Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Some of you may have noiticed that I'm not at Pennsic this year. The rest of you won't have noticed because our paths don't cross that often there or because you don't go to Pennsic. (And some won't see this because you don't check social media from Pennsic.) Anyhow, I'm not at Pennsic and I'm trying not to obsess over that even though it's kind of a big deal -- this is the first one I've missed since 1986, the first one I went to.

I'm not there for a bunch of reasons, any two of which I pobably would have stubborned my way past, but they added up. It's tempting at this point to say I'm having a sucky year, but earlier in the year were my fun birthday dinner and the trip to Cyprus (a very big deal, a very good thing!), so it's more accurate to say I'm having a really sucky summer. I also missed Conterpoint and Baitcon. (I actually got most of the wall-of-instruments loaded into the van for Conterpoint, but wore myself out so badly doing so that I never made it out of the driveway. A week later I finally managed to get it all unloaded again. Frustrating.)

So, since I haven't been writing as much as I ought, here's what's been up, some little things, some inconvenient things, some big-but-can't-tell-how-scary-yet things:

• My van filling with eye-burning fumes, sounding precarious, idling rough, surging -- not feeling safe to drive to Pennsic. Finally got it into the shop, where they said it should be ready in time for me to take to Pennsic (assuming I found a driver -- more on that below), but which actually took eight days longer than that, an uncomfortably large chunk of Mom's money, and wrecked two of the shop's tools (they didn't bill us extra for that, but apparently my exhaust manifold has a vicious streak).

On a positive note, the van is a whole hell of a lot better now. When Mom and I went to the garage to pick up my van and drop off hers and for her to sign the credit card slip, I greeted the folks there with, "So, did you build me a new car on the old chassis, or what?" After giving me a blank look for about half a second as she mentally reviewed the bill, one of the young ladies in the office replied, "Yeah, pretty much!" Percentagewise they didn't replace that much of the vehicle, but it sounds like a new car, the ride is more comfortable, the drive train responds smoothly, and it's even easier to steer. Feels like a Mercury again instead of "generic nineteen year old clunker" -- though it still looks like a beat-up old clunker, of course.

• My not feeling well enough to trust myself to drive hours to get to Pennsic safely (again, more on that below), and waiting too long to start trying to arrange either a driver to go in my van (because I didn't know repairs were going to take so long) or space in somebody else's. Losing track of time that badly is connected to feeling unwell.
• My feeling less and less comfortable with leaving Mom mostly alone and just arranging for folks to check in on her every so often like we did last year -- I think she needs someone in the house with her more of the time than that to be safe now.
• And I've been annoyingly, uncomfortably, mysteriously ill for the past ... uh ... has it been two months? (Remember what I said about losing track of days?) I'm frequently dizzy, nervous about driving longer than about a half hour (some days are worse than others), even more fatigued than usual, and having some trouble breathing. It feels rather a lot like the time I had pneumonia a few years ago, for which the big symptom visible to friends that triggered checking up on me was my losing weeks at a go without realizing how much time had gone by ... and the big symptom noticeable to myself was how much work breathing was and how tired I was all the time. It feels just like that -- I can take shallow breaths, but taking a full breath is real effort and occasionally painful; my shoulders ache the way they used to do after wind sprints at soccer practice in high school, and even the shallow breaths are sometimes more like gasps. But a chest X-ray says it's not pneumonia this time, a blood count says there doesn't seem to be any infection, and I've got no clue just what the problem is. I think the past week or so (uh, difficulty with time, sorry) has been a little better, but the description I just wrote still fits. (Hmm. Come to think of it, a month or so ago I was doing badly enough that when the paramedics came to pick Mom up after she fell next to her bed, they kept looking at me like they thought they should be hauling me off to the hospital, and as crappy as I feel now, I haven't been that bad in the last few weeks. So maybe I am getting better!)
• And lately my right leg has been getting weak. Enough so that when I was thinking, "Even if all I do is sit around in camp and send word out that I'm feeling poorly and want people to come visit me there, and never get all the way up to the merchant area, at least I'll be at Pennsic," it eventually did occur to me that I was going to have trouble walking the short way up the hill to the port-a-potties a few times a day. (Walking back to camp from the ones downhill would be even worse, as the hill is steeper below our camp.) Annoyingly, I can't walk with my eyes closed and keep anywhere near a straight line -- I veer way off to the right, or I overcorrect.
• And I still don't have medical care -- it appears that MD-PAC, who lost three applications I mailed to them last year, lost the application I faxed to them this year. (Mom's doctor kindly ate the cost of the X-ray at the radiology lab he owns; Mom paid for the blood test. Mom's doctor is a diabetes specialist, and the problem not being something obvious like pneumonia means I need to go elsewhere for the next bit of mystery-solving. But when my blood work came back with the expected very-bad A1C number, he did give me a month worth of a new diabetes drug to try, which is important too.)

So there's the current state of the Glenn: feeling even more run-down than usual, a little worried about the whole business of breathing, losing track of time by the week, too easily distracted into odd tangents (oh, wait, that bit's normal for me, isn't it?), and very, very frustrated about not being at Pennsic and not getting to see My People at the other events I'd planned to attend. (I did get to see dmk and her mother on their way through Maryland, and that was very nice. I even got to enjoy their company longer than planned, though for a reason that was rather inconvenient to them: car trouble.)

As long as I'm in babbling-catch-up mode ...

• The next Homespun Ceilidh Band album should be getting pretty close to finished by now -- last I heard, all or nearly-all of everybody's parts had been recorded (I made sure to get my studio time in before going to Cyprus) but I don't know how much editing and post-production work there is to do.
• Perrine is overdue for claw-snipping, but Her Adorableness has hidden the %$#^ claw scissors yet again. I'm sure she didn't move them far, but my room is so very cluttered ... (lots of possible things for her to move them under or into)
• A subset of The Homespun Ceilidh Band will be playing at the Battle of Bladensburg event at Riversdale House 2013-08-24.
• I finally got around to reading H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man. Spoiler: the invisible man is a real asshole.
• I'm working on a new composition that's significantly longer than anything else I've written so far, but the process is also going more slowly than usual. This may take a while.

I don't really have a good closing note in mind, and I'm sure I've left stuff out. I'll close with a not-exactly-random musing that's bounced around in my head for a couple of months: do "polymath" and "autodidact" go together more often than not?