Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"[...] it's not how fast, it's how deep. Albert King and Buddy Guy and Jimi Hendrix will tell you that. People who play really fast, it's like bullets that don't penetrate paper. But when you go slow and deep, man, people say you touched me in a place I never been touched before.

"And they start crying and you go, 'I wish I knew what that is.' Because I have no idea -- you're just channeling it."

-- Carlos Santana (b. 1947-07-20), interviewed by Tavis Smiley on the PBS television program Tavis Smiley, 2009-04-02

Sunday: for the part of it that I was awake, I felt significantly better than the previous several days, though still too wobbly and achy. Even managed to stay on my feet half an hour to wash the dishes that had been piling up in the sink -- considered that a positive sign. Then I crashed, hard, around 21:30.

Since: wretched again. *pout* Especially today.

I've got a bit of a bad feeling about parking, and I hope it's just the general crappiness messing with my head, and not a proper adding of two and two ... a neighbour's car, that had gotten its front end smashed up sometime in the past few days, was towed away just after the start of street-cleaning parking restrictions this morning, and at the time I assumed it was a prearranged salvage pickup like when I let the insurance company junk the accord. I did move my car in time, despite today being one of those days when getting my body all the way across the street is difficult (it's a somewhat inconsistent $42 ticket if I can't manage to do that much on a Tuesday or Friday). Later, when it got to be well past the time when they no longer bother to write tickets but still well before the official end of the parking restriction, I wanted to move the car back because I felt -- feel -- like I'm going to topple over any minute now and feared that if I did so I wouldn't be able to wake up again before rush hour, and leaving the car on the far side during rush hour is a pretty consistent very expensive tow, not a simple ticket ... And the step-van that had been parked in front of me before I moved the car this morning had a police car parked at an angle in front of it and raised voices were arguing about something (the cop, the driver, and a third party somehow financially involved) for a half hour or so. Maybe this was about something entirely unrelated, but I started to feel a nagging fear that they were starting to enforce the street cleaning rules to the letter, which would suck very, very badly, as well as seeming unfair. (If the street cleaner comes, which it often doesn't, it's usually in the first ten minutes of the street cleaning window, rarely in the second ten minutes, and never ever more than half an hour after the start of that window, so ticketing -- or towing, which the sign says they can do though until now it's been only tickets -- after the latest time the street cleaner ever comes, when street cleaning is the ostensible reason for the parking restriction, smacks of jerk-hood. Anyhow, though I don't know what the cop and two other people were arguing about (other than that money somehow wound up involved, and the tag number of the truck), I started to wonder whether my initial guess regarding the towing of the smooshed car had been correct.

I really hope this is nothing more than illness-amplified paranoia, and not the first signs of an unpleasant policy shift.

And now I really need to close my eyes and try to convince Perrine to express her joy at being with me in ways that don't involve closely-spaced clusters of holes in my chest from overenthusiastic kneading.

But before I forget ... do any of you have a shop manual for a 1994 Mercury Villager, and a couple of minutes to look up where the door-open switch for the reat gate is hidden? (And maybe confirm or correct my guess that the door switches are generally SPST NC switches?) I've found three switches so far (front doors and sliding door) and have yanked two (the third is stuck to a degree I can't unstick in my current physical condition) and the door-ajar light on the dashboard still remains lit. No hurry; this is kind of a long-term project (the fuses for circuits that drain the battery when a door is open have been pulled since I took over the car).