Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2007-01-27:

"I had been merely a by-stander, a bit-player, while Anna did the dying." -- John Banville, in his novel The Sea, from the character Max recalling his wife's death from cancer over a year.

(submitted to the mailing list by Mike Krawchuk)

[I still miss butterfluff, who had been a RL friend far longer than an LJ one.]

Doh! If you rearrange the Applications folder on a Mac, shoving apps into subfolders by category, the apps that were running while you were doing this get all confused and can't find parts of themselves (such as the "save as JPEG" part, or the "open a new window" part). Fortunately I was awake enough to figure out what I'd done before too long, and exit/restart those apps to de-confuse them.

There are a few cats I see on my block occasionally, all pretty shy -- none will approach for a scritch, and in general a human across the street is too close, if they know they've been spotted. Last night, I spotted this white-and-black kitty worrying a chicken bone that somebody had dropped on the sidewalk next to my front steps^[1], and too hungry to scamper away from it when I walked up after parking my car on the far side of the street. The cat even stuck around long enough for me to run upstairs and grab the flash cable so I could move the flash off the camera, and a handful of dry cat food to offer instead of the mostly-bare bone.

Tossing cat food on the sidewalk wasn't exactly kosher from a don't-encourage-the-rats perspective, but given how well the rats have been eating from my new neighbours' garbage, I don't think a single application of one handful of kibble, most of it consumed on the spot by the intended recipient, is going to be a huge factor. (The rats mostly (not entirely) leave my trash alone^[2] -- I'd see them explore it once in a while, but not enthusiastically and they didn't seem to be getting much from it, or shredding the bags open. I don't know how much this is due to the used cat litter in my garbage and how much is a rat preference for meat scraps which my garbage lacks. I'd ascribed it entirely to the cat waste, until the new neighbours, who seem to be typical American omnivores, moved in, and I noticed way more rat activity in and around their garbage bags than I'd ever seen around mine^[3]. It may still be entirely a cat-waste matter, but it did get me wondering whether rats prefer meat scraps over vegetable matter or not.) Unlike Perrine, who was pretty friendly even before I fed her the first time, this cat wanted to get plenty of distance between us as soon as its tummy was full. Admittedly, I didn't try very hard to coax it closer -- in our past encounters, all of which took place at much greater range, I'd gotten the message that pretty much anything I did that showed I wasn't completely oblivious to the cat's existence constituted a threat. Then again, Perrine had obviously been around humans before she became a stray, since she was wearing a collar when she found me. Whether this cat and the even more skittish black cat I often see across the street are completely feral or abandoned ex-pets, I really don't know.

I do know that I've been trying to photograph them, and a dark grey one, for a while, and they usually manage to get behind or under something before I can bring a long lens to bear. This time I was within a couple meters, easy reach with the 28-135mm zoom, and the subject having to stick around to eat the kibble meant I had time to compose and get off a few frames. The camera angle I got doesn't really show how skinny the cat is, but I couldn't move around much to re-compose the shot without scaring it away. Not a small cat -- somewhat longer than Perrine, I think -- but clearly too skinny when not scrunched up, hunched over food.

Glad I got to photograph one of the neighbourhood strays and provide a little nourishment ... but still not particularly thrilled about chicken bones being tossed next to my steps (nor about the occasional half-empty plastic cup sitting on my top step). Then again, as distracting elements of my local environment go, it's pretty small potatoes. The noise from dump trucks on Fulton Ave. (legal, however annoying) and the occasional semi on Lombard St. (where there are signs prohibiting trucks over 3/4 ton) affects me a lot more than bones on the sidewalk.

[1] I've got a good idea where the chicken scrap came from, as the new neighbours were sitting on their front step and mine for much of the afternoon, with their kids playing on the sidewalk and a tub of canned sodas in ice next to them, in a time-honoured approach to dealing with too warm a house. When I opened the security door to retrieve the mail from the entryway, they jumped up from my step in a hurry. I'm guessing that the chicken bone was from lunch, dropped by either a lazy adult or a careless child. It's possible that a rat dragged it there during the night, but I doubt a rat would have left enough behind to interest the cat.

[2] I'm going to try to pick up that proper garbage can with a lid this afternoon, so I can set a better example by making my trash even less rat-friendly, as much of a PITA wrestling the can in and out of the house will be. It's one of the many things on my to-do list that fell by the wayside during the two months of dizziness, and I'm still trying to put my to-do list back in some sort of order even now.

[3] The rats are also getting fed more often now, as the new neighbours don't seem to have figured out which days are trash-pickup days.

I think I want to be Theresa Andersson. I'd never heard of her until I saw her on The Late Late Show the night before last, starting off by playing a drum pattern into a loop pedal then layering in backing vocals, lead vocals, guitar, and violin, performing barefoot to work controls on the electronics with her toes, it looked like. There was an Appalachian Dulcimer on a stand behind her as well, but she didn't pick that up. It looked like she was enjoying herself. I joked to realinterrobang that she apparently couldn't afford to hire a band, but her Wikipedia entry suggests that I may have hit closer to the mark than I intended: "[...] Theresa overcame the financial impracticality of touring Europe with a band by learning to play with a loop pedal."

She's far from being the only one to get a lot of mileage out of that trick (the first person I saw do something like that on television was Les Paul, and several folks have taken it farther since), but gosh, she looked like she was having so much fun.

OT1H, I really do enjoy playing with other musicians -- there's a chemistry, an energy, in a band that would be missing in a solo act even if I could play all the instruments at once. OTOH, being a multi-instrumentalist, there are times when I have trouble making up my mind which one part to play out of a bunch of ideas in my head.

(Some combinations are easier to manage -- even without fancy electronics -- than others. maugorn routinely combines guitar, harmonica and tambourine at once, and when I was in Wild Oats I played drums and bass (or drums and guitar) together. But playing recorder, bass, and guitar all at the same time would, I think, require a sampler ... and I never did get around to implementing a kick-snare for the drum kit, so for some tunes I had to put down the bass and pick up the sticks.)

As usual, I'm paying for getting stuff done on good days with a few bad days in a row afterward. I think I'm recovered from my last bit o' activity, and thus hope to get to at least one thing on my calendar for this weekend. Between finances and spoon-deficit, getting all the way up to Boston the following weekend for ConCertino is looking pretty unlikely. (I'd briefly entertained a fantasy of being organized enough and energized enough to go up for ConCertino, spend the week visiting various friends up thataway, then go to Baitcon before coming home. Fortunately I didn't invest too much emotional energy in what was clearly a daydream from the outset, but I do hope to regain the ability to do things like that someday.) I do hope that I can at least make it to Baitcon, but even that is looking logistically challenging.

So today I've got some phone calls to make, and another attempt at dealing with the leaky toilet tank w/o breaking it, and hope that I don't burn up too many spoons to be able to go to a party tomorrow.

I'd feel a bit more confident of this if my sleep cycle weren't already out of whack again (as evidenced by my being awake to write all this and upload a few photos).

Oh $%^#, I made it worse.

I stripped something in the toilet's shut-off valve -- I'm hoping all I've damaged is the plastic handle. And, of course, I've now got no idea whether getting the plastic nut on the underside of the tank to turn did any good or not.

Gonna take a break, calm down, come back to it and see if I can tell whether all I broke was the handle or not, attempt a kludge and/or try to find a replacement if so, and then decide whether to ask a less plumbing-klutzy friend to do me a big favour, based on whether it turns out that I improved anything before I broke things.

I should not be so easily defeated by something so primitive, considering the more complicated stuff that I can deal with.

I was going to try to fix the shower today as well, but I'm wondering whether that'd just be asking for trouble.

Grumpy now. *pout*