Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity." -- Eleanor Roosevelt (b. 1884-10-11, d. 1962-11-07)

( Eleanor Roosevelt, on curiosity )

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Okay, the week has gotten off to a rough start. Moving hurts. Ow. Noise hurts. Ow. Not-moving sometimes hurts. Ow. Let's see ... I got to that recital on Friday night (late, due to traffic) and hung out with folks for a while afterward, and that was good. On my birthday I was feeling run down from having gone out Friday but still wanted to 'do something' to celebrate the day, even if low-key, and pizza with a friend fit the bill nicely, though by the time we finished, background noise in the restaurant (chosen partly to be a not especially noisy weekend-dining place, because I had already noticed my ears were being odd) was starting to make me wince. Sunday, I was achy and exhausted and still experiencing hyperacusis, never quite managed to get myself moving, but hey, 'twas a Sunday and I should've been resting up for Monday anyhow. So of course my body decided to cross me up by only letting me sleep one %$*@ing hour Monday morning -- crashed expecting to get a decent amount of shuteye, woke spontaneously an hour later, was not able to get back to sleep again then or later in the day. Kept trying for a nap before evening, was pretty ragged and headachy by the time evening rolled around, did not make it out of the house, missed 3LF rehearsal Yet Again. So yesterday, when I did crash, I slept ten hours, woke too achy to move, pecked at the computer for a while, slept another five hours, woke up with my blood sugar low enough that my glucometer thought it had to remind me that the number was a low one (reading was 60 mg/dL, which makes "hypo check" flash on the display), ate a normal meal despite temptation to pig out on carbs, felt worse after eating (when my blood sugar got up to a typical after-meal range -- about 130), and the whole time my hearing has been (still is) sensitive enough that normal passenger-car traffic -- regular cars, not buses, trucks and punks with thumpythumpy stereos or missing mufflers -- is painful. And yesterday was a many-many-sirens day (mostly fire trucks, I think, but some ambulances and police cars in there as well). My ears are still like that today. Not fun. And it makes watching television difficult ... I bailed partway through Obama's speech, because trying to hear past the traffic noise from outside meant turning up the volume enough that the frequent applause was even more painful than the traffic. I recorded it to watch later. Or maybe I'll just look for a transcript.

With the too-much-sleep yesterday, I slept through the times to move my car. I've not yet looked to see whether I got a parking ticket or not. Could be worse anyhow -- if I'd managed to move it across the street the night before, as I often do, I also would've slept through the time to move it back before rush hour, and it would've been towed.

Now my sleep is sufficiently messed-up that I'm having trouble remembering what day it is. I keep thinking that it's already Thursday or Friday, and I've got a time-sensitive errand that must be done each of those days, so I was kind of freaking out about not feeling well enough to go anywhere and it getting close to the end of the business day, until I finally remembered that today is still Wednesday.

At least today I'm finding it merely painful to walk on level ground, not actually difficult to accomplish like yesterday. (Stairs are still ... stairs. *sigh*) Poor Perrine keeps wanting me to play.

I treasure my ability to think and my ability to communicate, but there have been times in the last couple of days when I've just been so #$%^ing tired of the pain pain pain, that I've found myself thinking that being in a drugged-out semi-conscious but pain-free haze (which would take stronger drugs than I've ever gotten my hands on) would be better. Feelin' a bit desperate. It's the relentlessness of the pain, even more than the intensity, that does me in. (I know there are other chronic-pain sufferrers reading this who know what I mean.)

So, unsurprisingly, the start I'd made on my to-do list and my email backlog last week before I got interrupted with more urgent to-do items, has evaporated. Ain't gotten diddly done the past few days. Bleah.

God, I hope the next three days are better than this. Gotta get stuff taken care of tomorrow, and I really want to feel well enough to go to the party of Friday.

Wish me luck.

I had more to say, but I'm going to split it off into a separate entry, to make it easier for folks to skip the complaining in this one. The next entry is mostly unfinished snippets unrelated to anything else anyhow.

( It's been a rough week already. Hyperacusis, sleep wonkiness, and pain. Details, with complaining. )

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This entry is composed of bits and pieces started at various times over the last two weeks (whoops, four weeks -- I just checked the datestamp on the files I'd been jotting these snippets in) and set aside mid-thought for one reason or another.

As I write this paragraph, Stevie Nicks is on Soundstage on PBS. And I find myself wondering how "Rhiannon" would sound in silmaril's voice and style instead of Nicks'.

The second night with the DTV converter, it stopped being able to receive MPT, displaying an error message saying "signal lost". Later in the evening, it stopped seeing any of the other channels that it had tuned in easily the night before. Hmm.

A few nights later, my impression so far is still that things worked better (other than getting a couple of alternate channels) with NTSC, and the event timers on each of the converters leave a lot to be desired (but are basically useable, apart from stuff like their clocks not agreeing with the VCR clock or the actual time or the television stations' clocks). There's still a bit of confusion for me, as to which one should be turned off beforehand so the timer can take over, and which needs to be already turned on for the timer to work. I still haven't gotten around to reading the manuals though, so it may become clear when my head hurts less and I feel like reading.

I got a music catalog in the mail a little while ago. A few things about it caught my attention, other than the expected "gosh, I should buy more mic cables" reflexive reaction. First, I see that stage lights use LEDs now. I wonder how much cooler that makes the stage (or does most of the waste heat from incandescent stage lights go up anyhow, and most of the heat the performers feel come from the light itself, in which case LED lamps would just be a way of heating musicians with less electricity?). Kinda neat that LED lighting has hit that area. I wonder how long ago that happened (while I wasn't paying attention). And gee, cymbals suddenly got interesting-looking, with odd patterns of holes in them, and sound-altering paint. No idea whether these innovations really do things to the sound that couldn't be done in more ordinary ways, or are just things tossed in to be New And Different and suck more money out of drummers' wallets -- maybe I'll check whether Bill's Music has the funky cymbals and try 'em out there. Or maybe I'll just reflect on how I can't afford them whether they're really all that special or not, and ignore them.

The other thing I noticed, right on the cover, is the pre-washed *cough* "Road Worn" guitars that probably don't need much more said about them than what's already been covered in speaker2animals' journal.

Argh. Folks, if you're going to specify much smaller type than what your readers have chosen as the default in their browsers, ya' gotta pick your typeface carefully. I was wondering what V-radioactivity was, until I noticed that the 'V' was lowered and thought that maybe it was a poor rasterization of a 'y'. I was all set to Google 'y-radioactivity' before I remembered that in many fonts, 'γ' is indistinguishable from 'y' at any size other than huge. Dammit, stop tweaking font settings in ways that reduce legibility, or I'll be forced to invent a phenomenon called 'V-radioactivity' and turn it into a weapon to use on you! (Yes, I jacked up the font size a notch on this paragraph to make the letters easier to distinguish.)

(And yes, I know that some folks, mostly using habits learned in the pre-Unicode days, substitute Roman letters that look kindasorta like Greek the letters when they need a gamma or a mu, but I found a lowercase 'y' elsewhere on the page and it's different, so this really was the world's lamest rendition of a lowercase gamma.)

I know there was more that I'd started composing in my head, but those are the snippets that got enough typed in to serve as a reminder.

( 

• Rhiannon
• DTV
• Pre-Washed Guitars
• V-Radiation

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While I'm awake enough to be posting for a change (I know I miss a lot of birthdays here), happy birthdays to osewalrus, redaxe, and hobbitblue!

While I'm awake enough to be posting for a change (I know I miss a lot of birthdays here), happy birthdays to osewalrus, redaxe, and hobbitblue!