Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Thursday: Woke feeling marginally okayish despite having had major difficulty falling asleep ... until I stood up and started getting ready to go to Bowie for family Thanksgiving. After fifteen minutes upright, I felt dizzy and queasy enough that I had to lie down again lest I throw up. I emailed my brother to tell Mom that I wasn't feeling well and would be arriving late if at all. By the time I felt well enough to drive -- well, not really a great idea, but I thought I could make it -- things were pretty much wrapping up down there, so it would have been pointless. Fortunately my neighbour was starting dinner much later, so I could go there instead (if he'd started a couple hours earlier, I wouldn't even have felt up to walking next door). So I did get Thanksgiving dinner with good conversation (and really good food), just not with family.

Friday: Had a lot to get done before going to Darkover. Slept through my "get up now to accomplish everything" alarm. Slept through my "get up now to just do the most important things" alarm. Woke for the "too late, just go to Darkover now" alarm, but fell back asleep. Woke again, saw the time, uttered impolite expletives, hurried to the con. Arrived before the Playford dance had started, so technically on time; lugged instruments in with help (and discovered that the kludged wheel doesn't attach to the new endpin on the bass, so I need to modify it if I want to roll the bass around again instead of carrying it on my head); played poorly due to not feeling well, though I don't know whether anybody else noticed (but I'm sure my tuning problems were noticed -- I've never had to retune the bass so often; it kept drifting a semitone flat from one dance to the next). Planned to head straight home, but a) I had to wait for a friend to show up and deliver a heavy object of mine that had been taking up space in her house for too long because I hadn't had a good day that wasn't already booked so I could pick it up; b) I ran into too many people I hadn't seen in far too long whom I wanted to greet and vice versa; c) I got dragged out to a much needed dinner (and fun conversation, and a chance to photograph a small child next to a cookie larger than her face). Went home later than intended, exhausted but fed, after stashing instruments in a friend's hotel room. Practiced concert tunes one more time before going to bed.

Saturday: Woke late, feeling craptacular, loaded up the minivan, and dashed off to Darkover again, hoping to get to hear Ellen James' harp concert but half expecting a rehearsal to keep me away. Arrived, hauled instruments upstairs, retrieved recorders stashed the night before, had the only all-four-of-us rehearsal for the concert (previous rehearsals only included two or three members of the quartet at a time, due to logistical constraints) and made more thorough notes. Discovered that on one tune I thought I had cold, my timing was screwy and I should've been practicing with a metronome all week -- drat. We didn't rehearse on exactly the same instruments we planned to play, because the electronics were still out in the parking lot. Felt good about the music despite feeling dizzy and exhausted. As soon as we'd gone through all the tunes, we noticed it was already time to start hauling stuff downstairs and setting up ... I grabbed the bass and moved it to the ballroom, and dragged in other instruments I'd need for the ball as well, then caught up with the rest of the band and turned to setting up for the concert. Attempted to set up recording using a laptop and a PZM. Destroyed one piece of equipment, but fortunately it was only a dollar-and-a-half piece. Found myself drenched in sweat just from moving around, as though I'd been running instead of walking and carrying ten times as much stuff -- disconcerting. Started having trouble keeping focus. Sleepy.

Played the concert, feeling half-present. Frustrating. Okay, non-musicians reading this might not be aware of how mistakes are perceived onstage, but for the most part one notices one's own mistakes and is convinced they were obvious to the rest of the band, but only the most glaring (and often not especially important) of anybody else's mistakes register consciously (I'm told this is different in a choir than in an instrumental band), and even those are largely forgotten by the end of the following tune ...

But on Saturday, I was hearing mistakes from my bandmates, mostly in the brain-fart category, and though I haven't asked them yet, I'm pretty sure my own were bad enough for them to notice. There's an oft-repeated bit of advice: don't leave your best performance at the dress rehearsal. I think we did exactly that. I'd love another shot at some of that setlst, with all of us rested and alert, so that the stuff we worked out in rehearsal, some nifty sounds, could be heard. (I did get a crappy recording -- mono, lots of hiss, suboptimal mic placement, wonky levels -- and listening to that later, I didn't catch any glaring mistakes from our drummer.) I suspect we were all tired and distracted; I know I was. The tune I was most worried about, I played cleanly; but the one I'd drilled and drilled until I could play it ten times in a row at various speeds with nary an error, I flubbed when I was the only one playing melody. If the audience thought we did okay then I guess we did okay, but with the repertoire, instrumentation, and arrangement notes we had, there should have been fire, and we didn't deliver fire. Frustrating.

Especially on "Tourdion" and "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen", there should have been fire.

The Regency Ball, for which I was in charge of assembling a band, started right when our concert slot ended. What with packing up instruments while feeling like I should've been in bed, I didn't make it two doors down the hall until the ball was well underway. Fortunately things were well in hand (I'm not sure who was acting more leader-ish in my absence, maugorn or silmaril, but everything appeared to be going smoothly when I showed up (as I'd expected, considering who was involved)). Maug had to leave to set up for one of his concerts shortly after I showed up; I stuck to the bass and stayed in the background and let Silmaril lead, being too drained to do much more than that. My not playing well didn't have as much effect there, as I wasn't screwing anything up, just not adding as much as I should've, so I relaxed a little. I also realized I was too tired to read well, so I started improvising bass lines on the tunes where I couldn't keep up with the score (which is what I was going to do on the tunes without written bass parts anyhow...)

After I packed up there, I stayed on my feet long enough to get new-to-me surplus computers loaded into the van, roll the hand-trucks with guitars bungeed to them out of the way, and take the drums over to the music room where Maug wanted me to sit in on one tune. (Hey Maug, how many guest musicians did you manage to work into that concert?) I got to listen a while, then bugged out before the end so I could get my instruments out of the ballroom and into the van (with greatly appreciated assistance) before the Clam Chowder concert. Then I started noticing just how bad a shape I was in, and how hungry (and when I checked my blood sugar and got a reading of 63 mg/dL, a friend escorted me directly to the con suite, where an infusion of calories helped a great deal).

Between waiting for the food to make me feel better, and getting caught up in conversations, I was again late getting out. I wrestled a heavy server (two people had carried it from one car to the other) up my front steps and into my front hallway (where it still sits) single-handedly. I entertained a fantasy of returning to Darkover the following morning for one more shot at hearing Ellen play and unstructured time to appreciate friends too seldom seen ...

Sunday: I woke up at a quarter to seven in the evening. All of me hurt.

Monday: Severe back pain. Didn't get out of the house. Barely got out of bed. Did manage to feed the cat at one point, I think.

Tuesday: More pain. Alternated sleeping and wishing I could sleep. Crashed before remembering that I'd left a hole in the quote-of-the-day queue that I needed to fill (I already had quotes queued for today and Friday, but hadn't picked one for Yesterday). I'm not sure whether I'd ever let the "If you can see this I let my script run out of quotes" message get posted before -- I think this was the first time ...? I really need to get around to writing the more complicated script that will choose a random unassigned quote from the end of the queue file when the current day doesn't already have a quote picked.

Wednesday: Pain. Was alert enough to try to edit the recording, but attempting to de-hiss it introduced obnoxious artifacts. And I kept running out of space on the hard disk and the thumb drives I was using. Desperately needed to get out to a drug store and grocery store at the very least ... but never felt well enough to do so. Come evening, I was waiting to see whether, with the help of pain meds, I would finally feel well enough for a midnight grocery run or comfortable enough to fall asleep in hopes of buying groceries today. The answer was ... neither. I'm still awake and haven't bought groceries. OTOH, I might finally be feeling able to handle a really quick grocery run if I skip the other urgent errands on my to-do list.

Today: Remains to be seen, though not having slept is not a good sign.

This weekend is another gig, but it's a large group and I'd only said, 'probably' for it, so if I'm feeling so crappy that I don't think I can play well, or in too much pain to drive to it, I do have the option of punting this time. Since it'll be all sight-reading (I don't even know the setlist yet), I'll need to be feeling fairly alert and together -- anything less, and I'd better just not show up. So let's see whether I can finish recovering from Darkover by then.

More con notes (less chronological): I played eleven instruments on Saturday (an even dozen for the whole weekend). Admittedly somewhere between three and six of those were guitars, depending on how narrow your definition of 'guitar' is. {double bass viol, snare drum, ashiko, bass recorder, alto recorder, sopranino recorder, electric bass guitar, acoustic 5-string fretless bass guitar, electric 6-string guitar, folk 6-string guitar, folk 12-string guitar, and mandolin -- the mandolin is the most questionable about catagorizing as a guitar, but it is (like the guitar) a member of the lute family} I haven't tried to figure out how many different centuries the tunes came from, but I think I count at least five genres. I brought two instruments I didn't wind up playing (tambour and tambourine, though now that I think of it, I should've used the tambour in the tune I played with Maug and Myfanwy), not counting the stuff that lives in the woodwinds case along with the recorders I used. I never got to hear a full concert by Ellen, but I did get to listen to her playing in the lobby late Friday night.

Except for a little bit of time in the lobby Friday night and a longer time in the con suite Saturday night (and the part of Maug & Myfanwy's concert that I was in the room for but not playing in), I didn't really 'attend' the con. I was performing, or setting up, or hauling instruments from place to place, or rehearsing, most of the time I was at the convention. I was working. Or recovering. This is not a complaint; it's an observation, and an explanation for folks who knew I was around but didn't get to hang out with me, and why I never saw the art show, went to any non-music programming, or browsed the merchant area. Now I like performing, and I like having opportunities to perform for my people; that's why this isn't a complaint. (This convention was rougher than most for me, by a large margin, but that's because of how poorly I was feeling physically to start with, not that it was more time and work than usual.) My point is that this is the consequence of the choice to perform and take a comp membership instead of begging off the schedule and paying for a day membership: I don't see all that much of the con, and I don't get to hang out and catch up with people as much as I would otherwise.

So there are folks who got a brief hug, or a nod and a wave, whom I would have loved to have had long conversations with, and a few people with whom I started conversations but didn't get to get back to after interruptions. I'm thankful for the time I did get with a few friends (and even for just the sight of several others I didn't get to do more than wave to). I really need, for the sake of my mental health, to get back into a regular convention cycle again ... er, and to try harder to see people outside of conventions. Money and physical health are the hurdles here. Hmm. And I'm grateful for the chance to pick a couple friends' brains for info I needed, and regret not having had a chance to be purely social with them later.

Anyhow, I'm glad I got to be there, to the extent that I did.