.

But also, either way, I feel kind of guilty/ashamed for not writing more poetry than I do, these days. Hmm. Another issue to explore. Later.

17:15 -- ZhiiizshBANG! Unmistakable sound of a car crash in the intersection outside my window. Watch to see whether it seems like anybody's injured.

17:18 -- BLAMthump!! Even louder (due to proximity) sound of another chunk o' plaster falling off the ceiling in the nedt room. Go to investigate, discover chunk is much smaller than it sounded. Must've hit a nearly empty bucket at a particularly noisy angle. Also hear sirens.

17:20 -- Look out window, see police car arrive and notice that a fire/rescue vehicle is present (looks like a paramedics' truck but I don't have a good angle). I guess somebody was hurt after all, even though each driver was able to move his or her car (under power) out of the main travel lanes. (The most bent-up car I saw took a little while to do so. It looks as though one other was bumped clear of the intersection by the crash itself.)

17:30 -- Attention span? Not right now. Kind of a distracting, make-me-jumpy evening so far, after only getting an hour and a half of sleep late this morning when the rain finally started to ease off and I could go more than 35 minutes without emptying one of the big buckets.

Any of you about to get on the roads in the the Balto-Wash region (and based on what I saw on RADAR, a bunch of other places too), be extra careful. From the sound, that impact was at a pretty good speed, probably more than the 30MPH limit here. From the duration of the non-rotating-tires-zipping-over-wet-pavement sound, that must've been quite a distance one car slid. The rain did eventually clear the sheet-ice from my front steps (well, I think it would have done so even without the salt I threw out there earlier to try make the sidewalk a little less dangerous for schoolkids this morning (which, at the time, just cracked and clouded the ice to make it visible -- probably better than the "just looks damp" sheet it had been, but still not much good for traction)) but it sounds like the streets are still ooky-slick.

(Oh, and I got a phone call this morning from one of the roofers who was supposed to come out today, wanting to reschedule, and sounding rather unhappy about the weather's effect on his work schedule. The other one just didn't show up, probably figuring that I could guess on my own that today wouldn't be good for climbing up on roofs.)

Neeed mooore sleeep.

17:15 -- ZhiiizshBANG! Unmistakable sound of a car crash in the intersection outside my window. Watch to see whether it seems like anybody's injured.

17:18 -- BLAMthump!! Even louder (due to proximity) sound of another chunk o' plaster falling off the ceiling in the nedt room. Go to investigate, discover chunk is much smaller than it sounded. Must've hit a nearly empty bucket at a particularly noisy angle. Also hear sirens.

17:20 -- Look out window, see police car arrive and notice that a fire/rescue vehicle is present (looks like a paramedics' truck but I don't have a good angle). I guess somebody was hurt after all, even though each driver was able to move his or her car (under power) out of the main travel lanes. (The most bent-up car I saw took a little while to do so. It looks as though one other was bumped clear of the intersection by the crash itself.)

17:30 -- Attention span? Not right now. Kind of a distracting, make-me-jumpy evening so far, after only getting an hour and a half of sleep late this morning when the rain finally started to ease off and I could go more than 35 minutes without emptying one of the big buckets.

Any of you about to get on the roads in the the Balto-Wash region (and based on what I saw on RADAR, a bunch of other places too), be extra careful. From the sound, that impact was at a pretty good speed, probably more than the 30MPH limit here. From the duration of the non-rotating-tires-zipping-over-wet-pavement sound, that must've been quite a distance one car slid. The rain did eventually clear the sheet-ice from my front steps (well, I think it would have done so even without the salt I threw out there earlier to try make the sidewalk a little less dangerous for schoolkids this morning (which, at the time, just cracked and clouded the ice to make it visible -- probably better than the "just looks damp" sheet it had been, but still not much good for traction)) but it sounds like the streets are still ooky-slick.

(Oh, and I got a phone call this morning from one of the roofers who was supposed to come out today, wanting to reschedule, and sounding rather unhappy about the weather's effect on his work schedule. The other one just didn't show up, probably figuring that I could guess on my own that today wouldn't be good for climbing up on roofs.)

Neeed mooore sleeep.